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Knowledge is Justified True Belief

The Tripartite Analysis of Knowledge

The tripartite analysis of knowledge has been held by many philosophers throughout history and its origin can be traced all the way back to Plato's discussion of a tripartite analysis of knowledge in the Theaetetus. There are three components to the traditional analysis of knowledge; i.e, the truth condition, the belief condition and the justification condition.

Let's go through them one by one: -

The Truth Condition

According to the tripartite analysis of knowledge, a person S can only know the subject of a proposition p if and only if the proposition p is true.

Nonetheless, sometimes what is false cannot be known, and something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. 

Not all truths are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. 

Truth is a metaphysical, as opposed to epistemological. It (truth) is a matter of how things are, not how they can be shown to be. So when we say that only true things can be known, we’re not saying anything about how anyone can access the truth.

  

The Belief Condition

The tripartite analysis of knowledge states that a person S can only know the subject of a proposition p if and only if the person S believes the proposition p.

The belief condition is also controversial. The idea behind the belief condition is that you can only know what you believe. When you fail to believe in something means you do not know it. “Belief” in this context means full belief.


The Justification Condition

The tripartite analysis of knowledge states that a person S can only know the subject of a proposition p if and only if the person S is justified in believing the proposition p.

This relates to the justification condition in Plato’s Dialogue, Theaetetus, when Socrates in the dialogue points out that “true opinion” is in general insufficient for knowledge. The true opinion need to be justified with an account. 


Thus, the tripartite analysis of knowledge states that a subject S knows the proposition p if and only if

  1. proposition p is true;
  2. subject S believes proposition p;
  3. subject S is justified in believing the proposition p.


By analysing knowledge using such method means that we are stating the conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the propositional knowledge.

Knowledge could only be considered as true if it could fulfill the three conditions.


Bibliography

Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins and Matthias Steup, "The Analysis of Knowledge", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/knowledge-analysis/>.

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