Precis of Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function

Abstract

In Warrant: the Current Debate I noted first that 20th century British and American Epistemology has been dominated by internalist notions, the most important of which is justification. I also noted that contemporary epistemology presents a vast, confused, and confusing welter of views, and that in two crucial respects. First, there is a great deal of confusion as to what the connection is between justification, on the one hand, and rationality, knowledge, evidence, and internalist constraints on the other. Second, there is confusion as to the relation between warrant (that property or quantity that distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief) and justification. And thirdly, there is the same confused and confusing welter of opinion as to what justification itself is. (Among some of the more popular candidates: justification is taken as a matter of epistemic responsibility or aptness for epistemic duty fulfillment, as an evaluation of how well you have fulfilled your epistemic goals, as being believed or accepted on the basis of an adequate truth-conducive ground, as being produced by a reliable beliefproducing mechanism, as being supported by or fitting the evidence, and as a matter of everything's going right, for the knowing subject, with respect to cognitive processes 'downstream from experience'.) I argued that order can be introduced into this chaos by tracing the notion of justification back to its source in the classical deontologism of Descartes and especially Locke, both of whom speak of epistemic duty or obligation. Locke sees our main epistemic duty as that of proportioning belief to the evidence afforded by what is certain: my duty is to believe a proposition that isn't certain for me to the degree to which it is probable with respect to what is certain for me. Now some contemporaries (BonJour, the classical Chisholm) explicitly explain justification as epistemic responsibility or aptness for epistemic duty fulfillment, thus following the deontological lead of