Epistemology

What Makes True Belief Knowledge?

What must be added to a true belief to make it knowledge?

Positions

  1. Justified True Belief

    A person knows that a proposition is true exactly when the proposition is true, the person believes it, and the belief is justified.

  2. No False Lemmas

    Knowledge is justified true belief that is not inferred from any false proposition.

  3. Reliabilism

    A true belief is knowledge when it is produced by a cognitive process that reliably yields true rather than false beliefs.

  4. Virtue Epistemology

    Knowledge is true belief whose correctness is attributable to the knower's exercise of intellectual competence or virtue.

Methods used to investigate this question

  • Conceptual Analysis

    Conceptual analysis clarifies a concept by proposing an account of its conditions or structure and testing that account against cases and objections.

    Open in Methods

Discussion

A lucky guess may be both believed and true without being knowledge. The traditional justified-true-belief analysis adds justification, but Gettier constructed cases in which a belief is justified and true only through epistemic luck. Competing analyses therefore try to identify what rules out that luck while preserving ordinary cases of knowing.

This problem asks what knowledge is, not whether it comes from experience or reason; that question appears under Experience or Reason?. It also differs from the broader skeptical question of whether knowledge is possible, treated under The Possibility of Knowledge.

References