What is Knowledge? AQA A-Level Philosophy Revision Summary

This resource contains everything students and teachers alike need to learn or teach the “What is knowledge?” area of the AQA A-Level Philosophy specification. It contains the following information:

The distinction between acquaintance knowledge, ability knowledge and propositional knowledge.

The tripartite view
Propositional knowledge is defined as justified true belief: S knows that p if and only if:

S is justified in believing that p,
p is true and
S believes that p (individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions)
Issues with the tripartite view including:

the conditions are not individually necessary
the conditions are not sufficient – cases of lucky true beliefs (including Edmund Gettier’s original two counter examples):
responses: alternative post-Gettier analyses/definitions of knowledge including:
strengthen the justification condition (ie infallibilism)
add a ‘no false lemmas’ condition (J+T+B+N)
replace ‘justified’ with ‘reliably formed’ (R+T+B) (ie reliabilism)
replace ‘justified’ with an account of epistemic virtue (V+T+B).