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Can a Justified Belief Be False?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Douglas Odegard
Douglas Odegard*
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

Edmund Gettier objects to analysing knowledge as justified true belief (JTB) on the ground that someone can justifiably infer a true conclusion from a justified false premise and hence not know the conclusion's truth, although the conclusion is justified. For instance, someone can justifiably deduce a true p v r from a justified but false p, where he has no justification for the true r. Gettier's objection draws on two assumptions: first, that a justified belief can be false; second, that a premise can justify a conclusion even though the premise is false.

Some JTB advocates grant the first assumption but deny the second. They usually concede the first assumption to protect the respectability of non-deductive inference. The argument is that if evidence e can nondeductively justify the conclusion c, then it must be possible for c to be justified and yet false, since e does not entail c. Although the assumption is sound, the argument as it stands fails to show it. But let us set this point aside for the moment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 561 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 See “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Analysis 23 (1962-63), 121-23.

2 For instance, see Meyers, Robert G. and Stern, Kenneth “Knowledge without Paradox,” Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973), 147-60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Meyers-Stern, ibid, p. 148; also Pailthorp, Charles “Knowledge as Justified, True Belief”, Review of Metaphysics 23 (1969-70), pp. 28–29Google Scholar; Chisholm, Roderick M. “On the Nature of Empirical Evidence”, in Foster, L. and Swanson, J. W. (eds.) Experience and Theory (University of Massachussetts Press: 1970), p. 116.Google Scholar

4 See Hart, John A. and Dees, J. Gregory “Paradox Regained: A reply to Meyers and Stern,” Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974), 367-72Google Scholar; and Feldman, Richard “An Alleged Defect in Gettier Counter-Examples,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 52 (1974), 68–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See “Justified True Belief as Knowledge,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy IV, (1974-5), 435-39.

6 Cp. Pailthorp, op. cit.

7 Op. cit., p. 439.

8 See “Defeasibility and Scepticism”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 51 (1973), 238-44.

9 See “Truth and Evidence”, Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1974), 365-68.

10 Cp. Lehrer, Keith Knowledge(Clarendon Press: 1974), p. 48Google Scholar; Hoffmann, William E. “Aimeder on Truth and Evidence”, Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975), 59–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Cp. Moore, G. E. “Certainty”, in Philosophical Papers(London, Allen & Unwin: 1959), pp. 227-51.Google Scholar

12 Cf. Rozeboom, William W. “Why I Know So Much More Than You Do,” American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1967), 281-90.Google Scholar

13 Cf. Pailthorp, op. cit., pp. 46–47.

14 See Unger, Peter Ignorance (Clarendon Press: 1975)Google Scholar, Ch. 7.