Causal or Conditional or Explanatory-Relation Accounts
Edmund Gettier attacked the traditional analysis of knowledge by showing that inferring a true belief from a false but justified belief produces a justified true belief that does not qualify as knowledge. Subsequent analyses of knowledge were motivated in large part by the wish to avoid examples of the type Gettier used. One way to do so is to insist that a belief must be connected in some proper way to the fact that makes it true in order for it to count as knowledge. In Gettier's examples beliefs are only accidentally true since there are no proper connections between them and the facts that make them true. Analyses that require such connections may either retain or drop the justification condition from the traditional analysis. Without it they are thoroughly externalist analyses since they require only that a belief be externally connected with the fact that makes it true, not that the subject be able to specify this connection.
One intuitive way to specify the proper connection is to say that it is "causal": The fact that makes a belief true must help cause the belief in the subject if the subject is to have knowledge.
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