Using the Gettier problem as an entry point, this article compares reliabilism, virtue epistemology, and contextualism as accounts of the normativity of knowledge.
1.A lucky hit is not knowledge
A traditional analysis identifies knowledge with justified true belief. Gettier cases show how a person may have evidence and arrive at a truth through the wrong route. The question is therefore not only whether evidence is present, but whether truth is properly connected to the process that formed the belief.
2.The pressure of skepticism
If knowledge requires eliminating every possibility of error, little ordinary knowledge survives. Contextualists argue that standards for ‘knows’ shift with conversational stakes. Reliabilists instead ask whether a belief-forming method generally produces truth in relevant environments.
3.Major Positions
Reliabilism
Knowledge comes from processes that reliably generate true beliefs in relevant environments.
Virtue epistemology
Knowledge is a success attributable to the knower’s competence rather than luck.
Contextualism
Standards for knowledge attribution vary with the salience of possible errors.
4.Primary & Further Reading
- Plato, Meno and Theaetetus.
- Gettier, Edmund, 1963, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”
- Goldman, Alvin, 1979, “What Is Justified Belief?”
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Analysis of Knowledge”. ↗
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