Why is belief considered necessary for knowledge?

On the standard view, to know that p one must accept that p; a person who has no belief that p, however well placed to form it, is not credited with knowing it. Some dissenters question whether knowledge always entails belief, but the entailment is widely assumed.

What does knowledge-first epistemology claim?

It claims that knowledge is not built up from belief plus added conditions but is itself a basic factive mental state, so that other notions such as evidence and justified belief are best explained in terms of knowledge rather than used to define it.

The Analysis of Knowledge

The analysis of knowledge asks what conditions, taken together, are necessary and sufficient for a person to know that something is the case, beginning from the idea that knowledge is justified true belief and proceeding through the refinements forced by counterexamples.

Definition

The analysis of knowledge is the project of specifying the conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the truth of claims of the form 'S knows that p', where p is a proposition.

Scope

This topic covers attempts to give an analysis of propositional knowledge — knowledge that some proposition is true — in terms of more basic conditions such as belief, truth, justification, and safety or sensitivity. It includes the traditional justified-true-belief account and its post-Gettier successors, as well as the knowledge-first program that treats knowledge as unanalysable. It does not cover the detailed catalogue of Gettier cases and replies, which is treated separately, nor knowledge-how or knowledge by acquaintance.

Core questions

Are belief, truth, and justification individually necessary for knowledge?
Are those three conditions jointly sufficient, or is a fourth condition required?
Can knowledge be analysed at all, or is it conceptually basic?
Should the analysis appeal to internal evidence or to external conditions like reliability or safety?

Key theories

Justified true belief: Knowledge is belief that is true and justified; this tripartite analysis, suggested in Plato's Theaetetus, was the orthodox view until the mid-twentieth century.
Post-Gettier fourth-condition analyses: To repair the JTB account, philosophers add a condition such as no false grounds, defeasibility, sensitivity, or safety, ruling out cases where justified true belief is true only by luck.
Knowledge-first epistemology: Williamson reverses the traditional order, treating knowledge as a fundamental, unanalysable mental state in terms of which belief and evidence are explained rather than the reverse.

History

Plato's Theaetetus first formulated and probed the idea that knowledge is true belief with an account, and the justified-true-belief reading dominated the early twentieth century. Gettier's 1963 paper showed JTB to be insufficient, prompting decades of fourth-condition proposals; by 2000 Williamson's knowledge-first approach challenged the very assumption that knowledge can be decomposed into simpler parts.

Debates

Whether knowledge admits of analysis: Traditional epistemology assumes knowledge can be analysed into necessary and sufficient conditions, but the persistent failure of post-Gettier analyses leads knowledge-first theorists to argue that knowledge is conceptually primitive and resists such decomposition.

Key figures

Plato
Edmund Gettier
Timothy Williamson
Matthias Steup

Seminal works

gettier1963
plato-theaetetus
williamson2000

Frequently asked questions

Why is belief considered necessary for knowledge?: On the standard view, to know that p one must accept that p; a person who has no belief that p, however well placed to form it, is not credited with knowing it. Some dissenters question whether knowledge always entails belief, but the entailment is widely assumed.
What does knowledge-first epistemology claim?: It claims that knowledge is not built up from belief plus added conditions but is itself a basic factive mental state, so that other notions such as evidence and justified belief are best explained in terms of knowledge rather than used to define it.