H2 Knowledge and Inquiry — Knowledge as JB (25/30)

Critically assess the view that only two conditions are required for knowledge: justification and belief. [RI Prelim 2023] Epistemologists have long sought to construct a definition of knowledge in the form of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. While some propose the possibility that knowledge requires only justification and belief, a reasonable view in some fields, this requires a largely discredited and unipolar view about all knowledge in general, because truth is widely regarded as another necessary condition for justified belief to become knowledge. Ultimately, our need for belief and quest for justification in knowledge — a pursuit undertaken to mitigate the risk of epistemic error — implicitly reflects our need for knowledge to be true, making justification and belief jointly insufficient overall to constitute knowledge in the vast majority of our fields of inquiry. Before we tackle the necessity of the truth criterion, it is necessary to first consider whether belief and justification respectively are necessary for knowledge. Ostensibly, belief seems to be a distinct concept for knowledge in everyday parlance — often, we might hear a confident athlete declare before a game that he does not “believe” he will win, but he “knows” he will win. In this example, it appears that belief is not necessary for knowledge: we can know something without believing it to be the case. However, epistemologists have generally managed to dispel the intuitive, commonsense appeal of this illustration — what the athlete means is not that he does not “believe” he will win at all, but that he does not just “believe” he will win. This linguistic expression of confidence and certitude therefore should not render belief separate from our conception of knowledge in epistemology. In fact, Moore has observed that it would be contradictory and bizarre to claim one does not believe something that one knows — for instance, we would find it strange for someone to say that “It is raining, but I do not believe it is raining.” The absurdity of claims of the form “P, but I do not believe P” reflects that knowledge implies belief: when we make the knowledge claim “P”, it implies strongly that I indeed believe “P” to be the case. Hence, it is clear that belief must be a condition for knowledge — we encounter Moore’s paradox otherwise.

Similarly, justification is an important necessary condition for knowledge, even when it seemingly does not add to the utility of a belief. Detractors of the justification condition often claim that a belief without justification can be just as useful as a belief with justification — for instance, even though the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians were unable to offer a proof for the Pythagorean Theorem like the ancient Greeks did, they were equally able to use the theorem to construct right-angled triangles and build magnificent architectural feats. Hence, if the reason we value knowledge is that it is applicable in our lives