Reddit reviews Knowledge and Its Limits

Another way to state this concern, in a more meta-philosophical way, would be that philosophers are really interested in figuring out what knowledge is. They want to get the details right and understand what that means.

One could make a K=JTB~GC or something, but that doesn't tell us what is doing the '~GC' work. Furthermore, what does such a view say when you get into the epistemology literature like Linda Zagzebski's "The Inescapability of Gettier Problems"?

A further concern, along these same lines, is that with a K=JTB~GC account, we don't know how to evaluate that position other than criticizing it as ad hoc. Thus, closing off a natural route to something like Timothy Williamson's view that knowledge is prime.

This is all just to say that the reasons for it are somewhat methodological and are concerned with the answer being unsatisfying given the goals of epistemology, and it (kinda) closes off new theories of knowledge that reject the JTB model.

Clayton Littlejohn, in his Justification and the Truth-Connection, takes the idea that truth-guaranteeing justification is required for knowledge and develops it non-skeptically.

The picture that comes out is a kind of knowledge-first epistemology (Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits also owes a great debt to Zagzebski).

The author says that

>In order for the level of justification for a belief [to be knowledge] to be non-arbitrary, it is clear that one should be aware of all of the relevant pieces of information

Williamson and Littlejohn would say the only thing you need to be aware of to guarantee the truth of p is p. They argue that "being aware of p" is just another way of saying "knowing that p". So whether you're justified in believing p is determined by whether you are aware that p, which is determined by whether or not you know p.

Similarly, the only evidence you need to have a guarantee of the truth of p is p. If your evidence is what you know (Williamson believes this. Littlejohn's account is more complicated), then we get: Whether you're justified in believing p is determined by what your evidence is, which is determined by what you know.

What this points to, I would say, is that saving JTB by going for SJT doesn't do much saving: Strong justification just is knowledge.