This document discusses arguments for and against the justification, belief, and truth (JTB) conditions for knowledge. It examines arguments that individual JTB conditions are not necessary by considering examples of true belief without justification or belief. However, counterarguments show that in cases like misleading evidence or false beliefs, truth is indeed necessary for knowledge. Specific examples like beliefs about flamingos being gray or mondegreens show that strongly justified individual beliefs can be false, so justification and belief alone are not sufficient for knowledge - the belief must also be true. Therefore, truth is a necessary condition for knowledge.

1. Attacking the JTB account of
knowledge

2. JTB in Standard Form
• Also called the ‘Tripartite Account’
• In Standard Form:
– ‘S knows that p’ iff
• S is justified in believing that P
• p is true
• S believes that P

3. Testing the JTB Account:
Methods of attack
1. Try to show that individual conditions are
not necessary.
OR
2. Try to show that the existing conditions
are necessary but not sufficient.

4. Arguments that try to show
that individual JTB conditions
are not necessary.
By the way, what colour are
flamingos?

5. First argument that justification is not a
necessary condition for knowledge
• Is there really a practical difference between knowledge
and true belief?
• Consider Plato’s example in the Meno: If you asked two
people directions to the town of Larissa, and:
– One knew the way
– The other had a true belief about the way
• What would the practical difference be about the
directions you got?
• (Is there another kind of difference that’s more important
here?)

6. Arguments that reply that justification is
indeed a necessary condition for knowledge
• There really is a difference between knowledge and true
belief: this is because justification is important.
• People can have true beliefs with absent, poor or irrational
justifications for holding them, and this is really undesirable.
• Consider:
– Judging guilt by physical appearance, and being right (as it
happens).
– Acting on a hunch about your lottery numbers – and them being
right.
• Would we really want to live in a society where prejudice and
reckless gambling were celebrated, or acceptable?
• Surely a society where people were required to give good
reasons for their knowledge-claims would be better?

7. Second argument against justification
being a necessary component of knowledge
• Consider the Infinite Regress Problem
– Can justifications be entirely certain?
– Logically, justifications can always be mistaken, so we cannot
have certainty (and so, knowledge).
– So we ought not to ask for justifications, as we cannot have
them.
• Reply 1: do we need certainty? Perhaps justification can be
usefully redefined, and this objection overcome.
– Are some kinds of justifications just linked to prior reliability?
– Or coherence (‘fit’) with other things we (collectively) know?
– We can ask for these simpler justifications.
– Hence we can have justification.
• Reply 2: we can have foundational justifications founded on
basic beliefs that are indubitable. So certainty is possible!

8. First argument that belief isn’t a
necessary condition for knowledge
• Can you know something without
believing it?
– Take the claim ‘I don’t believe it’,
uttered when you receive dreadful
news.
– We do say this, implying we know
something, but we don’t believe it.
Examples: Victor Meldrew 
– Many catastrophic things happen
to Mr Meldrew, and he always
shouts ‘I don’t believe it!’
– [But here one could reply that ‘I
don’t believe it’ in this context
simply means ‘I wish it isn’t true!’]

9. The House Fire Example
• Imagine that you came home to find this gentleman (from the FDNY
Charity Calendar!) putting away his hose, and where you live a
smouldering pile of rubble.
• ‘Oh my God! I don’t believe it!’, you would shout.
• But: would you then go on to act as if you really didn’t believe it?
• Or (much more plausible!) wouldn’t you faint then make an insurance
claim etc?
• And surely this would suggest that you did know what had occurred –
but just wished that it didn’t.
• Surface meaning and depth meaning aren’t always the same!
• So saying ‘I don’t believe it!’ doesn’t show that you can have
knowledge without belief.

10. Second argument that belief isn’t necessary
for knowledge: Knowing without believing
• Colin Radford (1966) presents a scenario in which Jean
feels quite certain that he does not know any English
history.
• In this thought-experiment, when Jean is asked to provide
dates for certain events in English history, such as the
death of Queen Elizabeth, he correctly answers many of
the questions, though he feels like he is guessing.
• The correctness of his answers surprises Jean, and Jean
concludes that he actually does know some English
history (e.g. Queen Elizabeth died in 1603).
• Radford finds it intuitively plausible to regard this as a
case of knowledge without belief: Jean knew that Queen
Elizabeth died in 1603 but did not believe that she died in
1603.
• (Armstrong (1969) replies that this example is not
intuitively clear.)

11. More on knowing without believing:
tacit knowledge
• Radford’s ‘Queen Elizabeth’ example can be generalised.
– You have learned a topic thoroughly but can’t remember the
details, so you would say you didn’t know about it.
– Yet your answers when tested are much better than random
guesses, indicating that actually you do know the topic
thoroughly.
– You just don’t believe that you do.
• Isn’t much of what we know about the world in fact tacit
knowledge or unconscious knowledge?
• Often we know, but we don’t believe we know: we have
knowledge without belief that we do.
• [But: could you say, here, it’s not a valid knowledge-claim
because you can’t point to a justification of what you know?]

12. The example of ‘Blindsight’
• The phenomenon of blindsight may be another example of
the possibility of knowledge without belief.
• Blindsight refers to the phenomenon of people who are
cortically blind due to severe brain damage, but can still
respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see.
• Current evidence suggests that we have a faculty of
unconscious vision: visual awareness is possible without it
being explicitly known.
• But: is visual knowledge, a kind of perceptual knowledge,
isomorphic with propositional knowledge?

13. First argument that truth is not a necessary condition for
knowledge:
Isn’t strongly justified belief enough?
• Could knowledge simply be justified belief?
• Aren’t there many examples of strongly
justified individual beliefs?
– For example, someone may make the
knowledge-claim that flamingos are grey
– They may believe it very strongly on the basis of
good justification (say, they work in a zoo…)
• Reply: such a knowledge-claim is factually
mistaken: flamingos are not grey but pink.
• So what looks like justified belief that is actually
knowledge is not an example of knowledge at
all, but an example of false belief.
• So truth is necessary for knowledge: you cannot
know false beliefs.

14. The Truth about Flamingos
• Flamingos are actually pale gray or off-white.
• It’s the shrimps and algae in their diet that make them so pink.
• The pink colour is from from a shrimp and algae-based diet rich in
carotenoid pigments.
• Initially blue or green, the carotenoid pigments become orange or pink
during digestion and are deposited in the growing feathers.
• The same effect is seen when shrimp change color during cooking.
• The colour of the flamingo depends on the amount of carotenoids in its
diet.
• Initially, zoos fed carrots, red peppers, and dried shrimp to flamingos to
keep them pink.
• These days synthetic canthaxanthin is added to their feed.

15. Flamin’ eck! The real importance of
The Flamingo Test
• What does the attempt to make a flamingo knowledge-
claim based only on belief and justification show
about the role of truth?
 It shows that truth is vital to knowledge
• What, therefore, does the specific flamingo example
show about the claim that truth is not a necessary
condition for knowledge?
 It shows that the claim that truth is not a necessary component
for knowledge is wrong.

16. Another example that shows that truth is a
necessary condition for knowledge
• Take the notion of the mondegreen, ‘a mishearing or
misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in
a way that gives it a new meaning’ (Wikipedia).
• In a 1954 essay, Sylvia Wright describes how as a child she
misheard a line of "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray“ (a ballad):
– Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,/Oh, where hae ye been? /They hae slain
the Earl o' Moray, /And Lady Mondegreen.
• The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green“.
– She wrote: "I know, but I won't give in to it. Leaving him to die all alone
without even anyone to hold his hand--I WON'T HAVE IT!!!”
• Yet, here, what looked like strongly justified individual belief
that was knowledge is not an example of knowledge at all.
– Instead Sylvia Wright’s mondegreen is simply an example of false belief
– So truth is necessary for knowledge!
– Belief and justification aren’t enough, because they don’t rule out the
possibility of false belief.

17. Jimi Hendrix, ‘Purple Haze’, 1967
Some famous mondegreens
Desmond Dekker, ‘Israelites’, 1969
A song about being a gay man in 1967. A song about breakfast during a
divorce.

18. The actual lyrics
Purple haze, all in my brain
Lately things they don't seem the
same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why
Excuse me while I kiss the
sky.
Oh. It’s about drugs instead.

19. Get up in the
morning, making the
breakfast
my wife and my kids,
they f**k off and
leave me…
…my ears are alight!

20. The actual lyrics
Get up in the morning, slaving for
bread, sir,
so that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Get up in the morning, slaving for
bread, sir,
So that every mouth can be fed.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
My wife and my kids, they are packed
up and leave me.
Darling, she said, I was yours to
receive.
Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.
Oh. It’s about bread. Or
something.

21. Conclusion:
Mondegreens, Flamingos, False Beliefs
• Many individual beliefs are strongly held, and strongly
justified, particularly by empirical or sensory evidence.
• These beliefs can seem to have the certainty of knowledge.
• But although the justification for these individual beliefs seems
sound, they are not true.
• So such knowledge-claims are in fact examples of false
beliefs.

22. Second argument that truth is not necessary to
knowledge: Geocentrists and Flat-Earthers
• But sometimes entire societies have a
fervent belief and have good reasons
or justifications for having it.
• For example:
– That the Earth is flat (believed until
the Hellenistic period c. 330 b.c.)
– That the Earth is at the centre of the
universe (‘Ptolemaic cosmology’,
believed until the Renaissance)
• These are examples of strongly held
collective beliefs, believed for
millennia in pre-scientific societies.
• Don’t such beliefs amount to collective
knowledge, although they are false…?

23. Discussion Thoughts:
Geocentrists and Flatearthers
• Justifying flat-earth theory and geocentrism?
– Our senses plainly tell us the truth of these ideas.
– A society’s entire outlook justifies these beliefs as
such-and-so: texts/holy writ, cultural practices etc
• Knowledge? Or…?
– Were these views true at the time ( conflicts with
notion of knowledge as certain and indubitable?)
– or did they mistakenly believe them and they were
simply false beliefs?

24. The certainty of past beliefs:
Galileo’s first trial, 1616
• In 1610, Galileo (1564-1642) published his Sidereus Nuncius
(Starry Messenger), describing observations he had made
with the new telescope (the phases of Venus, the moons of
Jupiter).
• These observations supported the heliocentrist Nicolaus
Copernicus (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ,1543).
• The Inquisition investigated and declared heliocentrism
heretical: the idea that the Sun is stationary is "foolish and
absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly
contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture...”
• Galileo was ordered to “abandon completely... the opinion that
the sun stands still…and the earth moves”, and was told “not
to hold, teach, or defend this view in any way whatever.”
• He was then persecuted for the rest of his life: house arrest
etc…

25. What can we conclude about collectively
held and strongly justified beliefs?
• Past pre-scientific cultures are very
often wrong about cosmology and
other celestial sciences?
• (Worse?) Past pre-scientific cultures
are very often wrong about many
things?
• (Worser?) Past cultures are very often
wrong about many things
• …so (seemingly) justified beliefs may
be false…
• so (again) truth is necessary to
knowledge…
dannato idiota!

26. Third argument against truth being necessary
to knowledge: what you ‘know’ is not right…
• But what if our modern knowledge-claims
were as outdated as the older ones we have
just rejected?
• (In future, we will be a past culture…)
• And (some of, much of) what we have
justified belief in now, is in fact not true.
• For example, (we already know) Newton’s
physics is superseded: it is not correct at an
interstellar scale.
– Yet sometimes we may use as a thinking tool a
theory that in fact is not correct: Newtonian physics
is a very good approximation to the truth within
the solar system.
– So: can knowledge be of an approximation? Can
Newtonian physics be knowledge, even though it is
technically incorrect and untrue?
Of Newton with his prism and silent
face, The marble index of a mind for
ever. Voyaging through strange
seas of Thought, alone. — William
Wordsworth.

27. Response to the third argument that truth is not
a necessary property of knowledge: Newton vs.
the Flat Earth Society
• Surely a good answer here is that
“Newtonian physics helps us
understand the world, and where
and how Newtonian physics fails.”
• The other beliefs (geocentrism, flat
earth theory) aren’t (surely) good
approximations, so we can say
they’re beliefs alone.
• And false beliefs at that.
• (yet) they may be fair approximations…
• (yet) and if the job of science is to deliver
testable predictions, they may be
predictively better (initially) than the
newer theory…

28. Fourth argument against truth being a necessary
component of knowledge: Kuhnian Paradigms, or
Truth denied
• Hence, what about the notion that truth
itself is relative?
• Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) argues in ‘The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962)
that:
– Our scientific knowledge doesn’t improve
in smooth evolutions.
– Observations don’t exist in a vacuum.
– They are contained within a master
theory or paradigm
• The paradigm explains the
observations.
• The observations support the theory.
– ‘Truth’ makes sense within a paradigm.

29. Kuhnian Paradigm Shifts
• But sometimes the paradigm enters a
crisis.
• Observations build up that cannot be
explained by the paradigm.
• Pressure builds until the paradigm
breaks down and is (abruptly?)
replaced by entirely new ways of
knowing.
• This is called a paradigm shift
– e.g. Newtonianism to Relativistic physics,
for example.
– e.g. from witchcraft to science
• Can you think of any other ‘shifts’?

30. Another take on Paradigms:
Conceptual Schemes
• “Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing
experience; they are systems of categories that give form to
the data of sensation; they are points of view from which
individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing
scene.”
– Donald Davidson, “On the very idea of a Conceptual
Scheme”, 1973
• A ‘paradigm’ is, in Kuhn’s usage, restricted to science.
• Davidson’s formulation could allow us to think more broadly,
about ‘world-views’, ‘mind-sets’, ‘ways of seeing’ and the like.

31. Candidates for Conceptual Schema
Different languages
• Davidson: “We may accept the doctrine that associates
having a language with having a conceptual scheme… if
conceptual schemes differ, so do languages.”
– Does a Chinese-speaker perceive the world in the
same way as an English-speaker?
– Does the language you speak entirely control the
way you see the world? (‘Linguistic Determinism’)

32. Candidates for Conceptual Schema
Science
• A worldview that strongly contrasts with proto- or pre-
scientific worldviews.
– What beliefs characterise the scientific worldview?
– What is the relationship between the scientific and
non-scientific world-views?
– Do different sciences see the world in different ways?
– Are the sciences reducible? Does the world reduce,
for instance, to maths, or is the approach each
science takes subtly irreducible?

33. Pre-scientific, culturally specific views –
• All cultures have a particular world-view and deeply
embedded conception of the universe.
• These are highly specific to geography, technology levels,
interaction with other cultures.
• Take the Assyrian Empire which existed from the 25th
century BCE to the 6th century BCE. Their world-view:
Merodach…slew Tiamat…her body stretched throughout all Space. He
split the corpse ‘in two…and hung one of the halves on high as the
heavens…the other half he spread out under his feet as the
Earth…then he cut off his own head, and, having kneaded the blood
flowing from it with the Earth, formed men, who were thus endowed
with a surviving particle of understanding and with a surviving particle
of divine thought.’
• Would an ancient Assyrian person be able to understand
(y)our world-view? Who would be right?
Candidates for Conceptual Schema

34. Candidates for conceptual
schema
Faith-based views –
• All faiths, as pre-scientific world-views, have a conception of
the universe and of man’s role therein.
• Example: the Babylonian creation myth (c. 16-18 centuries
BCE):
– …Marduk offers to save the gods if he is appointed as their
leader. The other gods agree to Marduk's conditions and he is
selected as their champion against Tiamat, in which he destroys
her. He rips her corpse into two halves and makes the earth and
the skies. After this he creates the calendar, organizes the
planets and stars, and regulates the moon, the sun, and
weather.
• Would an ancient Babylonian person be able to understand
(y)our world-view? Who would be right?

35. Kuhn: There is no ‘Truth’, so it can’t be a
necessary component of knowledge
• Reality in a different paradigm is simply different: the
concepts themselves that we use to judge reality and
accuracy have changed, so ‘worldviews’ aren’t
commensurable.
– The scientist might think that ‘evidence’ allows them to disprove
more ‘primitive’ views.
– But there is no neutral way of describing states of affairs.
– So because ‘truth’ itself only exists within a paradigm, we can’t
compare the truth of different paradigms.
• Hence ‘knowledge’ can only be justified belief.

36. Replies to Kuhn: there is truth
• Reply 1: Science is more true than other worldviews
– Proponents of the scientific worldview could argue that science
is true because it is the best explanation for the way the world is
(it makes the best predictions etc) , and we have all benefited
immeasurably from technology.
– Kuhn’s response: ‘progress’ isn’t ‘truth’. It’s just difference.
(Consider: our happiness arguably hasn’t improved since we
become a more technological society.)
• Reply 2: Truth exists within paradigms and is meaningful
– One could also reply to Kuhn that if we can’t compare
paradigms, we can’t step outside them either.
– Truth exists without a capital ‘t’ – but it’s only relatively relative,
and so we can still use it as a notion.
– One could reply to Kuhn that our theory of truth must be a
coherence theory, instead.

37. Reply 3 to Kuhn: ‘Paradigm Shifts’ haven’t
really happened
• One could also reply that the
‘paradigm shifts’ Kuhn is thinking
of haven’t really occurred.
• So if there aren’t radical breaks
with the ideas of the past, ‘truth’
has simply been continually
refined and is still a meaningful
term.
• So it can be a component of
knowledge after all.

38. Quine’s reply to the claim that there is truth:
Truth is a ‘cultural posit’ – is this redefinition, or abolition?
“As an empiricist I continue to think of
the conceptual scheme of science as a
tool…Physical objects are conceptually
imported into the situation as
convenient intermediaries not by
definition in terms of experience, but
simply as irreducible posits
comparable, epistemologically, to the
gods of Homer …in point of
epistemological footing, the physical
objects and the gods differ only in
degree and not in kind. Both sorts of
entities enter our conceptions only as
cultural posits.” –
Willard Van Orman Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of
Empiricism’, (1960)
Science versus Homer

39. Quine’s ‘Confirmation Holism’
• The point that Quine is making is that the
existence of both physical objects and
the Homeric Gods is ‘underdetermined’
– the evidence, strictly speaking, doesn’t
quite stack up that either of these objects
exist.
• Their existence is supported holistically
by elements of cultural practice, that’s all
– beliefs cohere into belief-systems or
mutually supporting groups of cultural
posits.
• Hence, one cannot test a scientific
hypothesis in isolation, because an
empirical test of the hypothesis requires
auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary
hypotheses.
• And these assumptions cannot all be
explicitly tested.