Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
necessary false belief, S is barred from knowing altogether, with all judgments arising bound to be false, tarnished by faulty justification, or purely coincidental. As we might expect, when an agent depends on necessary false beliefs, the proposition itself will most often be false, automatically precluding knowledge due to a lack of truth. With falsity assuming such an integral role in the justification, uncovering the truth is naturally rendered extremely unlikely. For instance, referring to Nagel’s case, if I rely on the necessary false belief that the clock is properly functioning, I will be wrong, besides those two minutes of the day in which it happens to be correct. 5 In the slim chance that truth does prevail, this should not haphazardly grant the subject knowledge. As pointed out in Section II , we intuitively expect the subject to demonstrate a degree of agency in reaching his conclusion to secure knowledge. However, whenever one relies on a necessary false belief , it guarantees that any truth uncovered is pure luck. In Nagel's case, for example, if I correctly deduce the time from the broken clock, I have coincidentally looked during the 120 seconds of the day in which the clock reflects the time, which is a 0.02% chance! Such extraordinary coincidences ought not be a sponsor of knowledge, undermining the integrity of what it means to know. This is why the condition barring necessary false beliefs, alongside justified true belief, is jointly sufficient and individually necessary for knowledge, restoring the epistemic skill and agency we expect to know. Luck is no longer a sponsor of knowledge, with my condition affirming that knowledge must be derived from conscience justification and awareness of truth.
5 Nagel, The Analysis of Knowledge , 46-59.
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