Gettier and Justified Truth: A Philosophical Essay

Running head: PHILOSOPHY
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PHILOSOPHY
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Introduction
This is philosophical essay concerning the Gettier and justified truth. This essay will be
dived into two main parts, that is the first part of a full description of the idea of what in the past
many philosopher and authors termed knowledge to be. In this case, they termed knowledge to
be justified truth. The second part is a result of the getters rejection on this definition of the
knowledge by traditional JBT. The second part of this essay is a discussion on the attempts by
Gettier to justify his objection to justified true knowledge as the definition of knowledge.
Justified truth belief (JTB)
The justified true knowledge is a theory that attempts to explain the situation and
condition under which someone can or could be termed to have some knowledge of something.
According to this theory, someone is termed to be knowing something if they have several
conditions. They include a belief, if in fact, the person is true and if that person has been justified
in that belief. A good example of the situation in this theory would be, I do believe I have two
eyes, and indeed I have two eyes and for sure I have a justification of having these two eyes
since I am using them to read this assignment. Therefore considering and according to justified
true belief, I know I have two eyes. The developers of this theory have some explanation on the
three compositions of what is termed to be knowledge. According to the truth condition, they
state that what is generally false cannot be known. They use this phrase as a way of justifying the
truth condition. They state that one can only know things that are true only. Moreover, according
to the developers of the JTB, we use the term “knows” when describing someone or people who
are very confident on issues that turn out to be wrong at long last. In addition to the justification

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of the truth condition, they state that it’s not important for anyone to justify or have to prove
something that is true. (Gettier, 2000)
Considering the belief condition of the JTB theory of knowledge, the developers of this
theory strongly feel that one cannot believe what he or she does not know. A person only
believes in anything that they have a good knowledge on. If one fails to set their belief on
something, it means that there is something they are not aware of. In other words, one may
believe something on the condition or by virtue that they are pretty sure that it’s probably true.
The developers think that knowledge without belief is impossible in many cases. (Ichikawa,
2001)
On the other hand, the theory also has the justification condition. According to this
theory, we can say knowledge is true belief but this will not be the true meaning of knowledge.
They state that a belief can also be true even when formed improperly. This, therefore, calls for
justification of ant true belief. For instance, an example to explain this situation would be;
suppose that William flips a coin, and confidently believes—on no particular basis—that it will
land tails. If by chance the coin does land tails, then William’s belief was true; but a lucky guess
such as this one is no knowledge. For William to know, his belief must in some epistemic sense
be proper or appropriate: it must be justified. (Nozick, 2002)
Gettier's opposition to the JTB theory
Gettier is a philosopher who appears to be opposing the JTB theory on what is termed to
be knowledge. To some extent, just like other contemporary epistemologists, he accepts the
depth and the adequacy of the JTB analysis and agrees with the fact that the JTB elements are
important for the knowledge and its definition; however, he claims they are not sufficient to