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I am not a philosophy student and I have a question on the term "justified" in the definition of knowledge.

Suppose that I have some reasons for justifying a proposition. Is it necessary that these reasons should be justified for other people to be considered as "justified" reasons for me?

As an example, consider a prophet who have some mystical intuitions which are not accessible to other people, I can argue that he has at least "justified belief" about his intuitions based on the following reasons :

  1. he believes his intuitions,
  2. his understanding is justified, because he see some events (for example by seeing an angle)

am I true?

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You're touching at the crux of the matter when it comes to defining knowledge as "justified true belief", which is that, since we can't have direct access to the truth but only have reasonable confidence that a given fact is true, all we have to decide wether a belief is true or not is the justification. Therefore "justified true" appears to be redundant and "justified belief" is the best we can reach.

(Unless someone believes we can reach absolute truth through some kind of osmosis with reality, but this belief would require a justification, and so on)

This posits the problem of what "justified" means. People might feel justified but be wrong, like people who think the earth is flat because it looks flat from the ground. This means what those people holds to be knowledge isn't knowledge after all. The definition of "justified" itself is not consensual, and still actively discussed even among scientists and philosophers of science.

The lesson to take away is that no knowledge is so firmly grounded that it's justification can never be attacked by a better argument, resulting in a better justification for better knowledge. It also requires every person who claims to be knowledgeable to do their due diligence in pursuing justification and be open to counter arguments.

In the case of the prophet you describe, I have no doubt that he could feel justified, but would have to ask if he considered the many people who genuinely claimed to receive messages from God or angels and ended up wrong, suggesting that what he considers to be justified is not so reasonable after all.

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    @reza-ebadi, yes. I'm not sure "justified" has any objective meaning in this context, but it may certainly be reasonable for him to believe what he does, even if no one else agrees.
    – David Gudeman
    Commented May 30, 2022 at 17:32
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    @DavidGudeman you completely missed the point. I have no doubt facts are true wether we know about it or not (What you call "true") but all we have access to is justifications to hold a fact to be true (what you call "known to be true"). From our perspective, "true" and "known to be true" are the same thing. We can't know if something is true, but we can have a justification to hold it to be true. That's philosophy 101, kant, noumenon, phenomenon, etc...
    – armand
    Commented May 30, 2022 at 23:16
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    @DavidGudeman your example of a prophet is ludicrous. Yes, if the prophecy comes to pass, after the fact the prophet could claim to have been justified. But for 30 days all he has for himself is a vision, it is perfectly unreasonable for him to feel justified. End of the world prophecies are a dime a dozen, yet none have ever come to pass. Asylums are full of delusional people seeing things that don't exist. Considering this record, is it more probable to be the only chosen one as God's prophet or just one more crazy person? I know if it were to happen to me I would first consult a doctor.
    – armand
    Commented May 30, 2022 at 23:23
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    @reza-ebadi who told you Newtonian physics is not knowledge? Applied adequately it is indeed "justified true belief" (as I said, we know it's true because it's justified). It just works. If we apply the definition as strictly as you seem to be, nothing is knowledge, because it is probable that the current theories are going to be superseded in the future. The point being, a clear cut definition of knowledge does not seem to be accurate for the world we live in, because as you say there are degrees of truth. After all, flat earth is perfectly reliable knowledge for a hunter gatherer.
    – armand
    Commented May 30, 2022 at 23:35
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    @armand, no, I don't call justifications to hold something to be true "known to be true". You might be justified in holding something to be true when it's false. In that case you don't know it to be true by the definition in the question. From our perspective "true" and "known to be true" are not the same thing at all. It may be that "my lottery ticket is a jackpot winner" is true, but I don't know it to be true. If I lose the ticket, I may never know it to be true, but it is still true. You are still conflating truth with knowledge.
    – David Gudeman
    Commented May 31, 2022 at 3:24
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It's not about which particular people consider it justified. A million people can all be wrong together. Whether they do or don't consider it justified has no bearing on whether it actually is justified.

The question, with regard to justified true belief, is whether one ought to consider it justified. We can interpret this "ought" as being about what a hypothetical paragon of reason, a person who thinks very effectively and reaches the right conclusions so often that we can't think of a way to improve any part of his reasoning process, would consider justified.

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    so based on your interpretation of "ought", most of our beliefs are not justified, because we don't know such person.
    – reza-ebadi
    Commented May 29, 2022 at 21:15
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    @reza-ebadi We may not know such a person but we think we know some things about how such a person would think. For example, we think such a person would accept modus ponens as a valid inference rule. So, when we use modus ponens, we think it is justified, because we think we're doing what the hypothetical paragon would do. Of course, we don't know for sure what the paragon would do. But that doesn't stop our beliefs from being justified, it only stops us from knowing for sure the fact that they are justified. They could be justified even if we don't know for sure they are justified.
    – causative
    Commented May 29, 2022 at 21:47
  • thank you so much, I am a beginner in philosophy. Can you introduce me some books or references on your view (hypothetical paragon) for further reading. In my example for our prophet, can we refute his intuitions as justified beliefs?
    – reza-ebadi
    Commented May 29, 2022 at 22:03
  • Comparing one's thought process to a paragon is what people with a guru do, and it has been effective for a long time. People often say, "What would Jesus do?"
    – Scott Rowe
    Commented May 30, 2022 at 13:04
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    Of course this answer assumes that justification is a real property and not just a description of a vague, imprecise concept. The history of epistemology suggests that there is no real objective way to characterize justification. If there were, it would be odd that a lot of very smart philosophers have failed to find such a characterization over two and half millennia of trying.
    – David Gudeman
    Commented May 30, 2022 at 16:27

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