Abstract
It is obvious that we can be justified in believing something even though it is false. Juries sometimes convict innocent people because they have overwhelming evidence of their guilt. We can also be justified in believing something that is true yet not know that it is. Suppose, unbeknownst to me, a Hollywood film company has erected many barn facades in the area that, from the road, are indistinguishable from real barns. Then, even if I see a real barn and form the belief that there is a barn there, I do not know there is, even though my belief is true and I am justified in holding it.1 When I am just as likely to be mistaken as correct in my judgment about something, I don’t know it, even if I am justified in believing it.
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Notes
This example is taken from Alvin Goldman, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), pp. 771–91.
Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 ), p. 82.
At the NEH Institute on Knowledge, Teaching and Wisdom, in Berkeley, CA, directed by Keith Lehrer and Nicholas Smith in the summer of 1993, BonJour agreed that Ric lacks knowledge but claimed Ric is justified in believing what he does. Contra BonJour, this seems counterintuitive, once one allows that Ric’s situation is a possible one (as BonJour does), since beliefs should “fit” sensations and not just other beliefs. I suspect Keith Lehrer would claim that Ric holds some false belief, say, that in forming his beliefs he has taken account of all the sensations he is having. If that false belief were replaced by its denial, then, according to Lehrer’s theory, Ric would no longer be justified in believing what he does. Ric’s actual justification is defective and so he lacks knowledge, which accords with our intuitions.
This is a rough account of how BonJour views justification—as holistic and involving a system of beliefs that remains stable over time despite changes in “cognitively spontaneous” (non-inferential) beliefs. See The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), esp., Chpt. 5; Timothy Day’s “Circularity, Non-Linear Justification and Holistic Coherentism,” The Current State of the Coherence Theory (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 134–41 and BonJour’s endorsement of Day’s “reflections on the idea of non-linear justification” in his “Replies and Clarifications,” The Current State of the Coherence Theory,p. 292.
These two examples appear in Lehrer’s Theory of Knowledge (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 105–06. He attributes the second example to Frederick Schick.
In his “Reply To My Critics,” The Current State of the Coherence Theory, p. 260.
Thought (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 143.
Remote potential defeaters do not seem to present a problem. Harman remarks (Thought,pp. 146–47) that Jill would have knowledge if the wire to the television transmitter is cut so the cover-up does not go out over the air. Then the cover-up, and so the potential defeater, is not very accessible to people like Jill.
I am grateful to my colleague Stefan Sencerz who discussed in detail with me sections of this paper that had to be cut and to Richard Feldman for correspondence on some of those same sections. I am also grateful to Mylan Engel who wrote detailed comments on nearly every part of an earlier version of this paper. Sharon Ryan and her colleagues, especially Mark Aronszajn, at West Virginia University gave me valuable comments when I presented a version of this paper there in the spring of 1994. Finally, I want to thank Keith Lehrer and Nicholas Smith for inviting me to be a member of the NEH Institute on Knowledge, Teaching and Wisdom which they directed in the summer of 1993. I benefitted from discussions with Keith Lehrer and other members and participants in that Institute, including Mike Roth who talked with me about earlier views I had of defective justification. Though I have criticized the central tenets of Lehrer’s views about knowledge and justification, I admire him for his openness to criticism and his dedication to the pursuit of truth.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Russell, B. (1996). Justification and Knowledge. In: Lehrer, K., Lum, B.J., Slichta, B.A., Smith, N.D. (eds) Knowledge, Teaching and Wisdom. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 67. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2022-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2022-9_10
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