Abstract

If we accept certain Peircean commitments, Gettier’s two cases are not cases of justified true belief because the beliefs are not true. On the Peircean view, propositions are sign substitutes, or “representamens.” In typical cases of thought about the world, propositions represent facts. In each of Gettier’s examples, we have a case in which a person S believes some proposition p, there is some fact F* such that were p to represent F* to S then p would be true, and yet p does not represent F* to S but some other fact F of which p is false. Since truth is a property of propositions with respect to their representational function, it follows that the belief is not true. Although an examination of Gettier’s two cases, this essay is not a defense of the justified true belief analysis of knowledge, for there are objections to the JTB analysis other than Gettier’s two cases. Rather, Gettier’s two cases are of particular interest for the light they shed on the nature of truth and representation.