Someone point out my stupidity (x-posted at RE)
I am currently reading my future teacher Al Casullo’s book A Priori Justification. I am really enjoying it thus far. It is clearly written, and the arguments are impressive. However, I am very confused about a few passages. On page 22 he writes,
Most contemporary theorists agree that knowledge in general does not require justification that either provides a guarantee of truth or is indefeasible.
A similar passage is found on page 36, where he writes
It is generally granted that the degree of justification minimally sufficient for knowledge does not entail either truth or indefeasibility.
Now, I read these passages as claiming that it is generally granted that one can be justified sufficiently to know P, even if P is false. Is this an accurate reading? If it is, then I know no person who advocates such a view. Knowledge is factive. P must be true in order for one to be sufficiently justified to know P. I believe that this is held to be obviously true.
When I read the first passage, I thought that he must mean that most people agree that one’s justification can be sufficient to know P even if P could be false (this merely says that one can know contingent truths). But I cannot see how the second passage can be read that way. What am I missing?
I think he just means that the justification needn’t be infallible. That is, the *justification* component of knowledge doesn’t entail truth (one could have identical justification for believing a falsehood); the factive component of knowledge is something separate. (Hence the need to explicitly include it in “JTB”, rather than mere “JB” where J entails T.)
Richard,
That sounds right. Thanks.
Errol,
I think Richard is correct. We discussed this point in my epistemology seminar last semester, and it seems to me that allowing fallibility of justification & requiring truth for knowledge are consistent. To count as knowledge, a proposition must still be true – but the justification one has might not necessarily entail the truth. Of course, then you run into problems of not knowing if you have knowledge or not (because fallible justifications might support either true propositions which are knowledge or false propositions which are not knowledge). Proponents of the strong conception of knowledge (ex: Descartes) avoid this problem by requiring infallible justification for the foundations of knowledge, such that one has knowledge if and only if she has infallible justification.
Hope that helps some!