IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

The problem of philosophy within the gamut of epistemology has been the issue of knowledge and the justification of the knowledge one claims to have, if at all. Some theories and positions have come up in order to establish the certainty-ness of knowledge, while some cast some skepticism about knowledge; and all these come in divergent forms and formats. Sequel to this, there had been a long-held account of knowledge as “Justified True Belief”. The Justified True Belief account of knowledge holds that knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief. Hence, we have knowledge of that claim if all three conditions: justification, truth, and belief, are met of a given claim. Edmund Gettier challenges and argues against this long held belief, and goes further to point out its flaws in a logico-propositional format. He explicates with the use of double counter-instances that there exists a situation where an individual can have a true belief that is justified, as regards a particular claim and yet cannot know it due to the fact that the rationale for the said belief, and its substantiation, cannot defy truth in the end. Critically, Edmund Gettier did not give any sequence of argument and propositions that would stand in place of the Justified True belief account, since he adjudged it to be false. Against this backdrop, therefore, the aim of this work is to access the claims therein, and strike a possible balance by establishing the possibility of such knowledge in part, and in a context. The work, among others, argues that the case 1 (especially) presented by Gettier is rare, hypothetical and does not always happen that someone will forget such within that context. It also argues that there exists some level of knowledge that is fundamental and not untrue given his analysis, namely; that someone necessarily will get the job in so far as there was a vacancy that needed to be filled, even though it was not pronounced. Even if it happens to be so, this work advances for the relevance of the possession of some reasonable and indubitable epistemic virtues, (possibly lacking in the case he gave) that are pertinent to any claim, knowledge; strengthen the Justified True Belief, especially within the contexts presented by Gettier, and thus forestall such occurrences.

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