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Epistemology, the study of knowledge, has emerged many centuries ago. The scope of interests of this science includes the nature of knowledge, its sources, validity, and the relationship between belief and knowledge (Bremer and Cohnitz 126). It is possible to distinguish between two branches of epistemology: rationalism and empiricism. The supporters of the former claim that the source of knowledge is reason, while the followers of the latter approach consider sense experience to be the source of knowledge.
One of the founders of rationalism was Plato, who developed a theory of knowledge as justified true belief (Bremer and Cohnitz 131): if someone knows something, this means that this person believes this statement to be true, this statement is objectively true, and the person can justify own belief using some kind of reasoning (intuition, reasoning or sense experience). Plato’s rationalistic justification of knowledge also includes a priori knowledge (which is axiomatic, in fact), and a posteriori knowledge, which can be derived from a priori knowledge and facts (Bremer and Cohnitz 132).
Plato’s approach to knowledge was accepted by many philosophers, until Paul Gettier in the 1960s managed to generate a series of questions referred to as the Gettier problem (Hossack 289). These questions refuted Plato’s theory of knowledge as a justified true belief, because they met all the conditions of this theory, but the belief did not prove to be knowledge in its “strong” meaning.
According to Gettier, both the situations when the belief is justified and true, but does not turn into knowledge, and the situations when the knowledge is true, but the belief is different from the knowledge are possible. For example, if a person sees the figure of the neighbor moving the lawn, he or she can assume that the neighbor is at home. Indeed, this person believes that the neighbor is at home, the neighbor is in fact sitting inside his home, and his twin brother arrived to visit him and is currently moving the lawn.
Thus, the belief of the above-mentioned person is justified (the figure assumed to be the neighbor is at the lawn) and in fact true (the neighbor indeed is at home, but by mere chance). But it could equally happen in this case that the neighbor was at work, and his brother was moving the lawn – but the person would “know” that the neighbor is at home.
An example of an inverse situation, when the knowledge is true, but there is no belief, is the nervous and worried schoolboy. If the teacher asked him what the capital of France was, the boy could forget the word “Paris” (although he knows it for sure) and would not believe himself if the word “Paris” came to his mind. Thus, although in the majority of situations knowledge is based on belief which can be justified in some way, this concept does not apply to all cases. Gettier problems show that knowledge and belief can be both related and unrelated.
In my opinion, these issues can be descended down to Descartes’ axiomatic system and the mistrust to all human perceptions. From this point of view, any knowledge would be a form of strong belief, and the more justifications a human being can find to a certain fact, the firmer this knowledge is. However, all people are bound by their axiomatic system – the concepts and relationships between phenomena which they have learned before. For example, when the theory of relativity emerged, almost all physical knowledge had to be reconsidered, and old principles were no longer valid in their old form. I believe that knowledge is nothing more than a firm belief based on the existing system of axioms and methods of justification.