Relative Certainty and the Essence of Knowledge

Post-Gettier epistemology has centered the wrong feature of knowledge. By letting skepticism force a choice between absolute certainty and justification-based analysis, the field overlooked a third option: relative certainty, a fallibilist form of certainty that allows for the possibility of error. This paper applies ordinary language philosophy (OLP) to the question of knowledge and argues that ordinary speakers mark the difference between I know and I believe primarily by reference to certainty, and that OLP accordingly defines knowledge as certain belief (CB), not justified true belief (JTB). A key implication is that truth is not essential to knowledge but to true knowledge, admitting false knowledge as a legitimate epistemic category and repositioning post-Gettier schools such as reliabilism and virtue epistemology as criteria for distinguishing true knowledge from false.