What is justified belief

According to some, to know a fact is for that fact to be a reason for which one can do or think something. And according to still others, to know a fact is to be a trustworthy informant concerning whether that fact obtains. Whatever precisely is involved in knowing a fact, it is widely recognized that some of our cognitive successes fall short of knowledge: an agent may, for example, conduct herself in a way that is intellectually unimpeachable, and yet still end up thereby believing a false proposition.

Julia has every reason to believe that her birthday is July it says so on her birth certificate and all of her medical records, and everyone in her family insists that it is July Nonetheless, if all of this evidence is the result of some time-keeping mistake made at the time of her birth, her belief about her birthday could be false, despite being so thoroughly justified.

Debates concerning the nature of justification [ 20 ] can be understood as debates concerning the nature of such non-knowledge-guaranteeing cognitive successes as the one that Julia enjoys in this example. Here is an example: Tom asked Martha a question, and Martha responded with a lie. Was she justified in lying? What might Jane mean when she thinks that Martha was justified in responding with a lie?

A natural answer is this: She means that Martha was under no obligation to refrain from lying. This understanding of justification, commonly labeled deontological , may be defined as follows: S is justified in doing x if and only if S is not obliged to refrain from doing x.

If, when we apply the word justification not to actions but to beliefs, we mean something analogous, then the following holds:. Deontological Justification DJ S is justified in believing that p if and only if S is not obliged to refrain from believing that p. What kind of obligations are relevant when we wish to assess whether a belief , rather than an action, is justified or unjustified?

Whereas when we evaluate an action, we are interested in assessing the action from either a moral or a prudential point of view, when it comes to beliefs, what matters may be something else, [ 24 ] e. Exactly what, though, must we do in the pursuit of some such distinctively epistemic aim?

According to one answer, the one favored by evidentialists, we ought to believe in accord with our evidence. Other philosophers might deny this evidentialist answer, but still say that the pursuit of the distinctively epistemic aims entails that we ought to follow the correct epistemic norms.

If this answer is going to help us figure out what obligations the distinctively epistemic aims impose on us, we need to be given an account of what the correct epistemic norms are. The deontological understanding of the concept of justification is common to the way philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Moore and Chisholm have thought about justification.

Recently, however, two chief objections have been raised against conceiving of justification deontologically. First, it has been argued that DJ presupposes that we can have a sufficiently high degree of control over our beliefs. But beliefs—this objection alleges—are akin not to actions but rather things such as digestive processes, sneezes, or involuntary blinkings of the eye.

The idea is that beliefs simply arise in or happen to us. To this objection, some advocates of DJ have replied that lack of control over our beliefs is no obstacle to thinking of justification as a deontological status see R. Feldman a. Other advocates of DJ have argued that we enjoy no less control over our beliefs than we do over our intentional actions see Ryan ; Sosa ; Steup , , , ; and Rinard b.

According to the second objection to DJ , deontological justification cannot suffice for an agent to have a justified belief. This claim is typically supported by describing cases involving either a benighted, culturally isolated society or subjects who are cognitively deficient.

Such cases involve subjects whose cognitive limitations make it the case that they are under no obligation to refrain from believing as they do, but whose limitations nonetheless render them incapable of forming justified beliefs for a response to this objection, see Steup Those who reject DJ think of justification not deontologically, but rather as a property that that a belief has when it is, in some sense, sufficiently likely to be true. Sufficient Likelihood Justification SLJ S is justified in believing that p if and only if S believes that p in a way that makes it sufficiently likely that her belief is true.

If we wish to pin down exactly what the likelihood at issue amounts to, we will have to deal with a variety of tricky issues. This is just what cases involving benighted cultures or cognitively deficient subjects are designed to show for elaboration on the non-deontological concept of justification, see Alston What makes a belief that p justified, when it is?

Whether a belief is justified or unjustified, there is something that makes it so. Which features of a belief are J-factors? What is it, though, to possess evidence for p? Some evidentialists though not all would say it is to be in an experience that presents p as being true. According to these evidentialists, if the coffee in your cup tastes sweet to you, then you have evidence that the coffee is sweet.

If you feel a throbbing pain in your head, you have evidence that you have a headache. If you have a memory of having had cereal for breakfast, then you have evidence about what you had for breakfast. On this view, evidence consists of perceptual, introspective, memorial, and intuitional experiences, and to possess evidence is to have an experience of that kind.

Other versions of evidentialism might identify other factors as your evidence, but would still insist that those factors are the J-factors. Evidentialism is often contrasted with reliabilism, which is the view that a belief is justified by resulting from a reliable source, where a source is reliable just in case it tends to result in mostly true beliefs.

Reliabilists, of course, can also grant that the experiences mentioned in the previous paragraph can matter to the justification of your beliefs. However, they deny that justification is essentially a matter of having suitable experiences. Rather, they say, those experiences matter to the justification of your beliefs not merely by virtue of being evidence in support of those beliefs, but more fundamentally, by virtue of being part of the reliable source of those beliefs.

Different versions of reliabilism have been defended: some philosophers claim that what justifies a belief is that it is produced by a process that is reliable for instance, see Goldman , others claim that what justifies a belief is that it is responsive to grounds that reliably covary with the the truth of that belief, other claim that what justifies a belief is that it is formed by the virtuous exercise of a capacity, and so on. Consider a science fiction scenario concerning a human brain that is removed from its skull, kept alive in a vat of nutrient fluid, and electrochemically stimulated to have precisely the same total series of experiences that you have had.

Therefore, justification is determined solely by those internal factors that you and your envatted brain doppelganger share. Externalism is simply the denial of internalism. Externalists say that what we want from justification is the kind of likelihood of truth needed for knowledge, and the internal conditions that you share with your BIV doppelganger do not generate such likelihood of truth.

So justification involves external conditions. Among those who think that justification is internal, there is no unanimity on how to understand the notion of internality—i.

We can distinguish between two approaches. According to the first, justification is internal because we enjoy a special kind of access to J-factors: they are always recognizable on reflection. Evidentialism is typically associated with internalism of at least one of these two varieties, and reliabilism with externalism.

Evidentialism says, at a minimum, two things:. By virtue of E2, evidentialism is an instance of mentalist internalism. Whether evidentialism is also an instance of accessibility internalism is a more complicated issue. The conjunction of E1 and E2 by itself implies nothing about the accessibility of justification. But mentalist internalists who endorse the first principle below will also be committed to accessibility internalism, and evidentialists who also endorse the second principle below will be committed to the accessibility of justification:.

Necessity The principles that determine what is evidence for what are a priori recognizable. Although E1 and E2 by themselves do not imply access internalism, their conjunction with Luminosity and Necessity may imply access internalism. Next, let us consider why reliabilism is an externalist theory. Even if the operations of the sources are mental states, their reliability is not itself be a mental state.

Therefore, reliabilists reject mentalist internalism. Anyone who knows anything necessarily knows many things. Our knowledge forms a body, and that body has a structure: knowing some things requires knowing other things. But what is this structure? Epistemologists who think that knowledge involves justification tend to regard the structure of our knowledge as deriving from the structure of our justifications.

We will, therefore, focus on the latter. According to foundationalism, our justified beliefs are structured like a building: they are divided into a foundation and a superstructure, the latter resting upon the former. Beliefs belonging to the foundation are basic. Beliefs belonging to the superstructure are nonbasic and receive justification from the justified beliefs in the foundation.

Before we evaluate this foundationalist account of justification, let us first try to spell it out more precisely. What is it for a justified belief to be basic? The following definition captures this thought:. So you believe. Unless something very strange is going on, B is an example of a justified belief. DB tells us that B is basic if and only if it does not owe its justification to any other beliefs of yours.

So if B is indeed basic, there might be some item or other to which B owes its justification, but that item would not be another belief of yours. Let us turn to the question of where the justification that attaches to B might come from, if we think of basicality as defined by DB.

Note that DB merely tells us how B is not justified. It says nothing about how B is justified. DB, therefore, does not answer that question. What we need, in addition to DB, is an account of what it is that justifies a belief such as B. On such a view, B is justified because B carries with it an epistemic privilege such as infallibility, indubitability, or incorrigibility for a discussion of various kinds of epistemic privilege, see Alston [].

Note that B is a belief about how the hat appears to you. So B is a belief about a perceptual experience of yours. Other mental states about which a subject can have basic beliefs may include such things as having a headache, being tired, feeling pleasure, or having a desire for a cup of coffee. Beliefs about external objects cannot qualify as basic, according to this kind of foundationalism, for it is impossible for such beliefs to enjoy the kind of epistemic privilege necessary for being basic.

According to a different version of foundationalism, B is justified by some further mental state of yours, but not by a further belief of yours. According to this alternative proposal, B and E are distinct mental states. The idea is that what justifies B is E. Since E is an experience, not a belief of yours, B can, according to DB , still be basic. Privilege foundationalism is generally thought to restrict basic beliefs so that beliefs about contingent, mind-independent facts cannot be basic, since beliefs about such facts are generally thought to lack the privilege that attends our introspective beliefs about our own present mental states, or our beliefs about a priori necessities.

Experiential foundationalism is not restrictive in the same way. Suppose instead of B , you believe. Unlike B , H is about the hat itself, and not the way the hat appears to you.

Such a belief is not one about which we are infallible or otherwise epistemically privileged. Privilege foundationalism would, therefore, classify H as nonbasic. It is, however, quite plausible to think that E justifies not only B but H as well. If E is indeed what justifies H , and H does not receive any additional justification from any further beliefs of yours, then H qualifies, according to DB , as basic.

Experiential Foundationalism, then, combines two crucial ideas: i when a justified belief is basic, its justification is not owed to any other belief; ii what in fact justifies basic beliefs are experiences. It is not clear, therefore, how privilege foundationalism can account for the justification of ordinary perceptual beliefs like H. This could be viewed as a reason for preferring experiential foundationalism to privilege foundationalism.

DB articulates one conception of basicality. EB makes it more difficult for a belief to be basic than DB does. The J-Question Why are perceptual experiences a source of justification? One way of answering the J-question is as follows: perceptual experiences are a source of justification only when, and only because, we have justification for taking them to be reliable. What might give us justification for thinking that our perceptual experiences are reliable?

We are supposing, then, that justification for attributing reliability to your perceptual experiences consists of memories of perceptual success. On this view, a perceptual experience E justifies a perceptual belief only when, and only because, you have suitable track-record memories that give you justification for considering E reliable. If this view is correct, then it is clear how DB and EB differ. Your having justification for H depends on your having justification for believing something else in addition to H , namely that your visual experiences are reliable.

As a result H is not basic in the sense defined by EB. However, H might still be basic in the sense defined by DB. If you are justified in believing H and your justification is owed solely to E and M , neither of which includes any beliefs, then your belief is doxastically—though not epistemically—basic. But there are other possible answers to the J-question. Another answer is that perceptual experiences are a source of justification when, and because, they are of types that reliably produce true beliefs.

Yet another answer is that perceptual experiences are a source of justification when, and because, they have a certain phenomenology: that of presenting their content as true. To conclude this section, let us briefly consider how justification is supposed to be transferred from basic to nonbasic beliefs. There are two options: the justificatory relation between basic and nonbasic beliefs could be deductive or non-deductive. But if we consider a random selection of typical beliefs we hold, it is not easy to see from which basic beliefs they could be deduced.

Foundationalists, therefore, typically conceive of the link between the foundation and the superstructure in non-deductive terms. Foundationalism says that knowledge and justification are structured like a building, consisting of a superstructure that rests upon a foundation.

According to coherentism, this metaphor gets things wrong. Knowledge and justification are structured like a web where the strength of any given area depends on the strength of the surrounding areas. Coherentists, then, deny that there are any basic beliefs. As we saw in the previous section, there are two different ways of conceiving of basicality.

Consequently, there are two corresponding ways of construing coherentism: as the denial of doxastic basicality or as the denial of epistemic basicality. Consider first coherentism as the denial of doxastic basicality:. Doxastic Coherentism Every justified belief receives its justification from other beliefs in its epistemic neighborhood.

Let us apply this thought to the hat example we considered in Section 3. According to coherentism, H receives its justification from other beliefs in the epistemic vicinity of H. They constitute your evidence or your reasons for taking H to be true. Which beliefs might make up this set of justification-conferring neighborhood beliefs?

We will consider two approaches to answering this question. The first is known as inference to the best explanation. Such inferences generate what is called explanatory coherence see chapter 7 in Harman So the relevant set of beliefs is the following:. There are of course alternative explanations of why you have E.

Perhaps you are hallucinating that the hat is blue. Perhaps an evil demon makes the hat look blue to you when in fact it is red. Perhaps you are the sort of person to whom hats always look blue. Note that an explanatory coherentist can also explain the lack of justification.

Suppose you remember that you just took a hallucinatory drug that makes things look blue to you. That would prevent you from being justified in believing H. The explanatory coherentist can account for this by pointing out that, in the case we are considering now, the truth of H would not be the best explanation of why you are having experience E.

Rather, your having taken the hallucinatory drug would explain your having E at least as well as the hypothesis H would explain it. One challenge for explanatory coherentists is to explain what makes one explanation better than another.

What we need is an explanation of why you are having E. According to the evil demon hypothesis, you are having E because the evil demon is causing you to have E , in order to trick you. But why is it bad? What we need to answer this question is a general and principled account of what makes one explanation better than another.

Suppose we appeal to the fact that you are not justified in believing in the existence of evil demons. The general idea would be this: If there are two competing explanations, E1 and E2, and E1 consists of or includes a proposition that you are not justified in believing whereas E2 does not, then E2 is better than E1.

The problem with this idea is that it puts the cart before the horse. Explanatory coherentism is supposed to help us understand what it is for beliefs to be justified.

If explanatory coherentism were to proceed in this way, it would be a circular, and thus uninformative, account of justification. So the challenge that explanatory coherentism must meet is to give an account, without using the concept of justification, of what makes one explanation better than another.

Let us move on to the second way in which the coherentist approach might be carried out. Suppose the subject knows that the origin of her belief that p is reliable. So she knows that beliefs coming from this source tend to be true. Such knowledge would give her an excellent link between the belief and its truth. So we might say that the neighborhood beliefs which confer justification on H are the following:.

Call coherentism of this kind reliability coherentism. If you believe 1 and 3 , you are in possession of a good reason for thinking that the hat is indeed blue. So you are in possession of a good reason for thinking that the belief in question, H , is true. Like explanatory coherentism, this view faces a circularity problem.

If H receives its justification in part because you also believe 3 , 3 itself must be justified. But where would your justification for 3 come from? One answer would be: from your memory of perceptual success in the past. You remember that your visual experiences have had a good track record.

They have rarely led you astray. So if reliability coherentism is going to work, it would have to be legitimate to use a faculty for the very purpose of establishing the reliability of that faculty itself. But it is not clear that this is legitimate. We have seen that explanatory coherentism and reliability coherentism each face its own distinctive circularity problem. Since both are versions of doxastic coherentism, they both face a further difficulty: Do people, under normal circumstances, really form beliefs like 1 , 2 , and 3?

It would seem they do not. It could be objected, therefore, that these two versions of coherentism make excessive intellectual demands of ordinary subjects who are unlikely to have the background beliefs that, according to these versions of coherentism, are needed for justification.

This objection could be avoided by stripping coherentism of its doxastic element. The result would be the following version of coherentism, which results from rejecting EB the epistemic conception of basicality :. However, it is necessary that you have justification for believing 1 and 2. It is your having justification for 1 and 2 that gives you justification for believing H. A reliability coherentist might make an analogous point.

Both versions of dependence coherentism, then, rest on the supposition that it is possible to have justification for a proposition without actually believing that proposition. Dependence coherentism is a significant departure from the way coherentism has typically been construed by its advocates. According to the typical construal of coherentism, a belief is justified, only if the subject has certain further beliefs that constitute reasons for the given belief.

Dependence coherentism rejects this. According to it, justification need not come in the form of beliefs. It can come in the form of introspective and memorial experience, so long as such experience gives a subject justification for beliefs about either reliability or explanatory coherence. In fact, dependence coherentism allows for the possibility that a belief is justified, not by receiving any of its justification from other beliefs, but solely by suitable perceptual experiences and memory experience.

Next, let us examine some of the reasons provided in the debate over foundationalism and coherentism. The main argument for foundationalism is called the regress argument.

If B 1 is not basic, it would have to come from another belief, B 2. But B 2 can justify B 1 only if B 2 is justified itself. If B 2 is basic, the justificatory chain would end with B 2. Authors Authors and affiliations Alvin I. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Stich, ed.

Google Scholar. Foster and J. See Knowledge, Oxford: University Press, , pp. Alvin I. If so, then the JTB account, even if supplemented with iv , gives us the wrong result that James knows d. Suppose there is a county in the Midwest with the following peculiar feature. The landscape next to the road leading through that county is peppered with barn-facades: structures that from the road look exactly like barns.

Observation from any other viewpoint would immediately reveal these structures to be fakes: devices erected for the purpose of fooling unsuspecting motorists into believing in the presence of barns.

Suppose Henry is driving along the road that leads through Barn County. Naturally, he will on numerous occasions form false beliefs in the presence of barns. Since Henry has no reason to suspect that he is the victim of organized deception, these beliefs are justified. Now suppose further that, on one of those occasions when he believes there is a barn over there, he happens to be looking at the one and only real barn in the county.

This time, his belief is justified and true. Yet condition iv is met in this case. His belief is not the result of any inference from a falsehood. Once again, we see that iv does not succeed as a general solution to the Gettier problem. Another candidate fourth condition on knowledge is sensitivity. Sensitivity, to a first approximation, is this counterfactual relation:. A sensitivity condition on knowledge was defended by Robert Nozick Given a Lewisian Lewis semantics for counterfactual conditionals, the sensitivity condition is equivalent to the requirement that, in the nearest possible worlds in which not- p , the subject does not believe that p.

One motivation for including a sensitivity condition in an analysis of knowledge is that there seems to be an intuitive sense in which knowledge requires not merely being correct, but tracking the truth in other possible circumstances. This approach seems to be a plausible diagnosis of what goes wrong in at least some Gettier cases. For if there were no water there, you would have held the same belief on the same grounds— viz.

However, it is doubtful that a sensitivity condition can account for the phenomenon of Gettier cases in general. It does so only in cases in which, had the proposition in question been false, it would have been believed anyway. But, as Saul Kripke —68 has pointed out, not all Gettier cases are like this.

Consider for instance the Barn County case mentioned above. Henry looks at a particular location where there happens to be a barn and believes there to be a barn there. The sensitivity condition rules out this belief as knowledge only if, were there no barn there, Henry would still have believed there was.

But this counterfactual may be false, depending on how the Barn County case is set up. We assume Henry is unaware that colour signifies anything relevant.

Since intuitively, the former belief looks to fall short of knowledge in just the same way as the latter, a sensitivity condition will only handle some of the intuitive problems deriving from Gettier cases. Most epistemologists today reject sensitivity requirements on knowledge.

For example, George, who can see and use his hands perfectly well, knows that he has hands. Now imagine a skeptical scenario in which George does not have hands. Suppose that George is the victim of a Cartesian demon, deceiving him into believing that he has hands. If George were in such a scenario, of course, he would falsely believe himself not to be in such a scenario.

So given the sensitivity condition, George cannot know that he is not in such a scenario. Although these two verdicts—the knowledge-attributing one about ordinary knowledge, and the knowledge-denying one about the skeptical scenario—are arguably each intuitive, it is intuitively problematic to hold them together. A sensitivity condition on knowledge, combined with the nonskeptical claim that there is ordinary knowledge, seems to imply such abominable conjunctions.

Most contemporary epistemologists have taken considerations like these to be sufficient reason to reject sensitivity conditions. Although few epistemologists today endorse a sensitivity condition on knowledge, the idea that knowledge requires a subject to stand in a particular modal relation to the proposition known remains a popular one. Sosa characterized safety as the counterfactual contrapositive of sensitivity.

Sensitivity: If p were false, S would not believe that p. Safety: If S were to believe that p , p would not be false. An example of a safe belief that is not sensitive, according to Sosa, is the belief that a distant skeptical scenario does not obtain. Notice that although we stipulated that George is not at risk of deceit by Cartesian demons, we did not stipulate that George himself had any particular access to this fact.

Characterizing safety in these counterfactual terms depends on substantive assumptions about the semantics of counterfactual conditionals. Rather than resting on a contentious treatment of counterfactuals, then, it may be most perspicuous to understand the safety condition more directly in these modal terms, as Sosa himself often does:.

In all nearby worlds where S believes that p , p is not false. The status of potential counterexamples will not always be straightforward to apply.

The host does not want Michael to find the party. Suppose Michael never shows up. Had he merely made a slightly different choice about his costume, he would have been deceived. However, it is open to a safety theorist to argue that the relevant skeptical scenario, though possible and in some sense nearby, is not near enough in the relevant respect to falsify the safety condition.

Such a theorist would, if she wanted the safety condition to deliver clear verdicts, face the task of articulating just what the relevant notion of similarity amounts to see also Bogardus Not all further clarifications of a safety condition will be suitable for the use of the latter in an analysis of knowledge. In particular, if the respect of similarity that is relevant for safety is itself explicated in terms of knowledge, then an analysis of knowledge which made reference to safety would be in this respect circular.

This, for instance, is how Timothy Williamson characterizes safety. He writes, in response to a challenge by Alvin Goldman:. In many cases, someone with no idea of what knowledge is would be unable to determine whether safety obtained.

Although they could use the principle that safety entails truth to exclude some cases, those are not the interesting ones. Thus Goldman will be disappointed when he asks what the safety account predicts about various examples in which conflicting considerations pull in different directions.

One may have to decide whether safety obtains by first deciding whether knowledge obtains, rather than vice versa. Williamson Because safety is understood only in terms of knowledge, safety so understood cannot serve in an analysis of knowledge.

This is of course consistent with claiming that safety is a necessary condition on knowledge in the straightforward sense that the latter entails the former.

Significant early proponents of this view include Stine , Goldman , and Dretske To be able to know by sight that a particular phone is the 6S model, it is natural to suppose that one must be able to tell the difference between the iPhone 6S and the iPhone 7; the possibility that the phone in question is a newer model is a relevant alternative. Notice that in these cases and many of the others that motivate the relevant-alternatives approach to knowledge, there is an intuitive sense in which the relevant alternatives tend to be more similar to actuality than irrelevant ones.

As such, the relevant alternatives theory and safety-theoretic approaches are very similar, both in verdict and in spirit. As in the case of a safety theorist, the relevant alternatives theorist faces a challenge in attempting to articulate what determines which possibilities are relevant in a given situation.

As we have seen, one motivation for including a justification condition in an analysis of knowledge was to prevent lucky guesses from counting as knowledge. However, the Gettier problem shows that including a justification condition does not rule out all epistemically problematic instances of luck.

Consequently, some epistemologists have suggested that positing a justification condition on knowledge was a false move; perhaps it is some other condition that ought to be included along with truth and belief as components of knowledge.

This kind of strategy was advanced by a number of authors from the late s to the early s, although there has been relatively little discussion of it since. One candidate property for such a state is reliability. Part of what is problematic about lucky guesses is precisely that they are so lucky: such guesses are formed in a way such that it is unlikely that they should turn out true.

According to a certain form of knowledge reliabilism, it is unreliability, not lack of justification, which prevents such beliefs from amounting to knowledge. Reliabilist theories of knowledge incorporate this idea into a reliability condition on knowledge. Simple K-Reliabilism replaces the justification clause in the traditional tripartite theory with a reliability clause. As we have seen, reliabilists about justification think that justification for a belief consists in a genesis in a reliable cognitive process.

However, the present proposal is silent on justification. Goldman is the seminal defense of reliabilism about justification; reliabilism is extended to knowledge in Goldman See Goldman for a survey of reliabilism in general. In the following passage, Fred Dretske articulates how an approach like K-reliabilism might be motivated:. Who needs it, and why? If an animal inherits a perfectly reliable belief-generating mechanism, and it also inherits a disposition, everything being equal, to act on the basis of the beliefs so generated, what additional benefits are conferred by a justification that the beliefs are being produced in some reliable way?

If there are no additional benefits, what good is this justification? Why should we insist that no one can have knowledge without it? Dretske According to Dretske, reliable cognitive processes convey information, and thus endow not only humans, but nonhuman animals as well, with knowledge. He writes:. I wanted a characterization that would at least allow for the possibility that animals a frog, rat, ape, or my dog could know things without my having to suppose them capable of the more sophisticated intellectual operations involved in traditional analyses of knowledge.

It does seem odd to think of frogs, rats, or dogs as having justified or unjustified beliefs. So if, with Dretske, we want an account of knowledge that includes animals among the knowing subjects, we might want to abandon the traditional JTB account in favor of something like K-reliabilism. Another move in a similar spirit to K-Reliabilism replaces the justification clause in the JTB theory with a condition requiring a causal connection between the belief and the fact believed; [ 24 ] this is the approach of Goldman , Instead, consider a simplified causal theory of knowledge, which illustrates the main motivation behind causal theories.

Although some proponents have suggested they do—see e. Consider again the case of the barn facades. This belief is formed by perceptual processes, which are by-and-large reliable: only rarely do they lead him into false beliefs.

So it looks like the case meets the conditions of Simple K-Reliabilism just as much as it does those of the JTB theory. It is also a counterexample to the causal theory, since the real barn Henry perceives is causally responsible for his belief.

There is reason to doubt, therefore, that shifting from justification to a condition like reliability will escape the Gettier problem. We have seen already how several of these attempts failed. When intuitive counterexamples were proposed to each theory, epistemologists often responded by amending their theories, complicating the existing conditions or adding new ones. Much of this dialectic is chronicled thoroughly by Shope , to which the interested reader is directed.

After some decades of such iterations, some epistemologists began to doubt that progress was being made. She offered what was in effect a recipe for constructing Gettier cases:. Zagzebski suggests that the resultant case will always represent an intuitive lack of knowledge.

So any non-redundant addition to the JTB theory will leave the Gettier problem unsolved. Zagzebski invites us to imagine that Mary has very good eyesight—good enough for her cognitive faculties typically to yield knowledge that her husband is sitting in the living room. Such faculties, even when working properly in suitable environments, however, are not infallible—if they were, the condition would not be independent from truth—so we can imagine a case in which they go wrong.

This belief, since false, is certainly not knowledge. Since the recipe is a general one, it appears to be applicable to any condition one might add to the JTB theory, so long as it does not itself entail truth.

Although it would represent a significant departure from much analytic epistemology of the late twentieth century, it is not clear that this is ultimately a particularly radical suggestion. Few concepts of interest have proved susceptible to traditional analysis Fodor If it does, then it will of course be impossible to start with a case that has justified false belief. This kind of approach is not at all mainstream, but it does have its defenders—see e. Sutton and Littlejohn defend factive approaches to justification on other grounds.

Indeed, we have already seen some such attempts, albeit unsuccessful ones. For instance, the causal theory of knowledge includes a clause requiring that the belief that p be caused by the fact that p. One family of strategies along these lines would build into an analysis of knowledge a prohibition on epistemic luck directly; let us consider this sort of move in more detail.