[natt941]

If "quality" means something like strength of the evidence, then couldn't you still have Gettier-like cases, so long as the evidence doesn't entail the truth of the belief? (suppose the HR department printed the wrong name on the offer letter, etc.)

If "quality" doesn't mean this... then the worry is that you've just labeled what you were trying to explain, because "quality of justification" might mean something like "that thing, whatever it is, which makes a belief count as knowledge".

About truth as a condition for knowledge... there's a lot of subtlety here. The claim isn't that you have to first know that P is true in order for you to know that P, or that you have to provide the truth of P as one of the reasons why you know P, or anything like that. It's more of a logical claim about what it means when we say "S knows that P"... knowledge is "factive" in that you can't know P if P is false. At least, that's how philosophers use the word "know", and it's at least one of the common ways that ordinary folk use the word.

(For what it's worth, there's a lot of discussion amongst philosophers about whether anyone who knows that P also has to know that they know that P... plenty of philosophers deny this.)

[allturtles]

> If "quality" means something like strength of the evidence, then couldn't you still have Gettier-like cases, so long as the evidence doesn't entail the truth of the belief? (suppose the HR department printed the wrong name on the offer letter, etc.)

It would entail Gettier-like cases if you require knowledge to be true in some absolute sense. But I'm discarding the "true" condition as a requirement of a knowledge. Outside of a few domains like math, knowledge of this kind doesn't exist. Knowledge is always subject to revision.

[natt941]

Often we might think we know something and later conclude that we were wrong... but in this case, it's common to say "I thought I knew such-and-such, but I didn't". Also, for what it's worth, most people don't think that knowing that P requires that you're certain that P.

At least, that's one way of using the word "know". So if we're trying to give an analysis of this thing, we can't just decide to discard truth as a requirement of knowledge... the goal is to give an analysis of this thing that people talk about, not replace it with something else.

That said, it sounds like you're sympathetic to a line of thought on which this so-called "traditional" conception of knowledge isn't very useful, and we should focus on the sorts of things that Bayesian epistemology focuses on... something like degrees of confidence.