Abstract
Plantinga’s concept of warrant provides that which is necessary to combine with justified true belief to form knowledge when modified to account for warranted false beliefs and accidentally true beliefs. In section 1, I will present Plantinga’s view of warrant and how it addresses the demon argument and dreaming. In section 2, I will demonstrate how the Gettier problem exposes a fatal flaw in Plantinga’s concept of warrant. In section 3, I will present Chignell’s solution to the Gettier problem as an excellent patch to Plantinga’s theory of warrant. In section 4, I will contrast the modified theory of warrant with two other philosophical models and show how it provides a superior view of knowledge.
The Concept of Warrant
Throughout philosophical history, knowledge has been thought to be obtained when an objectively true belief can be justified by an individual or group who believes it. This form of knowledge acquisition is inherently internalistic; it relies on some form of mind-dependent rationalistic weighing of evidences or the utilization of logic in order to elevate a true belief to knowledge.[1] However, all internalistic accounts of knowledge run into a serious problem: “How can we trust that an individual or group’s rationality and logic is leading us to knowledge?”[2] Stated succinctly in the Demon Argument, it is impossible to ascertain from rationality, logic, and internalist justification for whether or not our beliefs are actually knowledge or the result of “an evil demon, intent on deceiving [us].”[3] Thus, justification alone is not enough to cause beliefs to become knowledge.
Plantinga addresses this problem head on in his externalist presentation of warrant as that which, “together with truth and belief, is sufficient for knowledge.”[4] First, Plantinga asserts that warrant can only be obtained for beliefs that have been produced by “epistemic [or cognitive] faculties” that are functioning properly.[5] This requirement rules out beliefs formed by those with mental illness, or under the use of mind-altering drugs. In each of those situations, cognitive faculties may be operating, but they are not operating as they should be and thus even if true beliefs happen to come out of them, they can never be warranted as knowledge. It is important to note that for Plantinga, having warrant minimally means that one’s “cognitive equipment, [one’s] belief-forming and belief-maintaining apparatus or powers, be free of such malfunction,” but not that all of one’s cognitive equipment be free. For example, a person can be blind and still make warranted beliefs about the world using other sense-oriented abilities that are operating normally.
However, proper function does not clear the full path to knowledge. For example, what about a person who is dreaming? Clearly, a person who is dreaming has properly functioning cognitive equipment, but can easily produce false beliefs, or beliefs we intuitively understand to be unwarranted. To address this issue, Plantinga introduces the necessity of a design plan with regard to the operation of cognitive powers. In order for a belief to be warranted, Plantinga argues that the cognitive equipment must be functioning in the environment that they were designed to operate in.[6] Thus, in the case of the dream world, a person’s visual, auditory, olfactory, etc. faculties are not operating in the environment (physical world) that they were designed to operate in. As such, no beliefs formed in the dream world based on those faculties can have warrant and thus knowledge from those faculties in the dream world is unobtainable.
To fully undercut the Demon Argument, Plantinga resorts to two final requirements for warrant: (1) the design plan behind a person’s cognitive faculties must be aimed at producing true beliefs, and (2) the design plan and faculties must exhibit a high degree of reliability of producing true beliefs.[7] In the case of the Demon Argument, the demon is explicitly designing and manipulating a person’s belief forming faculties to produce false beliefs that do not reflect reality. Thus, a person’s beliefs in the demon scenario cannot have warrant because they have been explicitly designed not to. Additionally, in the demon scenario, there is a 0% probability of forming a true belief (since the demon is manipulating all beliefs) and as such the reliability of the belief producing faculties is also 0%.
The Gettier Problem
With an internal methodology of justification and an external methodology of warrant, it seems as though the quest for knowledge is finished; however, a very peculiar situation can arise which, under Plantinga’s initial definition of warrant, produces false warranted beliefs. By his own admission, Plantinga affirms that false beliefs can have “some warrant” but not “warrant sufficient for knowledge.”[8] Under Plantinga’s view, the following scenario offered by Edmund Gettier could occur: A man named Smith is justified, by direct conversation, in believing that Jones will get hired for a specific job. He also knows by direct observation that Jones has ten coins. Thus, he concludes that the man who will get the job has ten coins. However, unbeknownst to him Smith actually gets the job. Additionally, Smith randomly has 10 coins in his pocket.[9]
In the above situation, Smith has warrant for both initial beliefs as they were formed with properly functioning faculties, in the environment where they are designed to provide true beliefs with a high reliability of doing so. Yet, the first belief turned out to be false. That in and of itself is not devastating since a condition of knowledge is that a belief be true. However, via transference of warrant, the second statement remains true even in light of the first statement’s falsity. Thus, a warranted false belief is shown to lead to the acceptance of an accidentally true, justified, and warranted, belief acquiring knowledge.
Again, this error is not devastating until we utilize the same warrant and justification in a slightly different world. Take the last example, only instead of having ten coins in his pocket, Smith only has nine. The same level of justification and warrant apply, but now the accidently true belief becomes false and there is nothing distinguishing how justification or warrant can discriminate between the two beliefs. This is a serious problem that Plantinga attempts to solve utilizing mini and maxi environments. His effort is only partially successful.
Plantinga starts by stating that the problem with his initial view is that it did not take into account the possibility that though the macro-environment (world at large) may be favorable to forming true beliefs, the micro-environment (specific scenario) may not be. Thus, amending his initial view, Plantinga stated additionally that in order to obtain warrant, a belief must be formed in a favorable micro-environment.[10] Favorability is then defined as any micro-environment that allows for the production of a true belief (additionally, the subject’s awareness of that environment must not be limited in such a way that false beliefs can be produced).[11] With reference to the coin example, though the belief that Jones would get the job was formed in a macro-environment that was favorable (all Smith’s senses were operating with the other qualifications of warrant), they were not operating in a favorable micro-environment simply because the belief that they formed turned out to be false. Though the false belief did have some warrant, it was not enough to merit knowledge.[12]
While this is an excellent start to addressing the problem of accidentally true belief, it does not provide not the final solution. First, the determination of what exactly constitutes a difference between two micro-environments is close to being arbitrary. At best, it is a real distinction, but there are few rules to actually guide the depiction of such an environment. As such, the environments can become blurred and warrant encounters the Gettier Problem again. Second, and arguably worse, Plantinga’s argument rules out situations in which the micro-environment is not favorable to producing truth and yet intuitively it makes sense to account the beliefs formed in that environment as knowledge.
A great example of such a situation concerns a bird watcher who has all of the necessary qualifications and knowledge to help him identify and distinguish between two very closely related birds. In the scenario, a disease has wiped out the majority of one type of bird. Thus the micro-environment is no longer favorable to forming the belief that a specific bird that the watcher discovers is actually the now rare bird. However, it just so happens that the bird watcher does run into one of the rare birds and identifies it as such.[13] Under Planting’s view of warrant, this belief would not have warrant enough to become knowledge.
Redefining Favorable Micro-Environments
Chignell provides an exceptional solution to both of these issues by redefining and providing clarity around what is and is not a favorable micro-environment. He proposes that whether or not a micro-environment is favorable or not is determined by whether the overwhelming majority of beliefs that a person could form about the object in question are objectively false in the instant before the belief in question is proposed.[14] Going back to the initial example, some of the beliefs that Smith could have formed about Jones would be: “Jones will own a house commensurate to his new job’s income,” “Jones will be working with Bob and Sue, who will be his coworkers at the new job,” and “Jones will visit four countries next year as a result of his new job.” All of those are objectively false beliefs due to the fact that Jones does not have the job. Thus, according to Chignell’s modification, the beliefs formed within that micro-environment do not have warrant and are not knowledge, which intuition supports.
However, unlike Plantinga’s definition, Chignell’s comes up with the opposite answer in terms of the bird scenario. Here is a list of beliefs that the birdwatcher could form about the bird he is observing in the micro-environment: “The bird has the exact markings of the rare bird,” “The bird’s beak is the right shape for the rare bird,” and “The bird flaps its wings like the rare bird.” All of these statements would be objectively true and thus the micro-environment is favorable which allows for the satisfaction of the initial belief as knowledge. For the time being, this seems to close the loop on the primary concerns raised against Plantinga’s concept of warrant.
Warrant Vs. Other Theories
With these issues settled, it is important to set Plantinga’s theory against other theories of knowledge and other critiques at more fundamental levels to see if it holds up in the wider world of ideas. One of the most controversial theories of knowledge is that knowledge is simply true belief. In Sartwell’s article on this view, he claims that justification is merely a “criterion, though not a logically necessary condition, of knowledge.”[15] Similarly, warrant would be another criterion by which a person could measure the confidence of the knowledge that they have.
On the surface, his argument and redefinition of knowledge and belief can theoretically work, and at the same time solve many problems like the Gettier problem and the problem of lucky guesses. However, in his redefining of knowledge, Sartwell makes a massive error: he loses sight of the purpose of knowledge. For Sartwell, knowledge amounts to nothing more than knowing true facts. However, the world operates on the fact that knowledge is a collection of true facts upon which one can base further inquiry. A person may know something to be true without justification, but that truth should never be used as a foundation for further truth. Rather, people must pursue justification for the true premise before taking any further action. As such, people would never consider unjustified true beliefs as knowledge because the consequences of accepting beliefs without justification could bring entire academic fields to the ground. This occurs because it is often difficult to objectively know that a belief is true. Thus, people require justification in concert with truth before building upon the belief.
Plantinga’s theory comes into play at this juncture as Sartwell claims that justification does not really provide anything to elevate beliefs to the status of knowledge, because all justification ultimately devolves into absurdity.[16] However, Plantinga’s theory of warrant actually provides grounding for justification. Take the example Sartwell proposes: A child asks how her parent “knows” what an elephant looks like. First the parent states that she has seen elephants in pictures. Then the child asks how does she “know” that the animal in the picture is really an elephant. This continues, according to Sartwell, until the parent becomes frustrated and gives up saying, “I just know.” By bringing in Plantinga’s concept of warrant, the parent could instead say that because the belief was formed and justified in an environment that promotes true belief statements being formed, and where there was no reason to doubt people’s cognitive faculties were functioning, the belief and its justification should not be doubted (in other words they should be warranted). This stops the questioning and effectively cements the justification in place. Thus, to accept Sartwell’s argument not only throws true knowledge acquisition into jeopardy, but also robs humanity of the robust grounding of knowledge in justification and warrant that provides stability for the entire knowledge-seeking endeavor.
A second theory that runs contrary to warrant is that knowledge is undefeated, justified true belief. In this view, there are two types of knowledge: (1) basic knowledge that consists of justified true beliefs that are true apart from any other beliefs (they are foundational and impossible to be defeated), and (2) non-basic knowledge that consists of justified true beliefs that are true in light of other justified true beliefs (they are synthetic in nature and it is possible that beliefs exist which can defeat them).[17] Lehrer et. al., in their paper on this topic, assert that by adding the quality of the non-existence of defeaters, issues like the Gettier Problem are resolved. For instance, in the Gettier situation, the accidentally true belief that the man who gets the job has ten coins in his pocket, counts as knowledge independently of whether or not the individual subject who holds the belief internally has the proper justification. All that matters is that there is that there exists some form of justification that is completely and perfectly undefeated. Namely that Smith did get the job and did have ten coins in his pocket. In this way, beliefs are resolved in a manner external to the belief forming agent.
This theory of knowledge has its merits and does address some serious epistemological problems; however, it also has some issues. First, there is a serious issue with the concept of being “undefeated.” Chignell points out that the concept of an undefeated belief must be assumed a priori.[18] In the example of the vase in the box, Lehrer et. al. point out that in situations in which one’s senses are being tricked it is possible to still have knowledge based on the actual reality. In that case, there is no causal link between one’s belief that a statement is true and the actual objective truth of the statement. This link is destroyed by one’s senses being limited to an environment that would cause them to provide erroneous beliefs. Lehrer et. al. argue that the beliefs formed apart from properly working cognitive faculties constitute knowledge. However, they unknowingly fall into the trap of having to accept that the entire world may actually exist, but a person may only know that it exists through divine intervention as opposed to properly functioning cognitive faculties. In other words, their view opens the door to extreme skepticism, where one cannot actually “know” anything for certain at all and justification is utterly meaningless: their view fails to account for the Demon Argument. In their view, the entire world may be the result of a demon controlling people’s minds but they see no difference between this situation and a situation where the world is real.
In contrast, Plantinga’s warrant not only accounts for the demon argument as demonstrated earlier, but also deals with properly functioning cognitive faculties in a way that allows adherents to rest in the knowledge that they do not need to embrace extreme skepticism about the world in which they live. However, with the requirement that true beliefs be undefeated comes the responsibility of demonstrating the truth of each statement. This is a large and arguably impossible task. With Chignell’s modification of warrant, one only need demonstrate that one’s environment is favorable based on a quick analysis of a few other beliefs formed in that environment – a much simpler and feasible task.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Plantinga’s concept of warrant as modified by Chignell holds up to the variety of arguments rallied against it including: the Demon Argument, Gettier Problem, the Dream Argument, and other sophisticated accidental true belief issues. Beyond that, his concept of warrant also serves as a more reasonable and defensible methodology for ascertaining knowledge when compared to the other systems of knowledge acquisition such as: true belief, justified true belief, and undefeated justified true belief. That warrant also grounds justification in such a way that closes its eternal regress and provides an externalist objective way of analyzing beliefs demonstrates even further its applicability to the reality that people live and walk in each day.
[1] Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), vi-viii.
[2] Ibid., vii-viii.
[3] Jack S. Crumley II, An Introduction to Epistemology, (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009), 28.
[4] Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), v.
[5] Ibid., 4.
[6] Ibid., 7.
[7] Ibid., 16-17.
[8] Alvin Plantinga, “Warrant and Accidentally True Belief,” Analysis, Vol. 57, No. 2 (April 1997), 140.
[9] Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 6 (1963), 121-123.
[10] Alvin Plantinga, “Warrant and Accidentally True Belief,” Analysis, Vol. 57, No. 2 (April 1997), 144.
[11] Andrew Chignell, “Accidentally True Belief and Warrant,” Synthese, Vol. 137, No. 3 (December 2003), 449.
[12] Alvin Plantinga, “Warrant and Accidentally True Belief,” Analysis, Vol. 57, No. 2 (April 1997), 144.
[13] Andrew Chignell, “Accidentally True Belief and Warrant,” Synthese, Vol. 137, No. 3 (December 2003), 449.
[14] Ibid., 454.
[15] Crispin Sartwell, “Knowledge is Merely True Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.28, No.2 (April 1991), 161.
[16] Ibid., 159.
[17] Keith Lehrer, Thomas Paxton and Jr., “Undefeated Justified True Belief,” The Journal of Philosophy Vol. 66, No. 8 (April 24, 1969), 225.
[18] Andrew Chignell, “Accidentally True Belief and Warrant,” Synthese, Vol. 137, No. 3 (December 2003), 452.
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