ABSTRACT
Topics in epistemology, but also relevant to issues in cultural theory. One answer to the question ‘What is knowledge?’—knowledge is justified true belief. (Plato offered this classical definition in his dialogue the Theaetetus.) Thus in order for something to count as a genuine item of knowledge it should satisfy the following three criteria: (i) it must be true, (ii) we must believe it to be true, and (iii) our belief should be adequately grounded, i.e. based on adequate evidence, arrived at through a valid process of reasoning, or known as a matter of self-evident (a priori) truth. On the face of it this seems a pretty good working definition. Still there are certain problems with it, as shown by counterexamples where the above three conditions are satisfied but where they do not yield genuine knowledge in anything like our usual (intuitive as well as philosophical) sense of that term. Thus we might believe X, and X might be true, and we might moreover have grounds for our belief, and yet it just happens that they are not the right grounds in this particular case.
