Knowledge is factually grounded belief. This account uses the same ingredients as the traditional analysis—belief, truth, and justification—but posits a different relation between them. While the traditional analysis begins with true belief and improves it by simply adding justification, this account begins with belief, improves it by grounding it, and then improves it further by grounding it in the facts. In other words, for a belief to be knowledge, it's not enough that it be true and justified; for a belief (...) to be knowledge, it must be justified by the facts. This account solves the Gettier problem. Gettierized beliefs fall short of knowledge because, albeit true and justified, they are not grounded in the facts. This account also elucidates why knowledge attributions are sensitive to epistemic standards. It's because whether we take a belief to be grounded in the facts is sensitive to epistemic standards. (shrink)

If we accept certain Peircean commitments, Gettier’s two cases are not cases of justified true belief because the beliefs are not true. On the Peircean view, propositions are sign substitutes, or “representamens.” In typical cases of thought about the world, propositions represent facts. In each of Gettier’s examples, we have a case in which a person S believes some proposition p, there is some fact F* such that were p to represent F* to S then p would be true, and (...) yet p does not represent F* to S but some other fact F of which p is false. Since truth is a property of propositions with respect to their representational function, it follows that the belief is not true. Although an examination of Gettier’s two cases, this essay is not a defense of the justified true belief analysis of knowledge, for there are objections to the JTB analysis other than Gettier’s two cases. Rather, Gettier’s two cases are of particular interest for the light they shed on the nature of truth and representation. (shrink)