Knowledge, Justification, and Reason-Based Belief

Is knowledge definable as justified true belief ("JTB")? We argue that one can legitimately answer positively or negatively, depending on how the notion of justification is understood. To facilitate our argument, we introduce a simple propositional logic of reason-based belief. We show that this logic is sufficiently flexible to accommodate various useful features, including quantification over reasons. We use our framework to contrast two notions of JTB: one internalist, the other externalist. We argue that Gettier cases essentially challenge the internalist notion but not the externalist one. In particular, we may equate knowledge and JTB if the latter is grounded in what we call "adequate" reasons.