Justified True Belief (JTB)
It’s a fairly simple concept: If you believe something and it turns out to be true, you have a JTB. Remarkably, this philosophic concept caused quite a stir in 1963, before The Beatles, when Edmund Gettier published a ground shaking three-page paper called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”
Sometimes the answer is “no.” Gettier provides two cases. In the first, two beliefs are asserted. One belief turns out to be true, but the other turns out to be false. The true belief is justified, but it is not knowledge. The form is “If A=B and B=C, then A=C.” This works better mathematically than it does in real world logic where C can contradict A. This is called transitivity of identity. Suppose I believe that small green crustaceans will perform Brigadoon on the far side of Ganymede and also believe that creatures with antennae will be singing the chorus on Once In The Highlands. Then I learn, from FOX News, that pine sawflies recently got rave reviews from the Ganymedean press for their exquisite rendition of the line “Two weary hunters lost their way.” Shrimp are crustaceans and they have antennae. Pine sawflies have antennae and they got the gig. However A does not equal C. Therefore, according to Gettier, I have a JTB but not knowledge (this example is flimsy, I realize, the shrimp might have fucked-up their opening performance and got fired before the reviewer showed up).
The other case involves disjunction introduction, kinda like Conjunction Junction made famous by SchoolhouseRock. The form is “If A is true, it’s true that either A or B are true.” This one is simpler, but easily the most commonly used deception – a fallacy used to introduce confusion, such as “Either Saddam had WMDs or he had al-Qaeda connections. He did not have WMDs, therefore he had al-Qaeda connections.”
Slippery slopes infect the entire universe of post-Wittgenstein philosophy. Retro guys insist in causality in Gettier’s tract. There must be a force in action from premise to conclusion, even though the link between cause and effect had been discounted by earlier philosophy. With belief, it must be different, they argue. This is consistent with the fill in the blanks B&W Manichaean dualism that has become the hottest fad in American politics since the Senate-McCarthy hearings. They are evil, we are good, and therefore anything we do to them is good. Do you want fries with that?
6:19:33 PM 
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