Justified True Belief
My Positions
- Knowledge, understood in the classical sense as a belief that is justified, true, and where truth is defined as correspondence with external reality, is unattainable. What we have instead are provisional models that, for now, appear to accord with external reality.
- I do not reject the justified true belief (JTB) account as a definition. I reject the idea that we can ever confirm that the "true" condition has been met.
Notes
- Human cognition does not produce knowledge in the strict JTB sense. Instead, it yields mental models: provisional, interpretive frameworks constructed from perception, inference, and social processes.
- These models are inherently limited, fallible, and always open to revision.
- Therefore, all claims should be held with an appropriate degree of doubt or provisional acceptance, rather than with certainty.
- The JTB account dates back to Plato's Theaetetus. Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" showed that a belief can be justified and true by luck, without amounting to knowledge (Gettier Problems). My position sidesteps the Gettier problem rather than solving it: if "true" can never be confirmed, then the question of whether JTB is sufficient for knowledge never arises in practice.
- What I call "knowledge" in everyday use is therefore shorthand for "a model that has so far survived contact with experience".