Notes · PhilosophyUK · A-Levels

What is knowledge?

Epistemology begins by distinguishing three kinds of knowledge and then asks what propositional knowledge is. The classical answer, the tripartite view, holds that knowledge is justified true belief; Gettier's counterexamples show these conditions are not sufficient, and this topic reconstructs the standard revisions — the no-false-lemmas condition, reliabilism and virtue epistemology — and asks whether any of them succeeds.

6 sections~26 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 2 · Advanced 3

T·0111 / 17

Exam profile

AO1 · Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the three kinds of knowledge, the tripartite definition, the Gettier problem and the standard responsesAO2 · Analyse and evaluate whether any revised analysis of knowledge defeats the Gettier problem, reaching a justified conclusion

Operators:explainoutlineanalyseassess'...' Is this claim true?to what extent

basic level

At AS-Level, state the tripartite definition, explain why each condition seems necessary, and give one Gettier-style counterexample with one response.

higher level

At full A-Level, reconstruct the definition as individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, run the Gettier dialectic in full, and evaluate whether the no-false-lemmas, reliabilist or virtue-theoretic revision succeeds without over- or under-generating knowledge.

Depth

Text

Contents · 6 sections

What is knowledge?

Three kinds of knowledge#

FoundationAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — The definition of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

The three kinds of knowledge

Fig. 1Only propositional knowledge ('knowing that') is the target of the definition of knowledge.

The English verb 'to know' does at least three distinct jobs, and epistemology is careful to keep them apart because only one of them is the target of the definition of knowledge. Acquaintance knowledge is knowledge OF a person, place or thing by direct experience of it — I know London, I know Ravel's music, I know my oldest friend. It is expressed with a direct object rather than a 'that' clause, and it typically requires some causal contact with the thing known. Ability knowledge, or 'knowing how', is a practical competence — I know how to ride a bicycle, how to speak French, how to prove Pythagoras' theorem. It is expressed with an infinitive and, on the standard view, consists in a skill rather than in the grasp of a set of facts (though Jason Stanley and others have argued that knowing-how reduces to knowing-that, which is a live dispute).

Propositional knowledge, or 'knowing that', is knowledge of a fact or truth: I know that Paris is the capital of France, that 7 is prime, that water is H2O. It is always expressed with a 'that' clause naming a proposition — a truth-evaluable claim — and it is the kind of knowledge the whole of the definition-of-knowledge debate is about. When a philosopher asks 'what is knowledge?', the question is specifically 'what is it to know that some proposition p is true?'. Keeping this focus is essential: an objection that trades on ability or acquaintance knowledge (for instance, 'but you cannot define how to swim') simply misses the target.

The three kinds are related but not reducible to one another in any obvious way. One can have ability knowledge without the corresponding propositional knowledge — a skilled cyclist need not know the physics that keeps the bicycle upright — and propositional knowledge without the ability — I can know that a triple axel involves three-and-a-half rotations without being able to perform one. Acquaintance and propositional knowledge likewise diverge: I can know many facts about Antarctica (propositional) without ever having been there (acquaintance), and I can be acquainted with a piece of music without knowing any propositions about its structure. This mutual independence is what justifies treating propositional knowledge as a topic in its own right.

Having isolated propositional knowledge as the target, the central question becomes one of analysis: what conditions must be met for a subject S to know that p? An analysis of a concept states conditions that are individually necessary (each must hold for knowledge to be present) and jointly sufficient (together they guarantee knowledge). A successful analysis would let us replace 'S knows that p' with a list of more basic conditions, illuminating what knowledge is and drawing the line between knowledge and mere true opinion. The tripartite view is the classical attempt at exactly this analysis, and everything that follows is the story of whether it succeeds.

Worked example

Sorting knowledge claims by kind

Classify each claim as acquaintance, ability or propositional knowledge: (a) 'I know how to ride a bike'; (b) 'I know Berlin well'; (c) 'I know that Berlin is in Germany'.

Test the grammar
A 'that' clause signals propositional knowledge; an infinitive signals ability; a direct object naming a thing signals acquaintance.
Classify (a)
'know how to ride' — an infinitive — is ability knowledge, a practical competence.
Classify (b)
'know Berlin' — a direct object — is acquaintance knowledge, by direct experience of the city.
Classify (c)
'know that Berlin is in Germany' — a proposition — is propositional knowledge, the target of the definition.

Result: (a) ability, (b) acquaintance, (c) propositional. Only (c) is the kind the tripartite view analyses.

Typical mistakes

Attacking the tripartite view with an example of ability or acquaintance knowledge; the analysis is only ever about knowing-that.
Confusing 'necessary' and 'sufficient': a necessary condition must hold for knowledge, but need not by itself guarantee it; sufficiency requires the whole set.

Active revision

Explain the difference between the three kinds of knowledge, and say which kind the tripartite definition analyses. (5-mark AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

The tripartite view: justified true belief#

StandardAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — The definition of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

Knowledge as the intersection of three conditions

Fig. 2On the tripartite view, knowledge is present only where truth, belief and justification all overlap.

The tripartite view, which traces to Plato's Theaetetus, analyses propositional knowledge as justified true belief. In its standard form: S knows that p if and only if (1) p is true, (2) S believes that p, and (3) S is justified in believing that p. The three conditions are claimed to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient — each is required, and together they suffice for knowledge. The view is elegant because each condition answers to a strong intuition, and because it draws a principled line between knowledge and lucky guessing: what a knower has that a lucky guesser lacks is justification.

The truth condition is defended by the observation that we cannot know a falsehood. If I claim to know that my team will win and they lose, we do not say I knew it and was unlucky; we say I did not know it after all, however confident I was. Knowledge is 'factive': 'S knows that p' entails p. The belief condition is defended by the point that to know something is, at minimum, to accept it — one cannot know that p while sincerely doubting or denying p. (Some cases, such as an unconfident examinee who 'knows more than she thinks', put pressure on this, but the standard view treats belief as necessary.) These two conditions together give true belief, but true belief is plainly not enough: someone who believes a proposition on a whim, or a hunch, or by wishful thinking, and happens to be right, does not thereby know it.

That is why the justification condition is added. To be justified in believing p is, roughly, to have adequate rational support for it — good evidence, a reliable source, a sound inference. Justification is meant to be exactly what converts a true belief into knowledge by ruling out the luck that infects a mere lucky guess. If I believe the horse will win because I have studied its form, the track and the field, and it wins, my true belief looks like knowledge; if I believe it because I like its name, and it wins, it does not. Justification is the ingredient that marks the difference.

Reconstructed as an analysis, the claim is strong: it says the three conditions do not merely usually accompany knowledge but constitute it. This is what makes the view testable. To refute a claim of joint sufficiency, one needs only a single case in which all three conditions are satisfied and yet, intuitively, there is no knowledge. To refute a claim of necessity, one needs a case of knowledge in which one condition fails. The history of the debate is essentially the search for such counterexamples — and in 1963 Edmund Gettier found the decisive ones against sufficiency, which the next section reconstructs.

Worked example

Diagnosing a failed knowledge claim

Priya believes the lottery ticket will lose because the odds are tiny; it loses. Does she know it will lose? Use the tripartite view to explain.

Check truth
The belief is true — the ticket loses. Condition (1) is met.
Check belief
Priya genuinely believes it. Condition (2) is met.
Check justification
Her ground is only the probability; however high, it does not entail the outcome, and lottery cases are the standard reason for denying that mere high probability yields knowledge.
Verdict on JTB
Even with all three arguably present, the intuition that she does not KNOW a probabilistic outcome shows how demanding the justification condition must be to do its work.

Result: The case shows justification is meant to exclude luck; lottery cases are one reason many think justification must be more than high probability, foreshadowing the Gettier problem.

Typical mistakes

Omitting the truth condition or treating justification as guaranteeing truth — justification can be strong yet the belief false (a fallible justification).
Presenting JTB as merely three things that go together, rather than as a claimed analysis (necessary and jointly sufficient conditions) — this hides why one counterexample can refute it.

Active revision

Outline the tripartite view of knowledge and explain why true belief alone is thought to be insufficient for knowledge. (12-mark AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

The Gettier problem#

StandardAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — The definition of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

The structure of a Gettier case

Fig. 3A false but justified belief yields a justified true belief that is true only by luck, so is not knowledge.

In a three-page paper of 1963, 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?', Edmund Gettier showed that the three conditions can all be satisfied while knowledge is absent, refuting the claim of joint sufficiency. His method exploits two assumptions the tripartite view seems to license: that justification is fallible (one can be justified in believing something false), and that justification is closed under known entailment (if I am justified in believing p, and I competently deduce q from p, I am justified in believing q). Put these together and true belief can be reached by luck through a false but justified intermediate step.

Gettier's first case: Smith and Jones have applied for a job. Smith has strong evidence for the proposition 'Jones will get the job and Jones has ten coins in his pocket' — the company president told him Jones would be hired, and Smith has counted the coins in Jones's pocket. From this Smith competently deduces, and comes justifiedly to believe, 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket'. As it turns out, Smith himself gets the job, and Smith, unknown to himself, also has ten coins in his pocket. So Smith's belief 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' is true, believed, and justified — yet he clearly does not know it, because it is true by a coincidence entirely unconnected to his evidence.

A simpler variant, due to Bertrand Russell, is the stopped clock. Looking at a reliable clock that happens, unknown to me, to have stopped exactly twelve hours ago, I form the belief that it is (say) three o'clock — and it is in fact three o'clock. My belief is true, I believe it, and I am justified (the clock has always been reliable), but I do not know the time, because I would have believed it was three o'clock whatever the actual time was: my true belief is a matter of luck. The 'fake barn' and 'sheep in the field' cases make the same point: a justified true belief can be true by accident in a way that disqualifies it as knowledge.

The structural moral is that the tripartite conditions permit a certain kind of epistemic luck to sit between the justification and the truth of the belief. In each case the subject reasons well from evidence, the belief is true, but the route from evidence to truth is broken and re-joined by coincidence. The diagnosis therefore points to a repair: either the justification must be strengthened so it cannot rest on a falsehood, or luck must be excluded some other way, or justification must be replaced by a condition that tracks truth more tightly. These are precisely the three families of response — no-false-lemmas, virtue epistemology, and reliabilism — reconstructed in the next two sections.

Worked example

Reconstructing Gettier's coins case

Set out Gettier's 'ten coins' case as an explicit argument and identify the epistemic luck.

The evidence
Smith is told by the president that Jones will get the job, and has counted ten coins in Jones's pocket — a justified belief in 'Jones will get the job and has ten coins'.
The deduction
Smith validly infers 'the man who will get the job has ten coins', so his belief in the conclusion is justified (justification transmits across valid inference).
The twist
In fact Smith gets the job, and Smith coincidentally also has ten coins, so the conclusion is true — but for reasons unconnected to Smith's evidence.
Locate the luck
The premise ('Jones will get the job') is false; the conclusion is true only because of an unforeseen coincidence about Smith's own coins.

Result: All three JTB conditions hold, yet Smith does not know the man who gets the job has ten coins: his true belief is disconnected from its justification by luck, refuting joint sufficiency.

Typical mistakes

Telling a Gettier case in which the belief is not actually justified, or not actually true — then it is not a counterexample to JTB at all.
Saying the belief is 'not really justified' as a diagnosis; the whole force of the case is that it IS justified, yet still not knowledge — the lesson is about luck, not defective justification.

Active revision

Explain, using an example, how a Gettier case shows that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge. (12-mark AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Responses I: infallibilism and no false lemmas#

AdvancedAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — The definition of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

Two fixes to the justification condition

Fig. 4Infallibilism raises the standard of justification; no-false-lemmas adds a fourth, no-falsehood condition.

The first family of response tries to fix the justification condition. Infallibilism strengthens it dramatically: to be justified enough for knowledge, one's grounds must guarantee the truth of the belief — the justification must be such that it is impossible for the belief to be false. On this view (with roots in Descartes and defended by figures such as Unger), knowledge requires certainty. Because Gettier cases turn on fallible justification (a justification compatible with the belief's falsity), infallibilism blocks them at a stroke: in the coins case Smith's justification does not guarantee the truth, so on the infallibilist standard he was never justified enough to know.

The decisive objection to infallibilism is that it sets the bar so high that it collapses into scepticism. Almost none of our ordinary beliefs — that there is a table before me, that the sun will rise, that Paris is in France — are supported by grounds that make falsity impossible; the evil-demon and dreaming scenarios show that even our best empirical evidence is compatible with error. So if knowledge requires infallible justification, we know almost nothing, which is a reductio of the proposal: a definition of knowledge that entails we have hardly any is worse than the problem it solves. Infallibilism buys immunity from Gettier at the price of denying that we know the things we most confidently do.

The second, more popular repair is the no-false-lemmas condition (J+T+B+N), associated with Michael Clark. It adds a fourth condition: S's justification for p must not rely on any false belief ('lemma'). This is precisely tailored to Gettier's own cases, which are built on a false intermediate premise — 'Jones will get the job', 'the clock is working'. Since Smith's reasoning passes through a falsehood, the no-false-lemmas condition rules that he does not know, while ordinary knowledge, which does not rest on false lemmas, is preserved. The proposal is attractive because it keeps justification fallible (avoiding scepticism) yet excludes the specific luck Gettier exploited.

The no-false-lemmas condition, however, does not defeat all Gettier-style cases, because not every case runs through a false belief. In Alvin Goldman's fake-barn case, Henry looks at the one real barn in a county full of convincing barn facades and believes 'there is a barn'. His belief is true, justified (it looks exactly like a barn) and rests on no false lemma — yet intuitively he does not know, since had he looked at any of the neighbouring facades he would have been wrong. The luck here is environmental, not inferential, so adding 'no false lemmas' does not touch it. This shows the problem is more general than Gettier's own examples, and motivates the truth-tracking and virtue-theoretic responses of the next section.

Worked example

Model 25-mark plan: does no-false-lemmas solve Gettier?

Plan an essay assessing whether the no-false-lemmas condition solves the Gettier problem.

Thesis
No-false-lemmas solves Gettier's ORIGINAL cases but not the problem in general, so it is at best a partial repair.
AO1
Explain JTB, Gettier's coins/clock cases (built on false lemmas), and the J+T+B+N fix.
Point for
It precisely blocks the inference-through-a-falsehood that generates the classic cases, while keeping justification fallible and so avoiding scepticism.
Point against
The fake-barn case is a justified true belief resting on no false lemma that is still not knowledge (environmental luck) — so the condition is not sufficient.
Judgement
Since a general solution must exclude luck as such, not just inferential luck, no-false-lemmas fails as a full analysis; a truth-tracking or virtue condition is needed.

Result: A defensible judgement: no-false-lemmas is a genuine improvement that dissolves Gettier's own examples, but the fake-barn case shows the underlying anti-luck problem outruns it.

Typical mistakes

Treating no-false-lemmas as a complete solution; fake-barn (and other 'no false lemma' Gettier cases) show it is incomplete.
Confusing infallibilism (justification guarantees truth) with the truth condition itself; infallibilism is about the strength of JUSTIFICATION, not about requiring truth.

Active revision

'Adding a no-false-lemmas condition solves the Gettier problem.' Assess this claim. (25-mark essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Responses II: reliabilism and virtue epistemology#

AdvancedAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — The definition of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

Sosa's AAA: apt belief as knowledge

Fig. 5Knowledge is belief that is true (accurate) because competent (adroit) — apt — excluding Gettier luck.

The second family of response abandons or replaces the justification condition rather than patching it. Reliabilism (Alvin Goldman) proposes that knowledge is true belief produced by a reliable cognitive process — one that tends to produce true beliefs — where 'justification' in the internalist sense drops out. The attraction is twofold. First, it explains Gettier cases: in the stopped-clock and fake-barn cases the belief is not produced by a reliable process in the circumstances (a stopped clock, or barn-spotting in facade country, is unreliable there), so reliabilism rules there is no knowledge. Second, it accommodates knowers who cannot articulate their justification — young children, expert 'chicken-sexers', animals — because it locates knowledge in the reliability of the process, not in the subject's ability to give reasons.

Reliabilism faces two well-known objections. The generality problem asks how to specify the relevant process: any belief is produced by processes describable narrowly ('vision in good light at noon', reliable) or broadly ('vision', less reliable), and the theory's verdict shifts with the description, which the theory itself does not fix. The BonJour counterexample of Norman the clairvoyant presses from the other side: Norman reliably forms true beliefs by a clairvoyant power he has no evidence for and no reason to trust; his process is reliable, so reliabilism counts his beliefs as knowledge, yet intuitively an epistemically irresponsible belief he has no reason to hold is not knowledge. This suggests that pure reliability, with no internalist accessibility, is not sufficient.

Virtue epistemology (Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski) refines the truth-tracking idea by requiring that the true belief be creditable to the subject's intellectual virtue or competence — the belief is true BECAUSE it issues from the knower's skilful exercise of a reliable cognitive faculty, not merely alongside it. Sosa's archery analogy captures the structure: a shot can be accurate (true), adroit (skilful) and apt (accurate because adroit); knowledge is apt belief — belief that is true because competent. In fake-barn cases the belief is accurate and adroit but not apt: it is true because of the lucky presence of the one real barn, not because of Henry's competence, so it is not knowledge. Virtue epistemology thus offers a principled account of WHY the luck disqualifies.

Zagzebski argues, however, that Gettier problems are in a sense inescapable for any analysis that has an independent truth condition sitting alongside a good-belief condition, because one can always engineer a case where the belief is good (justified, reliable, virtuous) and false, then add a second stroke of luck that makes it true — restoring the gap between the goodness of the belief and its truth. Escaping this requires tying truth and the good-making feature together so tightly that the good feature entails, or non-accidentally secures, the truth — which is what 'apt' belief attempts, but at the risk of either circularity or a slide back towards infallibilism. This is the deep reason the debate has proved so durable.

Worked example

Applying the analyses to the fake-barn case

Henry sees the one real barn among many facades and believes 'that is a barn'. Which analysis best explains why this is not knowledge?

JTB
True, believed and justified (it looks just like a barn) — so JTB wrongly counts it as knowledge.
No false lemmas
Henry's belief rests on no false lemma, so this condition also wrongly permits knowledge — the luck is environmental, not inferential.
Reliabilism
Barn-spotting in facade country is unreliable, so reliabilism correctly denies knowledge — but must fix the process description (generality problem).
Virtue epistemology
The belief is accurate and adroit but not apt: it is true because of the lucky real barn, not because of Henry's competence, so it is not knowledge.

Result: Virtue epistemology gives the most principled verdict: the belief is not true BECAUSE OF competence, so it is not apt and not knowledge — capturing the anti-luck intuition that no-false-lemmas misses.

Typical mistakes

Presenting reliabilism as merely 'true belief from a good source' without the process element, or conflating it with the justification condition it is meant to replace.
Treating virtue epistemology as just reliabilism; the extra claim is that the belief is true BECAUSE OF the subject's competence (aptness), which is what excludes environmental luck.

Active revision

'Reliabilism is a better response to the Gettier problem than repairing the justification condition.' Discuss. (25-mark essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Does any analysis of knowledge succeed?#

AdvancedAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — The definition of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

The too-strong / too-weak dilemma

Fig. 6An adequate analysis must sit between scepticism (too strong) and admitting Gettier luck (too weak).

A final evaluation must weigh the analyses against two demands that pull in opposite directions: an adequate account must exclude Gettier luck (so it is not too weak), yet must not exclude ordinary knowledge (so it is not too strong, collapsing into scepticism). Infallibilism is too strong; the tripartite view and no-false-lemmas are too weak (fake barns); reliabilism risks the generality problem and Norman cases; virtue epistemology gives the most principled anti-luck verdict but faces the charge of circularity or of quietly readmitting luck at the level of the reliability of the faculty. No proposal has won universal assent, which is itself a significant datum.

One response to the stalemate is Timothy Williamson's 'knowledge first' programme, which argues that the whole project of analysing knowledge into more basic conditions is misconceived: knowledge is a fundamental, unanalysable mental state, and belief and justification should be understood in terms of it, not the other way round. If Williamson is right, the search for necessary and sufficient conditions was bound to fail not because knowledge is mysterious but because it is basic — like trying to define 'point' in geometry. This dissolves rather than solves the Gettier problem, and a strong essay can use it to question the assumption every earlier analysis shares.

A more modest verdict holds that the analyses, though none is perfect, have taught us something real: that knowledge requires the non-accidental connection between a true belief and the way the world is, whether that connection is spelled out as reliable process, apt competence, or safety/sensitivity (the belief would not easily have been false; the belief tracks the truth across close possible worlds). On this reading the residual disagreements are about how best to formalise an anti-luck condition everyone now accepts in substance. That is progress, even if the definitional project remains open.

For an A-Level judgement, the defensible position is nuanced and must state its standard. If 'success' means a fully counterexample-proof analysis, then arguably none succeeds, and Zagzebski's argument suggests none can while truth and justification are independent conditions. If 'success' means the best available account of what distinguishes knowledge from lucky true belief, virtue epistemology (or a safety/sensitivity account) is the strongest candidate, capturing the anti-luck intuition without the scepticism of infallibilism. A candidate who simply lists the theories without reaching and defending such a verdict forfeits the highest AO2 marks; the examiner rewards a sustained line of reasoning to a conclusion that acknowledges the strongest opposing view.

The debate also connects outward across the specification. The scepticism that infallibilism courts is the subject of 'the limits of knowledge', where Descartes' demand for certainty and the responses to it recur; the reliabilist idea that knowledge does not require the ability to answer the sceptic reappears there as a response to global doubt. And the analytic method itself — seeking necessary and sufficient conditions, testing by counterexample — is the method used throughout, from the definition of 'God' to the analysis of mental states, so mastering it here pays dividends everywhere.

Worked example

Model 25-mark plan: can the Gettier problem be solved?

Plan an essay defending a judgement on whether any analysis of knowledge defeats the Gettier problem.

Thesis
No analysis is fully counterexample-proof, but virtue/safety accounts best capture the anti-luck condition, so the project is progressive though incomplete.
AO1
JTB, Gettier, and the responses (infallibilism, no false lemmas, reliabilism, virtue epistemology).
The dilemma
Show each is too strong (scepticism) or too weak (fake barns / Norman), framing the anti-luck target between them.
Zagzebski
Argue that independent truth and justification conditions make Gettier cases reconstructable, so full success is unlikely.
Judgement
Conclude that if success means counterexample-proof, none succeeds; if it means the best anti-luck account, virtue/safety wins — and defend which standard is apt.

Result: A defensible judgement: the strict definitional project has not succeeded and may be impossible, but the analyses have jointly established a non-accidental, anti-luck condition on knowledge, which is real progress.

Typical mistakes

Concluding 'knowledge cannot be defined, so it is all subjective' — the failure of an analysis does not make knowledge arbitrary or relative.
Listing theories with no comparative verdict; AO2 credit comes from weighing them against a stated criterion and defending a conclusion.

Active revision

'No analysis of knowledge can defeat the Gettier problem.' Is this claim true? Defend your answer. (25-mark essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

References & sources

Sources

Department for Education

GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy

What is knowledge?

6 sections~26 min reading time2 competenciesLevel Foundation 1 · Standard 2 · Advanced 3

What is knowledge?

Key points

Sorting knowledge claims by kind

Key points

Diagnosing a failed knowledge claim

Key points

Reconstructing Gettier's coins case

Key points

Model 25-mark plan: does no-false-lemmas solve Gettier?

Key points

Applying the analyses to the fake-barn case

Key points

Model 25-mark plan: can the Gettier problem be solved?

Sources

What is knowledge?

Key points

Sorting knowledge claims by kind

Key points

Diagnosing a failed knowledge claim

Key points

Reconstructing Gettier's coins case

Key points

Model 25-mark plan: does no-false-lemmas solve Gettier?

Key points

Applying the analyses to the fake-barn case

Key points

Model 25-mark plan: can the Gettier problem be solved?

Sources