Epistemology: Knowledge, Truth and Justification
Epistemology: Knowledge, Truth and Justification
This domain examines what knowledge is, how truth is understood, and what makes a belief justified. Exam questions often ask you to distinguish knowledge from mere true belief and to compare theories of truth and justification.
Core rules
- The standard analysis is knowledge as justified true belief (JTB): S knows that p only if p is true, S believes p, and S is justified in believing p.
- Gettier cases challenge the sufficiency of JTB: a justified true belief can be true by luck, so knowledge may require a further condition such as no false lemmas or reliable belief formation.
- Sources of knowledge include perception, reason, memory, testimony and introspection. Rationalism privileges reason; empiricism privileges experience.
- Truth theories: correspondence (truth as matching fact), coherence (truth as consistency within a system), and pragmatic (truth as what works in inquiry).
- Justification theories: foundationalism rests beliefs on basic beliefs; coherentism stresses mutual support; reliabilism asks whether the belief was produced by a reliable process.
Worked example
A student believes a coin in her pocket is a rupee because a reliable friend told her so; the coin is indeed a rupee, but the friend was guessing. The belief is true and, in a loose sense, justified by testimony, yet it is not knowledge because its truth is accidental. This is the Gettier-style gap between justification and knowledge.
Traps
Do not define knowledge as true belief; do not treat coherence as proof of correspondence; and do not assume that justification guarantees truth. Also distinguish the context of discovery from the context of justification.