According to a tradition that stretches back for literally a few decades there is a traditional analysis of knowledge. On this analysis, knowledge is justified, true belief. This view is sometimes attributed to Plato (because of some remarks in Plato’s Theaetetus) but it was thought to be decisively refuted by Gettier in his famous 1963 paper. Some of us might have doubts about the force of these examples, but let’s set these doubts aside for the time being. There is an interesting historical question that hasn’t received sufficient attention in the literature: was the traditional view part of the philosophical tradition? The view had few defenders, if any, after the reception of Gettier’s article, but what about the philosophical tradition stretching back from June 1963 to Plato?

Julien Dutant argues that philosophers did not accept the (so-called) traditional analysis of knowledge that was Gettier’s target. This is just a legend or myth passed along by epistemologists who don’t take sufficient care to check the historical texts. In place of the bad, old view, Dutant offers a new story of what philosophers traditionally took knowledge to be:

The New Story goes as follows. There is a traditional conception of knowledge but it is not the Justified True Belief analysis Gettier attacked. On the traditional view, knowledge consists in having a belief that bears a discernible mark of truth. A mark of truth is a truth-entailing property: a property that only true beliefs can have. It is discernible if one can always tell that a belief has it, that is, a sufficiently attentive subject believes that a belief has it if and only if it has it. Requiring a mark of truth makes the view infallibilist. Requiring it to be discernible makes the view internalist. I call the view Classical Infallibilism.

Read the whole thing, as they say. You can get an early view here.