JTB and Locke

Analytic philosophers notoriously have very short traditions; a good example of this is the fact that the claim that knowledge is justified true belief is often called the 'traditional' account of knowledge, even though it is extremely difficult to find people who held it before the 20th century, or, indeed, anyone who has ever held it besides analytic philosophers or those who were taught epistemology by them. If you poke and prod the term 'justification' enough you might be able to attribute it to Plato, when he considers the idea that knowledge is what you get when you give true belief a rational account; but that poking and prodding requires a great many assumptions, both about justification and about what Plato is getting at, that need not be made. And JTB is even less plausibly attributed to others. Consider Locke.

Locke is very clear that knowledge consists in something radically different from belief: it is perception of the agreement or the disagreement between two ideas. On the basis of this knowledge we assent to various propositions that are proposed to the mind (and, indeed, cannot help but assent, any more than I could deny to myself that I am seeing the color white when it is taking up my field of vision; but Locke seems clearly enough to think that the knowledge itself is a perception, not a belief. (I think there is a good argument that this is actually the most common view of knowledge in the early modern period, on both the rationalist and empiricist sides; Locke is not being idiosyncratic here.) From Locke, Essay IV.1.2:

Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion of and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists. Where this perception is, there is knowledge, and where it is not, there, though we may fancy, guess, or believe, yet we always come short of knowledge. For when we know that white is not black, what do we else but perceive, that these two ideas do not agree? When we possess ourselves with the utmost security of the demonstration, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones, what do we more but perceive, that equality to two right ones does necessarily agree to, and is inseparable from, the three angles of a triangle?

Indeed, Locke thinks that the sort of knowledge that most properly receives that name, the one that has "the utmost light and greatest certainty," is had simply by perceiving the agreement or disagreement between two ideas, and nothing else. This intuitive knowledge leaves no room for the intervention of a third idea, or anything else besides the perception itself of the two ideas, and is that by virtue of which everything else is known or understood.