This one’s from back in the day where Kanye was all upbeat and not afraid to be a little goofy. As far as goofy goes, however, Kanye is made to look like an amateur by Fonzworth Bentley in the blazer-bowtie-shorts-suspenders-headband-kneehighs combo, even before he cranks things up a notch with the boxing helmet and fashion-forward-older-woman glasses (which, incidentally, are not entirely dissimilar from those Baroness Helena Kennedy wears).

We need the justification condition to prevent lucky guesses from being counted as knowledge. If knowledge were only true belief then we’d have to say that the person who guesses the lottery numbers one weekwhat the lottery numbers are going to be, and this seems silly. You can’t know things that you aren’t justified in believing.

That all changed with the publication of Edmund Gettier’s ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ in 1963. The paper, just three pages long, is the only thing Gettier ever published in his whole career. It’s said he only wrote it to satisfy the demands of departmental administrators and had so little confidence in it that he had it translated into Spanish to be published in an obscure little South American journal.

Gettier’s little paper gives two examples of cases where a person has a justified, true belief(seemingly) having knowledge. If you want to read those examples you can do so here . I’m not including them in my blogpost because once you know the recipe Gettier-style counterexamples are super easy to come up with (and to be honest Gettier’s are a bit boring).

Kanye is on stage in San Jose. As he looks out on the crowd, he spies a young guy in the front row sporting a $20 t-shirt and a $10 haircut. He looks a lot like Mark Zuckerburg. So, Kanye thinks to himself, ‘Mark Zuckerburg is at my concert.’ But the guy Kanye’s looking at is not Mark. It’s some other baby-faced California tech dork. However, unbeknownst to Kanye, the real Zuckerburg is at the concert. He’s just at the back having a beer.

Now three things are true: (1) Kanye believes Zuckerburg is at the concert, (2) Zuckerburg is at the concert, and (3) Kanye is justified in believing Zuckerburg is at the concert (because he saw a guy who looked very much like Zuckerburg). So the JTB account of knowledge has to say that Kanye knows Zuckerburg is at the concert.

“S knows that h iff (i) h is true, (ii) S is justified [by some evidence e] in believing h…, (iii) S believes that h on the basis of his justification and…(ivg)…there is an evidence-restricted alternative Fs* to S’s epistemic framework Fs such that (i) ‘S is justified in believing that h’ is epistemically derivable from the other members of the evidence component of Fs* and (ii) there is some subset of members of the evidence component of Fs* such that (a) the members of this subset are also members of the evidence component of Fs and (b) ‘S is justified in believing that h’ is epistemically derivable from the members of this subset. [Where Fs* is an ‘evidence-restricted alternative’ to Fs iff (i) For every true proposition q such that ‘S is justified in believing not-q’ is a member of the evidence component of Fs, ‘S is justified in believing q’ is a member of the evidence component of Fs*, (ii) for some subset C of members of Fs such that C is maximally consistent epistemically with the members generated in (i), every member of C is a member of Fs*, and (iii) no other propositions are members of Fs* except those that are implied epistemically by the members generated in (i) and (ii).]”