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Plato 's Justified True Belief Theory

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For thousands of years the most prominent theory of knowledge was Plato’s Justified True Belief theory. He was convinced that in order to know something the following criterion must be met:
a) one must believe said thing to be true
b) said thing must actually be true, and
c) one must be justified in believing said thing to be true.
This theory made a lot of sense to most epistemologists, and was generally accepted as true for a very long time. It wasn’t until a man named Edmund Gettier wrote a paper offering some counterexamples to this theory that philosophers began to dismiss it. Since the publication of Gettier’s paper in 1963, most modern epistemologists have abandoned the justified true belief theory. Gettier’s counterexamples demonstrate that having a justified true belief in something isn’t necessarily equivalent to possessing knowledge. They show that something more than just justified truth is needed. This lead to what is known as the Gettier Problem: what, in addition to (or instead of) justified true belief, is needed to constitute knowledge? The solution to this problem is still being searched for by contemporary philosophers, and no general consensus has been reached. Many other counterexamples to justified true belief theory have been constructed since Gettier’s paper, and these thought experiments are referred to as Gettier Cases. These thought experiments are generally characterized by the presence of a few key elements: justified true belief without

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