The Tripartite View

Good to know:

You could get asked a 3, 5, 12 or 25 marker on the Tripartite View.

The best way to answer a 3 or 5 marker on the Tripartite View would be to define it as it is in red on the other side of the page.

This is another view on how to define what knowledge is. This definition comes from Plato, he wrote about it in his dialogue Theaetetus.

It holds that propositional knowledge is true justified belief:

S knows P if (if and only if):

P is true
S believes P
S has justification for believing P
These three criteria (truth, belief and justification) together are equivalent to knowledge.
They are individually necessary, meaning that each one is essential for knowledge. If we lack any one of those criteria, we could not have knowledge.
They are jointly sufficient, meaning that if you have all three, you have knowledge and you don't need anything more.

What do each of the criteria mean?

Good to know:

AQA love definitions, you'll want to be confident that you know how to define all the words you come across.

The advice I give to my students for this is to make little flashcards with 5 mark definition answers on the back.

Truth

Truth is a necessary condition of knowledge because, as Zagzebski argues, knowledge is a specific kind of mental contact with reality. Since reality consists of what is true, knowledge must therefore involve truth.

Belief

The idea of the mind connecting with reality also supports the criterion of belief. Without belief, the mind cannot be said to make contact with reality or have mental content genuinely connected to it.

Justification

Justification is the reason or the warranting for a belief. Knowledge has to be more than just being right about something. Justifications can be good or bad. There are a variety of types of bad justification such as irrationality, mistakes, logical errors & ignorance.

Problems with the Tripartite View

With every single topic in A-Level Philosophy, you have to be able to criticise it - even if you agree with it. What makes a good Philosopher (according to AQA) is the ability to balance arguments on all sides and come to a conclusion based on the available evidence

Problem 1: The Criteria of the Tripartite View are not Sufficient

You can have knowledge without Truth:
Scientific knowledge is what we have the strongest reason to believe based on current evidence, making it provisional and subject to change as new evidence emerges. This raises the possibility that scientific knowledge might be false, suggesting it could be seen as justified belief rather than knowledge, where the justification is the scientific method.

You can have knowledge without Belief:
EG: A student may recall a forgotten answer during an exam without realising its source but nevertheless chooses to write it down. In this case, they have the information but do not believe it is true, suggesting knowledge without belief. Arguably, to truly know something, you must also know that you know it.

You can have knowledge without Justification:
Immediate perceptual knowledge is knowledge of our current experience, such as seeing a green object. While claiming that a green object exists in the external world requires justification, simply knowing that I am experiencing redness requires no reasoning, as it is directly given.

What exactly are these criticisms attacking?

They are saying that the criteria as laid out in the Tripartite View is NOT sufficient.

Being able to say exactly how a criticism attacks a theory is integration, and you need to be able to do this for 12 and 25 markers.

The Gettier Cases:

The Gettier cases show that you can have a justified true belief due to epistemic luck (you just got lucky).

Such cases challenge the idea that this counts as knowledge, since knowledge should not depend on luck.

Therefore, the tripartite view is incorrect, as having all three does not guarantee that one truly knows a proposition.

Edmund Gettier

Smith and Jones are applying for a job. Smith has strong evidence for the belief: “Jones will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.” Smith sees Jones counting ten coins and the employer tells him Jones will get the job. Based on this, Smith forms the belief: “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.”

However, it turns out that Smith actually gets the job. Coincidentally, Smith also has ten coins in his pocket. So, the belief “The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket” is true and justified, but Smith believed it for the wrong reasons.

The Point: Smith had a justified true belief, but most would hesitate to call it knowledge because the truth of the belief depended partly on luck.

The Second Gettier Case:

Smith has strong evidence for the belief: “Jones owns a Ford.” Smith forms the belief that either:

Jones owns a Ford, or
Brown is in Barcelona.

(Smith doesn’t know where Brown is, but the “or” statement will be true if either part is true.)

It turns out:

Jones does not own a Ford.
But by sheer coincidence, Brown is in Barcelona.

So the statement “Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona” is true, and Smith was justified in believing it.

But again, his belief is true by luck, not because his reasoning about Jones was correct.

Point: Smith has a justified true belief, but intuitively we would not call it knowledge, showing that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge.

How can we fix the problem of knowledge?

So, we now see that the Tripartite View is not good enough as a definition of knowledge. This is because the criteria aren't necessary as you can have knowledge without one of the parts, and also because they're not enough.

In an attempt to fix this, we are left with trying to make the Tripartite View even better and stronger.

Fix 1: Infallibilism

Infallibilism strengthens the justification criterion of the tripartite definition of knowledge so that the justification becomes unquestionable.
There has to be no possibility of failure of this justification. The result must be certain.

P is true.
S believes that P is true.
S is justified in their belief that P is true.
S's justification guarantees the truth of P
Smith’s justification for his belief was not infallible because the president could have been wrong, lying. He was never certain.
Descartes is a supporter of infallibilism: "my reason convinces me that I ought not the less carefully to withhold belief from what is not entirely certain and indubitable, than from what is manifestly false"
BUT: This could lead to complete scepticism. This is too restrictive and opens the door for knowledge being impossible as we will never be able to meet the justification criteria. Everyday justifications are not infallible.

Fix 2: No False Lemmas

The no false lemmas theory adds a fourth necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge, "the justified true belief must not have been inferred from a false belief". A false lemma is a misstep in reasoning.
This view of knowledge is that s knows p if and only if:
P is true
S believes p
S has justification for p
S has not inferred their belief in p from any false lemmas
This can solve Gettier problems because it requires that we analyse the process that we took when we formed a proposition to make sure that we isolate what went wrong when we formed our beliefs. It allows us to make sure there are no missteps in our reasoning.

Criticism of No False Lemmas:

The No false lemmas theory assumes every case of epistemic luck must involve a false step in the reasoning. In other words, it claims that Gettier-style problems only occur when a person’s belief depends on a false assumption. However this fix to the Tripartite View ultimately fails.
A doctor has strong, reliable test results indicating that a patient has a particular disease. Based on those results, the doctor forms the belief:

“The patient has disease X.”
Unknown to the doctor, the test results were actually mixed up and they belong to another patient. So the doctor’s reasoning is perfectly justified, but the belief formed on that basis is false.
However just by sheer chance, the patient does in fact have disease X, just for completely different reasons that the doctor is unaware of.
So now we have: The belief is justified (good medical evidence); The belief is true (the patient really does have the disease).
But it’s true by accident, not because the justification connected properly to the truth.
If justification can be an accidental misstep, and truth can occur independently, double luck cases are always possible.
Zagzebski’s point is that the doctor did not base their belief on a false premise, she simply relied on misleading evidence. The “no false lemmas” condition is therefore satisfied. She has a justified true belief that does not depend on false reasoning yet it is still true only because of luck.
This suggests that the No False Lemmas condition is not sufficient to rule out cases where someone has justified true belief without genuine knowledge.

Fix 3: Virtue Epistemology

Ernest Sosa’s Virtue epistemology replaces the justification criterion with "virtuously formed".
This involves intellectual traits and virtues such as desire to seek truth, attention to detail and research as virtuous because they help us seek knowledge.
S knows p if and only if:
P is true
S believes p
S believes p because of the exercise of intellectual virtue

The Archer Analogy:

Accuracy: An arrow hitting the target is a true belief. But accuracy alone isn’t enough for knowledge, since the hit could be due to luck (as Gettier shows).

Adroitness: An arrow shot skillfully represents intellectual virtue. But, even a skillful and accurate shot doesn’t eliminate luck because maybe the arrow could be manipulated by the wind in order to hit the target.

Aptness: Complete knowledge requires aptness which means that the arrow hits the target because it was shot skillfully. Similarly, a true belief counts as knowledge only if it results from intellectual virtue, not luck.

BUT: Does this rule out the possibility of young children having knowledge since they have not developed these virtues yet?

Fix 4: Reliabilism

Reliabilists tweak the JTB account by redefining justification, while others replace it with reliability or proper causal connections.
A belief counts as knowledge if produced by a reliable process, like perception or the scientific method.
However, reliabilists struggle to define reliability either by high success rates or counterfactual performance—but both approaches face objections, especially when the agent lacks reasons for the belief.
The causal theory holds that a belief is knowledge if the fact causes it in the right way, preventing some lucky guesses. Yet it fails in cases like mathematics or general truths, where causal connections are absent or impossible.