Proper functioning and warrant after seven vodka martinis

Abstract

In his books Warrant: The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function,' Alvin Plantinga proposes and defends a new approach to the analysis of warrant. Warrant, according to Plantinga, is "that, whatever precisely it is, which together with truth makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief."2 This is a noteworthy departure from the treatment that has dominated epistemology for the last three decades. Ever since Edmund Gettier's famous paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?"3 there has been fairly broad agreement among epistemologists that in order to get knowledge, what we must add to true belief isn't one, but in fact two things: (i) justification, and (ii) a further condition which, so to speak, "degettierizes" cases of justified true belief. Plantinga, in contrast, thinks it's just one condition we need to add to true belief in order to get knowledge: warrant. So, rejecting what many epistemologists have taken to be the lesson Gettier taught, Plantinga proposes a tri-partite analysis of knowledge. This, however, is not the only way in which his approach to epistemology is revisionary. He also argues against that epistemological tradition which can be characterized as deontological and internalist.4 According to this tradition, whether or not a belief is justified is a matter of meeting one's epistemic duty (the deontological element), and whether or not one has met one's epistemic duty can be determined by no other things than those to which one has appropriate forms of cognitive access (the intemalist element).5 Plantinga contends that justification, thus understood, is an important and interesting affair, but has virtually nothing to do with knowledge, and accordingly chooses an approach which is neither deontological nor internalist.6 According to Plantinga, whether or not a belief is warranted is a matter of whether