Microblog Memes

I would say that the meme does a good job of producing a Gettier Case, which many philosophers recognize as valid counter examples that disprove the Justified True Belief definition of knowledge, indicating that a complete definition of knowledge requires more than those three elements.

Philosophers (aside from skeptics) were mostly agreed on JTB as a straightforward and elegant definition of knowledge for most of history and they have struggled to reach a new consensus after Gettier and instead are left with a hodgepodge of competing definitions. This could be perceived as something that might frustrate a philosopher, and that I think is why the meme positions this as a sort of "prank" for philosophers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem?wprov=sfla1

Fair enough, and I also just like the mystery of it all; I understand that a large philosophical question can't be definitively answered in a tweet. I would say that, while knowledge requires truth and justification, there's something more to it than just the presence of those 2 factors.

If I had never seen the sky, but believed it was blue, I'd be right, but I wouldn't be knowledgeable; I'd just be a lucky guesser due to the lack of justification for my belief. But would I be justified if I had read a book that said it was blue, and based my decision off of that? It seems arbitrary - what if the book was wrong? What if there were another book I had access to that described the sky as being green, but I simply decided I better liked the blue book?

I think real knowledge requires a level of certainty that a single point of justification can't reasonably provide, and that a "true justified belief" is a step between an arbitrary belief and real knowledge. Knowledge would essentially be a belief so well-justified that it requires no "belief" at all. In the end, I'd probably say that real knowledge is totally outside of human ability, but that's not a new concept.