No, it isn't. Gettier says that the JTB account of knowledge "does not state a sufficient condition for someone's knowing a given proposition." ("Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?") He doesn't thereby reject the truth-condition of knowledge. He doesn't say that truth is unnecessary for knowledge. What he says is that there are cases where a belief is both justified and true, and yet isn't knowledge.Fcacciola wrote:I've been reading a lot on the so-called JTB account of knowledge (that knowledge is (i) a belief, (ii) which happens to be true and (iii) which we're justified in believing so).
However, I have a really hard time agreeing with the requirement of truth, which seems to be taken for granted over and over.
For instance, I see the Gettier problem as discovering that the connection between knowledge and actual truth is just accidental, and all solutions seems to me that are basically attempting to turn that accidental connection into an intentional one. Causality, Defeasability, Truth-tracking, all these seem to me to reconnect the accidental "P is true" with the "P is Justified".
But, isn't "P is true" the real root of the Gettier (and related) problem?
"That essential insight is this: in the classical Gettier counter-examples the state of affairs that makes the belief true (or the believed proposition true) – its truthmaker, so to say – is not the state of affairs that has given rise to the justification for the belief. Though normally they would be the same, in these cases they have come apart, and having come apart, the agent has a true belief, which happens also to be justifed, but it seems only a matter of luck that that is so."
(Heathcote, Adrian. "Gettier and the Stopped Clock." Analysis 72/2 (2012): 309–314. p. 309)
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What we believe or claim to know can (turn out to) be false, but it doesn't follow that what we really know can (turn out to) be false. False "knowledge" isn't (and hasn't ever been) knowledge but false knowledge-belief.Atreyu wrote:I agree with the general proposition Truth should not be a requirement for Knowledge, since we truly know very little. However, once something is known to be false, we can no longer call it "knowledge". Now, it's simply a lie....
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"If I am to know that there is someone outside the door, then there really must be someone outside the door. Before the belief is entitled to be called 'knowledge', what is believed must be true. If I say 'I know that P' and then find out that P is false, I will withdraw my claim to knowledge: I will say that I thought I knew that P but did not really know it."
(Musgrave, Alan. Common Sense, Science and Scepticism: A Historical Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. p. 2)
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Right you are!Cuthbert wrote:Truth is definitely not sufficient for knowledge. But it does seem to be necessary. Nobody has offered a persuasive example of S knows that p where p is false.
"The dedicated link to truth is part of the essence of knowledge. We speak of 'knowing' falsehoods when we are speaking in a non-literal way (just as we can use a word like 'delicious' sarcastically, describing things that taste awful). Emphasis—in italics or pitch—is one sign of non-literal use. 'That cabbage soup smells delicious, right?' 'I knew I had been picked for the team. But it turned out I wasn't.' This use of 'knows' has been called the 'projected' use: the speaker is projecting herself into a past frame of mind, recalling a moment when it seemed to her that she knew. The emphasis is a clue that the speaker is distancing herself from that frame of mind: she didn't literally or really know (as our emphatic speaker didn't really like the soup). The literal use of 'know' can't mix with falsehood in this way."
(Nagel, Jennifer. Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. pp. 8-9)
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Davidson thought otherwise, and I'm inclined to agree with him:Sage4557 wrote:I think "truth" would need to be irrefutably defined so as to not undermine it's existence.
"For the most part, the concepts philosophers single out for attention, like truth, knowledge, belief, action, cause, the good and the right, are the most elementary concepts we have, concepts without which (I am inclined to say) we would have no concepts at all. Why then should we expect to be able to reduce these concepts definitionally to other concepts that are simpler, clearer, and more basic? We should accept the fact that what makes these concepts so important must also foreclose on the possibility of finding a foundation for them which reaches deeper into bedrock.
We should apply this obvious observation to the concept of truth: we cannot hope to underpin it with something more transparent or easier to grasp. Truth is, as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gottlob Frege maintained, and Alfred Tarski proved, an indefinable concept. This does not mean we can say nothing revealing about it: we can, by relating it to other concepts like belief, desire, cause, and action. Nor does the indefinability of truth imply that the concept is mysterious, ambiguous, or untrustworthy."
(Davidson, Donald. "The Folly of Trying to Define Truth." Journal of Philosophy 93/6 (1996): 263-278. pp. 264-5)