Warrant: A Unique Epistemic Good
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Friday, March 16, 2007 at 9:03 AM
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6 Comments |
In my last post, I introduced the uniqueness problem for warrant. While warrant is supposed to be just one condition that turns true belief into knowledge, it turns out that there are many such (non-equivalent) conditions.
To solve this problem, I shall first do a little housekeeping on the definition of warrant. I shall refine the standard definition without abandoning its most central claim: that warrant is a condition satisfying a particular function or role in the epistemic economy of an agent. Recall that Plantinga and others following his lead define warrant as that condition (whatever it is) that fills the gap between mere true belief and knowledge. This conception of warrant's role is supposed to be non-partisan (not partial to any particular account of what warrant actually is), and I shall preserve this feature.
As pointed out earlier, on this definition, knowledge itself counts as warrant. This odd result can be shaved off with the following refinement:
D1: Warrant is that logically weakest condition (whatever it is) that fills the gap between mere true belief and knowledge.
(Condition C fulfilling role R is a logically weakest condition for R just in case there is no condition C` such that C` fulfills role R and C` entails, but is not entailed by C). On D1, knowledge doesn't count as a warrant condition, since knowledge entails (but is not entailed by) other weaker warrant conditions. D1 shaves off some other infelicitous candidate warrant conditions too. Mike Huemer anticipates this maneuver in a footnote, and claims that there still can be no guarantee that D1 picks out a unique condition; there may be many logically weakest conditions that satisfy the warrant role. He's right. And we can do better. Before we do, however, there is one more problem to address. Call this the epistemic good problem.
Warrant is supposed to be an epistemic good; an agent A having more warrant than B is in a better epistemic situation than B, all other things being equal. So if a definition of warrant's role is to be any good, it's got to pick out only epistemic goods, I'd think. But some conditions will satisfy the role picked out by D1 even if they aren't epistemic goods. Take this example of Huemer's: p only if C (where C is itself a warrant condition). p only if C is one of those conditions picked out by D1, but it hardly seems to be an epistemic good (it's satisfied whenever p is false, for one). Huemer employs this condition to argue that warrant need not be an epistemic good. But Huemer's modus ponens shall be my modus tollens. Whatever warrant is, it seems to me, it's got to be an epistemic good. Thus, warrant can't include in its extension conditions like p only if C. With this insight in hand, then, I regroup as follows.
Let S be the set of all those logically weakest conditions (whatever they are) that are epistemic goods and that fill the gap between mere true belief and knowledge. Note that conditions like p only if C will not be elements of S. Define warrant thusly:
D2: Warrant is the maximal disjunction on S.
(Where x = {1, 2, 3...} y is a maximal disjunction on x just in case y = 1 or 2 or 3 or... for every element of x). My strategy is simple. Suppose there are a plethora of conditions satisfying the warrant role (broadly construed); let's just call 'warrant' the disjunction of all these conditions. I think this move is consistent with the current conception of warrant. It fulfills some desiderata on definitions of warrant that I gestured towards, for one (functional definition, non-partisan, epistemic good). D2 will also prove fruitful when trying to say something interesting about warrant, since there is just one maximal disjunction on S.
Aside: there are some set-theoretical worries in the neighborhood. They are of little concern to me at the moment, but I will address them in a paper-length version of this series.
I have thus far resolved the uniqueness problem and the epistemic good problem. In my next post, I shall apply my results to the truth problem. That is, I shall answer the question, "does warrant entail truth?"
6 Comments:
Noumena at 8:12 PM said... Warrant as defined in D2 is likely to be inconsistent. At the very least, you're going to need an argument that the following sort of scenario cannot happen:
W1 and W2 are both members of S. p is such that, according to W1, p is warranted; while according to W2, not-p is warranted.
Also, you might be cutting out too much when you restrict yourself to strictly epistemic goods. Making this move means you essentially allow no room in epistemology for social, political, or ethical factors in characterising warrant. Not only is this historically and descriptively problematic, but the issue of whether or not these factors play a role in normative epistemology is one of the major debates in contemporary philosophy of science.
alex at 8:04 AM said... Dan's way of phrasing his situation is a bit awkward. Since W1 and W2 are properties, one should say that Bp has W1 and that B-p has W2.
And I'm not sure this situation is all that bad. As described, it is compatible with B-p having W1 and Bp having W2. In which, no inconsistency.
So maybe we flesh out the scenario: Bp has W1 and -W2, and B-p has -W1 and W2. Maybe this situation is more worrisome.
Another oddity about this situation: if the situation we're talking about employs a doxastic notion of warrant (where S's being warranted in believing that p entails S's believing that p) then we get situations like the one described only when someone believes a proposition and its negation.
alex at 8:09 AM said... Also, I don't see why the restriction to epistemic goods automatically rules out social, political or ethical factors. Given Andrew's weak characterization of what an epistemic good is (x is an epistemic good just in case if A has x and B doesn't, then A is in a better epistemic position than B is), I don't see why a "thick" understanding of epistemic position mighn't include social, political and ethical factors.
alex at 8:34 AM said... I couldn't spell "mightn't." I'm mortified.
Andrew Bailey at 8:42 AM said... Dan, I'm not sure how I've excluded social, political, or ethical factors as being conjuncts of a warrant condition. And I *hope* I haven't, given that my project is supposed to be non-partisan between competing accounts of what actually satisfies the warrant role.
Alex, I'm increasingly inclined to think only in terms of doxastic warrant conditions. So Dan's is a worry worth thinking about. Suppose "Bp has W1 and -W2, and B-p has -W1 and W2." Since W1 and W2 are both members of S, we infer that W(Bp) and W(-Bp).
Three thoughts. First, this presents us with (what strikes me as) an all-too-quick argument for fallibilism about warrant.
Second, W(Bp) and W(B-p) isn't inconsistent. So far as I can tell, given fallibilism about warrant, no contradiction can be derived from this conjunction.
Third, Dan's case might be assuming something substantive about which conditions actually satisfy the warrant role (are members of S). I'm inclined to think that any substantive account of warrant will block the possibility of these cases (or at least certain cases like Dan's). But this is a task for the substantive warrant theorist to take up.
Noumena at 7:46 PM said... Ah, yes, thanks Alex. That gets at the problem much more eloquently. A little background might help motivate things, too: I tend to think about epistemological issues from a phil sci perspective (duh), and especially from a theory choice perspective. I have two (or more) theories -- say it's the late Renaissance, and the contenders are Ptolemy and Copernicus -- and I need to choose one. On a very crude picture, I'm going to ask what warrant I have for each theory. The problem I'm trying to get at is the case where one standard of warrant says Ptolemy is the way to go (say, an account of warrant that emphasises empirical adequacy), while another standard of warrant says Copernicus is the far superior option (such as an account that emphasises simplicity and ontological parsimony). Alex's formulation is pretty accurate, though I would want to read `Bq' as `accepting theory q', not `believing q', because on this crude picture I'm not actually believing either until after I've compared the warrant for each. For Andrew Bailey's purposes, this probably just comes to a non-doxastic notion of warrant.
This isn't a contradiction, exactly, but it's a dilemma a crude picture of theory choice would like to avoid. On the other hand, any epistemology of science that takes underdetermination seriously is going to recognise the dilemma. But these are also likely to embrace some sort of pluralism or contextualism about warrant that runs right against the uniqueness claim Andrew Bailey's trying to argue for.
And reading the original post again, I'm not entirely sure why I thought Andrew Bailey might be excluding social, &c., factors. Maybe I was misreading the phrase `the definition of warrant[] ... [has] got to pick out only epistemic goods'.
