Necessity and Sufficiency of Belief, Justification and Truth as Conditions for Knowledge

Philosophers have always considered knowledge in an epistemological perspective to entail propositional knowledge, not skill acquisition or possession or acquaintance. In order for information to qualify as knowledge, it must meet three necessary and sufficient conditions; belief, justification and truth. A necessary condition in knowledge is one without which we cannot validly claim to know. A necessary condition is that which offers enough basis to guarantee the existence of knowledge. However, some scholars have cast doubt as to whether these three conditions are necessary and sufficient for knowledge. To justify their claims, they present scenarios in which at least one of the conditions is absent and yet knowledge is attained. The objective of this paper was to examine the nature and validity of the three classical conditions for knowledge. The study was library-based and involved an examination of relevant texts by various scholars. The paper examined each of the arguments for or against JTB conception of knowledge and demonstrated the insufficiency of the counter arguments presented by critiques of the JTB conditions. This study posited that each of the conditions is necessary for knowledge, but none is sufficient by itself. They are collectively sufficient for knowledge. As such, absence of one limits the possibility of knowledge acquisition. Belief is a necessary condition because it enables the subject to have an awareness of the truth value (truth or falsity) of their ideas. A conviction that an idea is true or false forms the basis of one’s understanding of it. Truth is necessary for knowledge because when we claim knowledge of something, we must demonstrate that we really know it and the only way to do this is by proving that our belief is in agreement with the state of affairs. Further, justification cannot be wished away because it is what makes our beliefs worth having. In its absence, it would not be possible to distinguish between a belief that is worth holding and one that should be discarded because there would be no reason whatsoever to reject any belief or conviction.