The Relationship between Knowledge and True Justified Belief; In Viewpoint of the Islamic Epistemology: A Critique on the Paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”

The article “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” by Edmund Gettier is one of the famous works in contemporary epistemology. This short article has challenged the classical definition of knowledge by the two controversial examples and raised various disputes and solutions by epistemologists. The present article studies those examples by relying on Islamic epistemology and answers the problems by proposing a kind of causal relation that differs from the causal theory of Goldman. The main difference is that the chain of causality is between external fact and proposition knowledge by the perception of a different form of knowledge called “knowledge by the present.” This causality originally has an epistemic role because it is identical to the manifestation of the external fact by appearing in perceptions that are effects of the external fact. Therefore, the perceiver grasps facts by the deeper surface of knowledge intermediates between external fact and proposition knowledge, and by the conceptualization of the appearance and judgment. The mind constitutes true justified beliefs therefore in Gettier’s problems, the chain of this causality is not connected in an appropriate way.