Knowledge and Justification

For the past few years I was able to convince myself that justification should not be a requirement for knowledge. The reasons I had for that view was mainly due to the Gettier cases and the people I had discussed the topic with seemed to include justification on an intuitive level which I found unconvincing. After reading a remarkably short argument by BonJour (1985), I am now convinced that such a view is wrong.

I used to think true belief was far more important than justified true belief which caused me to conclude TB was knowledge and not JTB. The various philosophers that I have discussed the topic with tried to use examples to convince me that justification was needed for knowledge. One example was suppose that you are talking to a friend in a coffee shop and you notice your friend place their wallet in their sock. Say you think to yourself, “I know my friend’s wallet is in her sock.” Also suppose that someone standing outside the coffee shop notices your friend and just has the random thought, “I know that person has a wallet in her sock.” Such an example is suppose to have the intuitive pull that the person standing outside the coffee shop doesn’t have knowledge. I noticed I didn’t have that intuition. The person standing outside the coffee shot is correct so what could I say that the person standing outside the coffee shop lacks? If our focus is truth then we should say that the person lacks nothing for knowledge. It might be a lucky guess, but how does that make it not knowledge? When I ask these types of questions, I noticed I really didn’t get much of an answer.

Another concern for me was looking at historical examples which I thought showed that the JTB account of knowledge was false. There was an ancient Greek (I wish I could remember his name) that hypothesized the moon was formed by an object that struck the earth and that object and what was struck off, formed the moon. Now that ancient Greek, given their level of technology and development of science at the time, was probably not justified in what he believed. What reason do we have for denying that ancient Greek knowledge? He was right about how the moon was formed.

Now the argument from BonJour,

“If truth were somehow immediately and unproblematically accesible so that one could in all cases opt simply to believe the truth, then the concept of justification would be of little significance and would play no independent role in cognition. But this epistemically ideal situation is quite obviously not the one in which we find ourselves. We have no such immediate and unproblematic access to truth, and it is for this reason that justification comes into the picture.” (p. 7)

I find such an argument, very convincing.