Abstract
Warrant is what fills the gap between mere true belief and knowledge. But a problem arises. Is there just one condition that satisfies this description? Suppose there isn’t: can anything interesting be said about warrant after all? Call this the uniqueness problem. In this paper, I solve the problem. I examine one plausible argument that there is no one condition filling the gap between mere true belief and knowledge. I then motivate and formulate revisions of the standard analysis of warrant. Given these revisions, I argue that there is, after all, exactly one warrant condition.
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Notes
This distinction when applied to ‘warrant’ tracks with Balmert and Green’s distinction between ‘k-warrant’ (functional) and ‘p-warrant’ (substantive). See Balmert and Green (1997), p. 132.
Plantinga (1993), p. 3.
This is, I take it, why Plantinga says that warrant is ‘that whatever precisely it is, which makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.’ Ibid.: 3–4, emphasis added. Merricks, too, clearly thinks of this as a feature of Plantinga’s functional analysis of warrant. See Merricks (1995), pp. 841–842.
I think the exchange is productive and philosophically interesting, at least. More importantly, I think there is nothing inappropriate about it. There are no insidious assumptions lurking in the background. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate this conclusively. More on that later.
On the assumption that S knows that p entails both p and S believes that p, at least.
Read ‘Bp’ as ‘S believes that p,’ while ‘Kp’ reads ‘S knows that p’, and ‘Tp’ reads ‘p is true.’ Huemer (2005), pp. 172–173.
See Ibid. pp. 172–175.
As Oliver notes: ‘We know we are in the realm of murky metaphysics by the presence of the weasel words ‘in virtue of’.’ (1996), p. 48. Surely if we can avoid such murkiness, we ought to. And we can.
Plantinga presupposes that exactly one condition makes the difference between mere true belief and knowledge. The functional analysis of warrant I propose below guarantees such uniqueness. If fitting well with Plantinga’s remarks is a desideratum on functional analyses of warrant, this is one more reason to prefer mine over KnowledgeMaker. For a critical treatment of Plantinga’s various remarks on warrant’s role, see Pust (2000).
Success will do for our present purposes, but it may be in need of minor debugging. Note that on Success, an analysis like ‘x is God if and only if x is essentially omnipotent and x is essentially omniscient and x is essentially omnipresent’ would be an unsuccessful analysis if only God could be omniscient. I shall leave untouched the important question of what sense we can make of ‘constituent talk’ when it comes to analyses.
R is the logically weakest relation with feature P just in the case that there is no relation R* (where R* has feature P) such that R entails R* and R* does not entail R. Note that this reading of ‘logically weakest’ ensures only that W is among the logically weakest relations with a certain feature; the addendum by itself does not solve the uniqueness problem since W could be one of many relations with the relevant features, all of which are equally logically weak.
This principle holds only given the ‘distinct and non-equivalent’ fillip: p or p is not logically weaker than p.
Distinct but equivalent conditions pose no trouble to my argument, since all such conditions would have the same relevant logical features.
References
Balmert, N. A. & Greene, R. (1997). Two notions of warrant and Plantinga’s solution to the Gettier problem. Analysis, 57, 132–139.
Coffman, E.J. (2008). Warrant without truth? Synthese, 162, 174–194.
Howard-Snyder, D., Howard-Snyder, F., & Neil F. (2003). Infallibilism and Gettier’s legacy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63, 304–327.
Huemer, M. (2005). Logical properties of warrant. Philosophical Studies, 122, 171–182.
Kearns, S. (2007). In praise of folly. Analysis, 67, 219–222.
Merricks, T. (1995). Warrant entails truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55, 841–855.
Merricks, T. (1997). More on Warrant’s entailing truth. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57, 627–631.
Oliver, A. (1996). The metaphysics of properties. Mind, 417, 1–80.
Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant: The current debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pust, J. (2000). Warrant and analysis. Analysis, 60, 51–57.
Ryan, S. (1996). Does Warrant entail truth?. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 56, 183–192.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Bob Audi, EJ Coffman, Al Plantinga, Mike Rea, Brad Rettler, Chris Tucker, and audiences at Brown, Lewis & Clark, and Northern Illinois University. I dedicate this—my first paper to appear in my favorite journal—to Ciocchi, Crisp, and Ten Elshof: the best teachers an undergraduate could ask for.