One way of understanding knowledge is that it fulfils the three criteria of being, justified, true, and believed. As this essay will explore, Edmund L. Gettier attempted to dismantle this theory of knowledge by arguing that it is possible to have a justified true belief without having knowledge. Following an evaluation of this, the integrity of Gettier’s assumption made in his argument will be explored, concerning his belief as to what the word justified means in this context. Furthermore, Gettier’s
understand just how much of truth this phrase holds, and sieve out any logical fallacies, before accepting it to be a good argument. In this essay, I will explain Descartes’ line of logic leading to the Cogito, and then go on to make three possible criticisms of the argument at hand, before concluding that Descartes argument is not substantial or persuasive enough to hold true to its own premises, and hence fails to hold as a good argument. To understand why he came up with this argument, one has to understand
v Van Wyk 1967 1 SA 488 (A) the defendant successfully pleaded private defence where upon the minister put forth the following question: could a person ever be justified in using lethal force to protect their property? The court decided unanimously in the affirmative with judge Steyn stating that “if the use of necessary force is justified ... then it is not clear to me why deadly force must be excluded from that principal…proportionally will not do as a general basis for private defence” . This