Hi, I'm Dr. Anadale, with a flowchart about the relationship between truth, belief, and justification.
The way we're going to begin is by taking all of my beliefs, everything I believe, about
the distant past, about the present, myself and my relationships, and about the distant
future, all of my beliefs about anything, I'm going to put in this top category, of Beliefs.
So, my belief about the causes of the Civil War, my beliefs about Lewis and Clark, my
beliefs about the heat death of the universe billions of years from now, all of these are
things I believe about the way the world is--they all go in the top category.
Now, the first obvious division among beliefs is between beliefs that are true and beliefs
that are false.
So there's our first division in the flowchart.
I have some true beliefs, I have some false beliefs, regardless of whether I know they
are true, or whether anybody ever will know that they are true.
My belief that the universe will eventually... will expand infinitely and then experience
heat death.
This belief may be true, it may not be true, I won't be around to see it.
But if that's actually what happens billions and billions of years from now, then my belief
turns out to be a true one.
If something else happens, if the universe enters some cycle of expansion and contraction,
my belief about its infinite expansion was a false belief.
Among my true beliefs though, some of them are justified, and some of them are unjustified.
My true beliefs that are justified, these are beliefs that are true, and that I have
a good reason for believing.
I have a good argument to back them up, or I have good authority for establishing those
beliefs as true.
So I have good reasons for believing them.
If I have good reasons for believing a belief, and it is also a true belief, then it qualifies
as knowledge.
This is our traditional definition of knowledge: justified true belief.
Some of my true beliefs, however, are unjustified.
I don’t have a good reason for believing them.
Even though they happen to be true, I haven’t done my homework, so to speak.
I don’t have good authority to establish that these things are true.
Even if they happen to be true, I sort of luck into them.
This would be like if I picked the winner of the Super Bowl based on a coin toss.
We would say, “Well, you didn’t *know* who was going to win, you simply got lucky.”
This is what I’ll call… things in this category are not knowledge, but they’re
more like a lucky guess.
Among my false beliefs, there’s also a division of justified and unjustified false beliefs.
Some of the things that I believe that are false are false beliefs that I have a good
reason for believing, and these are my justified false beliefs.
We might call these understandable mistakes or honest mistakes.
We would say, “It’s not true, it’s not the way things are, but given the other knowledge
you had available to you, given the way you went about your belief formation process,
it’s completely understandable and justified that you formed that false belief.
It just missed the target, it didn’t turn out to be true, so it wasn’t knowledge.
It’s not the way the world actually is.”
If I predict the winner of a football game based upon who’s got the better offensive
line, defensive line, and who’s the heavy favorite, and the game turns out to be a massive
upset, and the underdog wins: in that case we would say my belief that the favored team
would win was a false belief, but it was a *justified* false belief.
I had very good reasons for believing that that was the way it was going to go.
Among my false beliefs I also have unjustified false beliefs.
I have some beliefs that are false, and I don’t have any good reasons for believing
they are true.
I haven’t, as it were, done my homework.
I haven’t engaged in a responsible process of belief formation.
And this is…
I’d call these beliefs the kind of “You ought to know better!” sort of beliefs.
You don’t have a true belief, and you don’t even have good reasons for believing the false
things that you believe.
The thing to keep in mind, to wrap up, is that among these four different categories
at the bottom of the flowchart for our beliefs, only this leftmost category, justified true
belief, counts as knowledge.
These other three are different ways in which I can fall short of this ultimate target of
having justified true beliefs.
Three different ways, three different errors that I can make intellectually, to fall short
of knowledge.
That’s all for right now.
I hope this flowchart helps you in thinking about knowledge, truth, and belief.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.