Warrant and Proper Function

256 Pages·1993·17.83 MB·English

by  Alvin Plantinga

WARRANT AND
PROPER FUNCTION
This page intentionally left blank
WARRANT AND
PROPER FUNCTION
Alvin Plantinga
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1993
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland Madrid
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1993 by Alvin Piantinga
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Piantinga, Alvin.
Warrant and proper function / Alvin Piantinga.
p. cm. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-507863-2; ISBN 0-19-507864-0 (pbk)
1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Belief and doubt. 3. Cognition.
I. Title.
BD161.P57 1993 121'.6—dc20 92-408
246897531
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
In Theaetetus, Plato sets the agenda for Western epistemology: What is knowl-
edge? More exactly, What is it that distinguishes knowledge from mere true
belief? What is this elusive quality or quantity enough of which, together with
truth and belief, is sufficient for knowledge? Call that quantity, whatever it is,
'warrant'; in Warrant: The Current Debate, the first volume in this series, I
considered some of the main contemporary views of warrant. You may not be
surprised to learn that I found them all wanting. Now it is time to take the next
and more dangerous step, leaving the safety of the philosophical bunker from
which one snipes at other views for the more risky business of exposing my
own views on the subject. (My plan was to call this volume Warrant: the Sober
Truth, but wiser heads prevailed.) Before taking that precarious step, however, I
wish to recapitulate briefly the main themes of the first volume. Its principal
aim was to take a careful and critical look at some of the main contemporary
accounts of warrant, trying to understand them, noting where they go wrong or
are inadequate, seeing what can be learned from them, and trying to figure out
where to look for a better account.
In the first chapter of Warrant: The Current Debate I noted that twentieth-
century British and American epistemology has been heavily internalist. Inter-
nalism is really a loosely related set of views about epistemic access—access to
whatever it is that makes for warrant. According to the internalist, the knower
can know, and know in some special way, that a certain proposition or belief
has warrant or justification for her; alternatively, she can know that the condi-
tion constituting the ground of warrant is present, or that she has the property
that makes it true that a belief has warrant for her, or something else in that
neighborhood. But this epistemic access must be special in some way. I have
access to the distance from Vienna to Prague (I own an atlas); but that kind of
access doesn't count. The access in question must be privileged in some way:
perhaps it is certain for the epistemic agent that the condition in question
holds, or perhaps she can determine by reflection alone that it holds, or per-
haps there is a certain kind of mistake she can't nonculpably make; however
precisely she puts it, the internalist claims that a knower has special epistemic
access to the conditions of warrant.
Internalism in epistemology, so I argued, goes hand in hand with the idea
that warrant is really justification. More exactly, what it goes with is the
vi Preface
thought that justification is necessary for warrant and nearly sufficient for it:
what is required in addition is only a fillip to mollify Gettier. I noted that
twentieth-century epistemology displays a vast and confusing diversity. The
major movements, however, unite in declaring that there is an intimate connec-
tion between justification and warrant, between justification and internalist
constraints, between justification and evidence, and between justification and
the satisfaction of epistemic duty. Twentieth-century epistemology also dis-
plays, however, great diversity with respect to the question what, exactly, justi-
fication is. Some say it is intimately connected with duty and responsibility—a
matter of aptness for epistemic duty fulfillment (Chisholrn) or perhaps a matter
of pursuing one's epistemic goals responsibly (Bonjour). Others say that justi-
fication crucially involves having evidence for a belief (Alston, Conee, Conee
and Feldman, many others). Others see the degree of justification enjoyed by a
belief as a measure of how well you have fulfilled your epistemic goals (Lehrer);
still others see a belief's being justified as a matter of everything's going right
with respect to the knower as knower; yet others say it is a matter of a belief's
being produced by a reliable belief-producing mechanism.
I argued that this blooming buzzing confusion with respect to justification
can be reduced to order by going back to the fountainheads of contemporary
theory of knowledge, those twin towers of Western epistemology, Descartes and
Locke. What is crucial to Descartes and (perhaps even more important) Locke,
is epistemic deontologism: the view that there are epistemic duties and obliga-
tions. According to Descartes, the central epistemic duty is that of abstaining
from any belief that isn't clear and distinct; according to Locke, it is that of
proportioning degree of belief to degree of evidential support by what is cer-
tain. Justification itself, however, is just the condition of having done your duty
and satisfied the requirements: the condition of doing no more than is permit-
ted, going contrary to no duty or obligation. The main contemporary concep-
tions of justification can all be understood in terms of this deontological
tradition—either as explicitly carrying it on, or as diverging from it to one or
another degree, and thus using the term 'justification' in a sense analogically
related to this aboriginal sense.
It is therefore easy to see the historical roots of contemporary concern with
epistemic justification. Further, as 1 pointed out, deontology generates internal-
ism; so it is also easy to see the roots of contemporary internalism. Finally,
given Locke's view that the prime epistemic duty just is that of proportioning
degree of belief to the evidence (evidence from what is certain for me), it is
equally easy to see the origin of the contemporary stress on the importance of
evidence with respect to justification.
I turned next to some prominent internalist construals of warrant. First
there is the powerful and powerfully influential work of Roderick Chisholm.
According to the classical Chisholm, warrant is aptness for epistemic duty
fulfillment. We all have a duty to get into the right relation to the truth: the
better you can fulfill that duty by believing a certain proposition, the more
warrant that belief has for you. This is an attractive view (and for many years I
followed Chisholm in accepting it); closer examination, however, shows that it
Preface vii
can't possibly be correct. First, the very notions of duty and obligation don't
apply at all directly to the formation and sustenance of belief; for the most part
these things are not within our direct control. But concede as much control as
Chisholm needs: it is still wholly obvious that epistemic dutifulness is nowhere
nearly sufficient for warrant. I may be doing my level best, I may be trying my
hardest to get into the right relation to the truth, but, by virtue of epistemic
malfunction, may still fail miserably—and fail in such a way that my beliefs
have little or no warrant. And therefore I may be magnificently dutiful in
forming or maintaining a given belief, but still be such that it has no warrant
for me. The moral is that justification strictly so-called is nowhere nearly
sufficient for knowledge or warrant. I also argued, though less vociferously,
that justification isn't necessary for warrant either.
Turning to the post-classical Chisholm, the Chisholm of "The Place of
Epistemic Justification"1 and Chisholm's "Self-Profile"2 we find quite a differ-
ent view. Here the idea is that warrant, for a belief, is a matter of a certain
fittingness between that belief and a person's "evidence base," that is, "the
conjunction of all the purely psychological properties that that person has at
that time." (Purely psychological properties are "those properties to which we
have privileged access. Every such property is necessarily such that, if a person
has it and if he attributes it to himself, then his attribution is evident in the
strongest sense of the term."3) This is a much more general view than classical
Chisholmianism; one gets different specifications of it by differently specifying
that relation of fittingness. Taking the view broadly, it includes coherentism;
taking it still more broadly, it might even encompass the externalist theory I
mean to propose. Taken Chisholm's way, however, this view seems clearly
mistaken, as I argue in chapter 3 of Warrant: The Current Debate.
I turned next to coherentism uberhaupt (chapter 4), then to the coherentism
of Laurence Bonjour (chapter 5), and then to Bayesian coherentism (chapters 6
and 7) a recent and very interesting coherentist entry in the lists. Coherentism
uberhaupt is unsuccessful because it sees warrant as involving only the relation
between beliefs; but the fact is the relation between experience and belief and
between environment and belief is also crucial to warrant. Bonjour's articulate
version of coherentism (so I argue, but Bonjour might conceivably disagree)
suffers from that problem, as well as some others specific to it. Bayesian coher-
entism isn't really an answer to the question of warrant (and if addressed to it
would be a wholly unsatisfactory response); it is directed, instead, to the ques-
tion of rationality. Rationality is protean and 'rationality' is multiply ambigu-
ous; thinking about Bayesianism gives us a chance to disentangle some of the
main varieties of the former and some of the main meanings of the latter. There
is Aristotelian rationality, which goes with being a rational animal; there is
means-end rationality and Foley rationality, an epistemic special case of it;
Philosophical Topics, ed. Roberta Klein, vol. 14, number 1, p. 85.
2In Roderick M. Chisholm, ed. Radu Bogdan (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986) p. 52ft.
'This is not an official analysis or definition; if it were, the account of reasonability would be
circular. It is instead simply a means to enable the reader to identify the class of properties he
proposes to discuss.
viii Preface
there is the sort of rationality that amounts to sanity, to epistemic proper
function; and there is the rationality that is really a matter of believing in
accord with the dictates of reason. Satisfying the Bayesian constraints, I argue,
is neither necessary nor sufficient for any of these kinds of rationality. Bayes-
ianism, so I argue, really describes the mental life of a certain kind of ideally
rational agent—one who, like us, holds beliefs, reasons, learns, and the like,
but is also unlike us in certain crucial respects. As such, Bayesian constraints
aren't really conditions on our rationality (so one who violates them isn't
necessarily irrational); but in some special cases these constraints may function
as ideals to which we can appropriately strive to conform.
So internalist accounts of warrant go awry. Moving toward externalist ac-
counts, I turned next in chapter 8 to the work of John Pollock, who offers, so I
claimed, a sort of uncomfortable halfway house, an uneasy compromise be-
tween externalism and internalism. Pollock argues, fundamentally, that a belief
is justified for a person if she arrives at it in conformity with her own norms.
His discussion of norms is subtle and penetrating, but (so far as I can see) it
does not yield a successful account of warrant. The reason is that it seems
perfectly possible for my epistemic norms to be incorrect norms, and incorrect
in such a way that my carrying on my epistemic life in conformity to them is
nowhere nearly either necessary or sufficient for warrant. My beliefs could
therefore be Pollock-justified, but have no warrant; Pollock-justification, there-
fore, is deficient as an account of warrant.
I turned finally to reliabilist and paradigmatically externalist accounts of
warrant; here I examined the proposals of Fred Dretske, William Alston and
Alvin Goldman in chapter 9. Reliabilism marks a real advance—or better, it
represents a fortunate retreat, a happy return to the externalist perspective
occupied much earlier by Thomas Reid, and earlier yet by Aquinas and Aris-
totle. Still, reliabilism does not offer a correct account of warrant. The early
Goldman offers a stylized and paradigmatic reliabilism: A belief has warrant if
and only if it is the product of a reliable belief producing mechanism (or
process or faculty). But there are two problems here: first how can the reliabilist
account for the fact that warrant comes in degrees? Attempts to follow Gold-
man by doing this in terms of degree of reliability lead straight to the generality
problem, the reef on which the early Goldman founders. And second, a belief
may be the product of a reliable belief producing mechanism, but if the mecha-
nism in question malfunctions (the agent is drunk, or ill, or under attack by a
shark) the resulting belief has little or no warrant, despite its respectable
source. This problem bedevils both the early and the later Goldman. Reliabil-
ists, as I see it, call attention to one of the four conditions characterizing
paradigm cases of knowledge; reliabilism is therefore an approximation to the
truth. But reliabilists also neglect the other three traits of paradigm cases of
knowledge; reliabilism is therefore (at best) a zeroeth approximation to the
truth.
Can we do better? Indeed we can (so I claim, anyway). As I sec it, a belief
has warrant if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly (subject
to no malfunctioning) in a cognitive environment congenial for those faculties,
Preface ix
according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth. In the first couple of
chapters of the present volume I fill out, develop, qualify and defend this view,
exploring along the way some of the convoluted contours of the notion of
proper function. In the next seven chapters I consider how the proposed ac-
count works in the main areas of our cognitive design plan: memory, introspec-
tion, knowledge of other minds, testimony, perception, a priori belief, and
probability. Then in chapter 10 I consider broader, structural questions of
coherentism and foundationalism. My account of warrant meets the conditions
for being a naturalistic account; but in chapters 11 and 12 I claim that natural-
ism in epistemology flourishes best in the context of supernaturalism in meta-
physics; for (as I argue in chapter 11) there appears to be no successful natu-
ralistic account of the notion of proper function. Finally in chapter 12 I argue
that metaphysical naturalism when combined with contemporary evolutionary
accounts of the origin and provenance of human life is an irrational stance; it
provides for itself an ultimately undefeated defeater.
Here I must acknowledge a complication with respect to my way of think-
ing of warrant. I aim at something in the neighborhood of an analysis of
warrant: an account or exploration of our concept of warrant, a concept nearly
all of us have and regularly employ. (As we all know, desperate difficulties beset
any attempt to say precisely what analysis is.) Thus at the least I should be
looking for necessary and sufficient conditions. But I very much doubt that
there is any short and elegant list of conditions at once severally necessary and
jointly sufficient for warrant. This is a way in which philosophy differs from
mathematics; and epistemology differs more from mathematics, along these
lines, than, for example, philosophy of logic or the metaphysics of modality.
Our concept of warrant is too complex to yield to analysis by way of a couple
of austerely elegant clauses. The structure of this concept, I believe, involves a
central picture, a group of central paradigms—clear and unambiguous cases of
knowledge—surrounded by a penumbral belt of analogically related concepts,
concepts related by different analogies and standing in different degrees of
closeness to the aboriginal paradigms. Between the central core area and this
penumbral belt there is a more shadowy area of borderline possible cases, cases
where it isn't really clear whether what we have is a case of warrant in the
central sense, or a case of one of the analogically extended concepts, or neither
of the above; and beyond the penumbral belt we have another area of bor-
derline cases.
Hence perhaps a good way to characterize our system of analogically re-
lated concepts of warrant is to give first, the conditions necessary and sufficient
for the central paradigmatic core. (Even here, as we shall see, there is no
stylishly sparse set of necessary and sufficient conditions: various qualifica-
tions, additions and subtractions are necessary.) Second, what is needed is an
exploration of some of the analogical extensions, with an explanation of the
analogical bases of the extensions. This way of proceeding is less elegant and
pleasing and more messy than the analysis we learned at our mother's knee: it
is also more realistic.
In the preface to Warrant: The Current Debate I acknowledged my indebt-