Warrant and Uniqueness
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 6:40 PM
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5 Comments |
Warrant, we are taught from our mother's knee, is that condition (whatever it is) that fills the gap between mere true belief and knowledge.
Aside. perhaps it's strange think of this notion of warrant as being taught from a mother's knee, given that it was imported into the epistemology literature fairly recently (by Plantinga in 1993). But I'm only 22, and in all the three or four years that I've been doing philosophy, I've always been taught this notion of warrant. End aside.
Some have tried to say interesting things about warrant on this conception, interesting things that do not depend on any particular cashing out of what warrant actually is (undefeated justification, belief formed in a reliable way, etc.). Most prominently, Trenton Merricks has advanced arguments toward the claim that warrant (whatever it is) entails truth.
In the next few posts, I'm going to evaluate this claim.
I begin by noting the uniqueness problem. Why think that there is only one condition which converts true belief into knowledge? Plantinga's definition seems to assume that there is just one such condition. But is this right? Brief reflection will reveal that it can't be:
Take knowledge that p. This is a condition that, when added to the mere true belief that p begets knowledge: a warrant condition. And knowledge that p is distinct from and not equivalent to any proposed warrant condition I know of.
But there are deeper problems still. Let W1 = S is warranted in believing that p. Let W2 = p only if C (where C is some condition that given the input of true belief outputs knowledge). W1 and W2 are both a warrant conditions; when conjoined with p and S believes that p, W1 and W2 both output S knows that p. Note further that W1 and W2 are not equivalent conditions; one can be satisfied without the other. Thus, for any warrant condition, there is some distinct and non-equivalent warrant condition (this argument I owe to Mike Huemer's 2005 paper in Philosophical Studies).
It gets worse. For any warrant condition W that entails truth, there is a warrant condition that doesn't (p only if W). And for any warrant condition W that doesn't entail truth, there is a warrant condition that does (p and W). It seems that not much can be said about warrant after all, so long as we remain neutral between competing accounts of what actually plays the warrant role.
This is the uniqueness problem, and it can be solved. Doing so is the project I'll take up in my next post.
5 Comments:
Noumena at 7:49 PM said... I'm not sure why a lack of uniqueness would be a problem for Merricks' claim as you present it here. We'd need to generalise slightly -- `Each actual warrant condition is such that it entails truth', say -- but that's all.
Now, based on your second post, you seem to be trying a strategy of appealing to uniqueness (in some sense or another) to argue for the claim. But then uniqueness is a desideratum, not a problem.
at 8:22 AM said... You must have had an interesting childhood--learning about warrant at your mother's knee and all.
Andrew Bailey at 8:46 AM said... Dan, you're right; this is one strategy Merricks could adopt in arguing for infallibilism about warrant. But Huemer shows us how to construct non-equivalent warrant conditions for any warrant condition. And these constructions reveal that if there's a warrant condition that entails truth, there's one that doesn't (and visa versa).
The trick, then, is to find a way to block Huemer's logical constructions on warrant conditions and pick out just one warrant condition (or, if this doesn't work, to pick out a set of warrant conditions, all of which have certain features).
Then we can say whether warrant entails truth or not. =)
Noumena at 7:17 PM said... I'm not entirely sure what to make of that point. If Merricks is making a claim about warrant, then what does it matter if that claim fails to hold of other warrant(-like) conditions? Unless the only thing Merricks is appealing to about warrant is its knowledge-entailing property, it seems like the answer is `nothing'. And if Merricks is only appealing to warrant's knowledge-entailing property, then your other warrant(-like) conditions seem to show that the argument is invalid.
Andrew Bailey at 3:34 PM said... Merricks (in his '95 and '97 papers, at least) is only appealing to warrant's knowledge-entailing property (that is, when belief and truth are present).
