Gettier's Notion of Justification

Abstract

One surprising feature of the literature surrounding Edmond Gettier's1 familiar challenge to the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief is the failure of writers to take into account in their discussion of Gettier's arguments the notion of justification of beliefs which he has in mind. For instance, David H. Sanford proposes to isolate a weak sense of justification, 'some objective relation which obtains between two propositions',2 and then goes on to give a 'solution' to the Gettier puzzles in terms of that notion. But the notion of justification he employs is, as will become clear below, not Gettier's notion. So although Sanford might help us see, by employing his notion of justification, why it is that the subjects of the Gettier examples do not know, he tells us little about the status of these examples as counter-examples to the traditional analysis of knowledge, and hence about the validity of Gettier's argument against the traditional analysis of knowledge. But inattention to Gettier's own perfectly coherent notion of justification is often a feature of discussions directly concerned with the force of Gettier's critique against the three term definition, and it is to these that I shall return in explicating what I take to be Gettier's notion of justification. It has become customary just to refer to Gettier's counter-examples as counter-examples to the justified true belief analysis of knowledge whereas Gettier actually specifies the general form of such analyses in the following way: