À la lumière de cas concrets impliquant des universités du Sud comme du Nord et sur la base de l'expérience d'évaluation du réseau international PRELUDE, les auteurs analysent des pratiques de constitution, de capitalisation et de partage des...

I argue that reliabilist warrant should not require that a true belief have been produced in accordance with a design plan. At least sometimes, it seems sufficient that there be an intent for the faculty to have the reliable outcomes it in fact has. This pertains to the notion of warrant of Alvin Plantinga.

I develop an approach to action and practical deliberation according to which the degree of epistemic warrant required for practical rationality varies with practical context. In some contexts of practical deliberation, very strong warrant is called for. In others, less will do. I set forth a warrant account, (WA), that captures this idea. I develop and defend (WA) by arguing that it is more promising than a competing knowledge account of action due to John Hawthorne and Jason (...) Stanley. I argue that cases of warranted false belief speak in favor of (WA) and against the knowledge account. Moreover, I note some problems with an “excuse maneuver” that proponents of the knowledge account frequently invoke in response to cases of warranted false belief. Finally, I argue that (WA) may provide a strict invariantist account of cases that have been thought to motivate interest-relative or subject-sensitive theories of knowledge and warrant. (shrink)

Warrant is “that, whatever precisely it is, which makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.” S knows that p, therefore, if and only if S’s belief that p is warranted and p is true. This is a purely formal characterization of warrant. Warrant may, no doubt, be a messy item: a substantive analysis might be full of disjuncts and conjuncts and conditionals and caveats. But if there are true beliefs that are not knowledge, then there (...) is something that all beliefs that are knowledge share, and all merely true beliefs lack. This is warrant. I want to argue that warrant, whatever it is that makes the difference between mere true belief and knowledge, entails truth. (shrink)

Warrant and Conditions for Warrant in Alvin Plantinga’s Philosophy. Warrant is the central concept of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology. As Plantinga suggests it, warrant is that quantity or quality which together with belief and truth constitutes knowledge. This paper intends to present broadly the concept of warrant and to analyze the conditions for warrant in order to see if the conditions proposed by Plantinga are necessary and sufficient for a belief to be considered knowledge.

Warrant is what fills the gap between mere true belief and knowledge. But a problem arises. Is there just one condition that satisfies this description? Suppose there isn’t: can anything interesting be said about warrant after all? Call this the uniqueness problem. In this paper, I solve the problem. I examine one plausible argument that there is no one condition filling the gap between mere true belief and knowledge. I then motivate and formulate revisions of the standard analysis (...) of warrant. Given these revisions, I argue that there is, after all, exactly one warrant condition. (shrink)

Epistemic warrant consists in the normal functioning of the belief-forming process when the process has forming true beliefs reliably as an etiological function. Evolution by natural selection is the most familiar source of etiological functions. . What then of learning? What then of Swampman? Though functions require history, natural selection is not the only source. Self-repair and trial-and-error learning are both sources. Warrant requires history, but not necessarily that much.

Alvin Plantinga theorizes about an epistemic property he calls "warrant," defined as that which makes the difference "between knowledge and mere true belief." I show that, given this account, Plantinga can have no justification for claiming that a false belief is warranted nor for claiming that warrant comes in degrees.

Amidst long-running debates within the field, high energy physics has adopted a statistical methodology that primarily employs standard frequentist techniques such as significance testing and confidence interval estimation, but incorporates Bayesian methods for limited purposes. The discovery of the Higgs boson has drawn increased attention to the statistical methods employed within HEP. Here I argue that the warrant for the practice in HEP of relying primarily on frequentist methods can best be understood as pragmatic, in the sense that statistical (...) methods are chosen for their suitability for the practical demands of experimental HEP, rather than reflecting a commitment to a particular epistemic framework. In particular, I argue that understanding the statistical methodology of HEP through the perspective of pragmatism clarifies the role of and rationale for significance testing in the search for new phenomena such as the Higgs boson. (shrink)

According to a Moorean response to skepticism, the standards for knowledge are invariantly comparatively low, and we can know across contexts all that we ordinarily take ourselves to know. It is incumbent upon the Moorean to defend his position by explaining how, in contexts in which S seems to lack knowledge, S can nevertheless have knowledge. The explanation proposed here relies on a warranted-assertability maneuver: Because we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p, it can seem that (...) S does in fact lack that piece of knowledge. Moreover, this warranted-assertability maneuver is unique and better than similar maneuvers because it makes use of H. P. Grice’s general conversational rule of Quantity—“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”—in explaining why we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that a belief to the effect that the believer is currently in some conscious state is "self-Warranted," in the sense that what warrants it is simply its being a belief of that sort. This position is compared with other views as to the epistemic status of such beliefs--That they are warranted by their truth and that they are warranted by an immediate awareness of their object. In the course of the discussion, Various modes of immediate (...) justification and various types of "epistemic immunities" are distinguished. It is contended that principles of justification are to be evaluated in terms of whether the beliefs they approve are likely to be correct. (shrink)

Let ‘warrant’ denote whatever precisely it is that makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief. A current debate in epistemology asks whether warrant entails truth, i.e., whether (Infallibilism) S’s belief that p is warranted only if p is true. The arguments for infallibilism have come under considerable and, as of yet, unanswered objections. In this paper, I will defend infallibilism. In Part I, I advance a new argument for infallibilism; the basic outline is as follows. Suppose (...) fallibilism is true. An implication of fallibilism is that the property that makes the difference between knowledge and mere belief (which I dub ‘warrant*’) is the conjunctive property being warranted and true . I show that this implication of fallibilism conflicts with an uncontroversial thesis we have learned from reflection on Gettier cases: that nonaccidental truth is a constituent of warrant*. It follows that infallibilism is true. In the second part of the paper, I present and criticize a new argument against infallibilism. The argument states that there are plausible cases where, intuitively, the only thing that is keeping a belief from counting as knowledge is the falsity of that belief. Furthermore, it is plausible that such a belief is warranted and false. So, the argument goes, infallibilism is false. I show that this argument fails. (shrink)

Plantinga examines the nature of epistemic warrant; whatever it is that when added to true belief yields knowledge. This volume surveys current contributions to the debate and paves the way for his owm positive proposal in Warrant and Proper Function.

This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive (...) faculties, thus, insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true. (shrink)

“Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moorean Dogmatism” would allow. A surprising result is that Dogmatism’s commitment to (...) immediate epistemic warrant isn’t enough to avoid certain standard arguments for skepticism about the external world. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief (2000) is the capstone to the latest stage in his views on the intellectual credibility of theism in general, and Christian theism in particular. While Plantinga’s stature in the community of Christian philosophers alone makes gaining familiarity with this text a good idea for contemporary analytic philosophers of religion, its vigorous, innovative defense of specifically Christian theism and daring suggestions for renovating the landscape of analytic philosophy of religion merit serious consideration. I aim to provide (...) a useful introduction to the book’s contents and critique some of its main claims. (shrink)

We perceive relevance by virtue of inference habits, which may be expressed as Pierce's leading principles or as Toulmin's warrants. Hence relevance in a descriptive sense is a ternary relation between two statements and a set of inference rules. For a normative sense, the warrants must be properly backed. Different types of warrant to empirical generalizations, we introduce L.J. Cohen's notion of inductive support. A to empirical generalizations, we introduce L.J. Cohen's notion of inductive support. A generalization H is (...) supported by evidence E to degree i/in iff E indicates that H passes canonical test i, where there are n canonical tests. In a canonical test, one or more relevant variables, factors which may falsify H, are varied. H passes a test if it is not falsified. The tests are cumulative. Degree of support is relative to the canonical test, and may be modeled as relative to a point in a dialectical situation. A value of a variable at which H is falsified is a rebutting value. A is normatively relevant to B with respect to W iff sup[associated generalization(W), E] = i/n and for j > i, there is a presumption that the values of j are non-rebuting. (shrink)

Dewey defines knowledge as the outcome of competent inquiry. but knowledge is for dewey fundamentally predictive. this gives rise to a difficulty: should the course of nature change, a man might both know something (having carried out the relevant inquiry) and not know it (his relevant predictions being false). this difficulty is set out formally, and a solution is proposed in terms of dewey's concept of warranted assertibility.

Most people believe in an afterlife, but is such a belief warranted? While Newman did not specifically treat the doctrine of afterlife, his Grammar of Assent furnishes a trajectory that shows that Christians can believe in this doctrine with a warranted assent, precisely because the Church is a warranted belief.

In a recent paper on Truth, Knowability and Neutrality Timothy Kenyon sets out to defend the coherence of a putative anti-realist truth-predicate, superassertibility, due to Wright (1992, 1999), against a number of Wright’s critics. By his own admission, the success of Kenyon’s defensive strategies turns out to hinge upon a realist conception of absolute warrant which conflicts with the anti-realist character of the original proposal, based, as it was, on a notion of defeasible warrant. Kenyon’s potential success in (...) resisting Wright’s critics brings a pyrrhic victory: either way, realism wins. Here I argue that the link between superassertibility and defeasible warrant can be restored in a way which clarifies the consistency of the pair, provided that the notion of inference to superassertibility is properly understood in logical terms. As one might expect, the requisite notion is not classical in character. As one might not expect, the notion cannot be properly construed in intuitionist terms either. Hence, I propose an alternative logical framework which, I believe, is at least formally adequate to the representation of superassertibility on the basis of defeasible warrant. The price to be paid for rejecting the ‘third way’ proposed here in favour of either of the two more traditional logical options is precisely that indicated by Kenyon’s discussion. (shrink)

In order to achieve a deeper understanding of warrant, I turn in this chapter to a closer look at the idea of a design plan. I do so under the following six section headings: the max plan versus the design plan, unintended by‐products, functional multiplicity, the distinction between purpose and design, trade‐offs and compromises, and defeaters and overriders. In connection to the notion of trade‐offs and compromises in our cognitive design plan, I take up the subject of Gettier problems, (...) trying to understand what really underlies Gettier situations and then seeing how these situations look from the vantage point of my conception of warrant. While Gettier problems do not in fact plague my account of warrant, considering them nonetheless enables us to deepen our analysis of warrant. I close the chapter with a brief argument for the conclusion that my account of warrant qualifies as an example of naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright’s analysis of transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that Wright’s analysis is partially incoherent with our (...) analysis of warrant transmission and prima facie defective. We conclude exploring three alternative lines of reply: developing a more satisfactory account of transmission failure, which we outline; dismissing the Bayesian counterexample by rejecting some of its assumptions; reinterpreting Wright’s analysis to make it immune to the counterexample. (shrink)

Philosophers deny a proposal for actions can be deduced from arguments for or against the proposal because they may be incompatible. Nevertheless, people in general, and politicians especially, make decisions and present arguments they believe are convincing. We studied politicians who made decisions in complex situations. They spoke about possible actions, their consequences, the probabilities of these consequences and their evaluations, but rarely indicated why their arguments led to their choice. We hypothesized implicit argumentation rules involved and checked whether they (...) predicted those choices. We found seven implicit informal logic rules involved. We also found a random sample of people made the same choices based on the same arguments, suggesting basic warrants by which people argue about decisions. (shrink)

Although ‘warrant’ has been used to mean something like ‘justified to the degree required for knowledge’, it has recently come to mean something else. Alvin Plantinga has recently used the word ‘warrant’ to mean “that, whatever precisely it is, which makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.” So, in Plantinga’s sense of the word, warrant is the justification condition plus some other condition designed to rule out Gettier examples. In almost all cases, reliabilists, foundationalists, and (...) coherentists have not been giving theories about ‘warrant’ in Plantinga’s sense. They have been busy giving theories about justification. In his paper, “Warrant Entails Truth,” Trenton Merricks argues that warrant, in Plantinga’s sense, entails truth. In this paper, I will show that Merricks has not succeeded in showing that warrant entails truth. (shrink)

In my 1991 paper, AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access,@ I argued that externalism in the philosophy of mind is incompatible with the thesis that we have privileged , nonempirical access to the contents of our own thoughts.¹ One of the most interesting responses to my argument has been that of Martin Davies (1998, 2000, and Chapter _ above) and Crispin Wright (2000 and Chapter _ above), who describe several types of cases to show that warrant for a premise does not (...) always transmit to a known deductive consequence of that premise, and who contend that this fact under-mines my argument for incompatibilism. I will try to show here that the Davies/Wright point about transmission of warrant does not adversely affect my argument. (shrink)

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] Fred Dretske motivates his denial of epistemic closure by way of the thought that the warrant for the premises of a valid argument need not transfer to the argument’s conclusion. The failure-of-transfer-of-warrant strategy has also been used by advocates of epistemic closure as a foil to Michael McKinsey’s argument against the compatibility of first person authority and semantic externalism, and also to illuminate, more generally, why certain valid arguments appear ill-suited (...) for the purpose of establishing their conclusions. This paper takes re-examines some of the central attempts to explain transmission-failure, and a central line of objection to the strategy from Begging-the-Question theorists. The ultimate goal of this paper is to promote a decidedly Dretskean explanation of the unpersuasiveness of the said arguments. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has argued that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident but non-co-extensive norms of assertoric practice and that this fact tends to inflate deflationary theories of truth. Wright’s inflationary argument has generated much discussion in the literature. By contrast, relatively little has been said about the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms. This paper will examine that claim. Wright’s argument for the claim that truth and warranted assertibility are coincident norms is first clearly presented. It is (...) then suggested that the argument trades on an ambiguity in ‘justified’ and ‘warrantedly assertible’. Finally, it is argued that, once the ambiguity is removed, there is reason to reject the claim that truth and epistemic warrant are coincident norms of assertoric practice. One important result is that no epistemic theory of truth can satisfy what Wright takes to be a platitude about assertion. (shrink)

Having an etiological function to F is sufficient to have a competence to F. Having an etiological function to reliably F is sufficient to have a reliable competence, a competence to reliably F. Epistemic warrant consists in the normal functioning of the belief-forming process when the process has forming true beliefs reliably as an etiological function. Epistemic warrant requires reliable competence. Warrant divides into two grades. The first consists in normal functioning, when the process has forming true (...) beliefs reliably as an etiological function, so that it reliably produces true beliefs when in normal conditions, but need not be in normal conditions. The second grade requires the first, and presence in normal conditions, so that the chance of true belief is high. Why is warrant normative? Because when reliably forming true beliefs is a function, both grades meet evaluative norms that follow from that function. The paper ends by comparing Tyler Burge’s answer to this question from "Perceptual Entitlement" and "Entitlement: The Basis of Empirical Warrant". It is argued that Burge’s answer implausibly presupposes that all belief-forming processes—not just those with forming reliably true beliefs as an etiological function—should form reliably true beliefs. (shrink)

Against contextualism, Duncan Pritchard has argued that conversational pragmatics give rise to an argument in favour of invariantist neoMooreanism. More specifically, he argues that when we conjoin a Moorean view with a warranted assertability manoeuvre, we can satisfy our pretheoretical intuitions (which are decidedly invariantist), whereas contextualists cannot. In the following paper, I challenge Pritchard’s argument and contend that he is too quick to declare victory for invariantism, for not only does the WAM he employs appear to be ad hoc (...) vis-à-vis DeRose’s plausible criteria, but it also seems to have very implausible pragmatic implications when subjected to close scrutiny. (shrink)

Attributer contextualists maintain that the verb 'knows' is context-sensitive in the sense that the truth conditions of a sentence of the form "S knows that p" can be dependent upon the ascriber's context. One natural objection against attributer contextualism is that it confuses the impropriety of certain assertions which ascribe knowledge to agents with the falsity of those assertions. In an influential article, Keith DeRose has defended attributer contextualism against this charge by proposing constraints on what he calls "warranted assertibility (...) manoeuvres" of this sort. This paper argues that, contra DeRose, the warranted assertibility manoeuvre directed at attributer contextualism is able to meet the constraints that DeRose lays down. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion of the 'evidence-based practitioner' is relation to the National Numeracy Strategy (NNS). The exploration is dealt with in the context of a pilot study of the implementation of the NNS one year before its national launch in September 1999. We begin by describing some of the milestones encountered in the relatively short life history of evidence-based practice (EBP) and exploring some of its various articulations. Challenging the appropriateness of current externally derived formulations of 'evidence' we (...) develop the notion of 'warranting' in order to examine alternative ways in which teachers legitimate their professional practice in relation to the NNS. We conclude that what we observe is a series of shifting and multiple meanings and justifications, carrying different constraints and possibilities for practice. (shrink)

This chapter develops a novel Neo-Moorean view. The view falls squarely within the Radical Neo-Moorean camp, in that it holds that closure holds unrestrictedly, warrant transmits through Moore’s inference, and that there is nothing wrong – epistemically or dialectically – with Moore’s argument. Nevertheless, the account is superior to extant Radical Neo-Mooreanisms in explanatory power: it explains both the precise variety of epistemic failure exhibited by the sceptic, and the intuition of reasonableness when it comes to the sceptic’s resistance (...) to Moore’s argument. It does so in terms of epistemic functions and contrary-to-duty obligations. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Wang Yangming'sNeo-Confucian religious beliefs can bewarranted, and that the rationality of hisreligious beliefs constitutes a significantdefeater for the rationality of Christianbelief on Alvin Plantinga's theory of warrant. I also question whether the notion of warrantas proper function can adequately account fortheories of religious knowledge in which theaffections play an integral role. Idemonstrate how a consideration of Wang'sepistemology reveals a difficulty forPlantinga's defense of the rationality ofChristian belief and highlights a limitation ofPlantinga's current conception (...) of warrant asproper function. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga s Warranted Christian Belief has very quickly become one of the most influential books in philosophy of religion. In this collection of essays, German philosophers, theologians and a mathematician deal critically with several aspects of Plantinga s seminal work. In a long essay, Plantinga answers these critics.".

Whereas the first book is designed to demonstrate the inadequacy of other accounts, the second volume is supposed to tell us the sober truth about warrant. In a nutshell, Plantinga's theory is that a belief has warrant to the extent that it is produced by a cognitive process that is truth-aimed, functioning properly, operating in an appropriate environment, and reliable. Furthermore, for any two warranted beliefs, the belief which is held most strongly is the most warranted. Plantinga is (...) aware that, stated this baldly, his theory raises as many questions as it answers. He spends the better part of two chapters attempting to put flesh on this skeletal account. (shrink)

A warranted belief may derive inferential warrant from warranted beliefs which support it. It may possess what I call coherential warrant in virtue of beingconsistent with, or lacking improbability relative to, a large system of warranted beliefs. Finally, it may have foundational warrant, which does not derive from other beliefs at all. I define and distinguish these sources of warrant and explain why all three must be included in the true and complete account of the structure (...) of knowledge, and why the first two sources are significant at all levels of knowledge. Only foundherentism and a weak version of foundationalism can satisfy this criterion. My analysis has significant, and happy, consequences for the epistemological tradition. The project of describing the structure of knowledge is nearly complete. Those who have pronounced the death of epistemology are partially correct, not because epistemology has failed, but because it has been so successful. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga over the decades has developed a particular theory of warrant that would allow certain beliefs to be warranted, even if one lacked propositional arguments or evidence for them. One such belief that Plantinga focuses on is belief in God. There have been, however, numerous objections both to Plantinga's theory of warrant and to the religious application that he makes of it. In this article I address an objection from both of these categories. I first tackle an (...) objection that attempts to show that proper function isn't a necessary condition for warrant. After tackling this, I move on to interact with the Pandora's Box Objection. This objection argues that Plantinga's epistemology is weakened by the fact that all sorts of serious religious beliefs could be warranted by using his system. (shrink)

The paper deals with certain aspects of the interpretation and application of the law pertaining to the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), which are related to a person’s right to question the possibility of criminal prosecution as well as to the impossibility of execution of criminal prosecution in respect of a person who was not surrendered to the Republic of Lithuania. It is observed that the procedures of the execution of the EAW in legal practice, as distinct from their delineation (...) in the provisions of the legal acts of the European Union, are being inadmissibly misinterpreted in the national law. It conditions infringements of the right of a person to be brought to criminal account to know what he/she is suspected of. A person’s right to question the possibility and the limits of criminal prosecution is a constitutional guarantee towards the legitimacy of criminal proceedings. (shrink)

This article defends a pragmatic conception of objectivity for the moral domain. I begin by contextualizing pragmatic approaches to objectivity and discuss at some length one of the most interesting proposals in this area, Cheryl Misak's conception of pragmatic objectivity. My general argument is that in order to defend a pragmatic approach to objectivity, the pragmatic stance should be interpreted in more radical terms than most contemporary proposals do. I suggest in particular that we should disentangle objectivity from truth, and (...) I claim that moral inquiry is in most cases responsive to a normative standard that is closer to warranted assertibility than to truth. Using an argument that relies partly on Huw Price's account of forms of normative assertion, I will show that a practice-based account of warranted assertibility does the epistemic work required to defend objectivity while avoiding exposure to the criticisms that are usually addressed against this notion. (shrink)

The epistemological analysis offered in this paper reveals that a combination of pieces of evidence, none of them sufficient by itself to warrant a causal conclusion to the legally required degree of proof, may do so jointly. The legal analysis offered here, interlocking with this, reveals that Daubert’s requirement that courts screen each item of scientific expert testimony for reliability can actually impede the process of arriving at the conclusion most warranted by the evidence proffered.

Recently, there has been much interest in epistemic roles of attention, especially in whether visual attention is necessary for warranting (basic) visual belief. Arguably it is not. But attention nevertheless has important roles to play in our warrant from vision. I argue that we must appeal to a competence for shifting visual attention in explaining transsaccadic vision and our epistemic warrant from it. So even if it is not necessary for visual warrant or vision, visual attention plays (...) a central role in both. (shrink)

I critically examine two features of Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology. (i) If basic theistic beliefs are threatened by defeaters (of various kinds) and thus must be defended by higher-order defeaters in order to remain rational and warranted, are they still “properly basic”? (ii) Does Plantinga’s overall account offer an argument that basic theistic beliefs actually are warranted? I answer both questions in the negative.

Previous assurance-theoretic treatments of testimony have not adequately explained how the transmission of warrant depends specifically on the speaker’s mode of address – making it natural to suspect that the interpersonal element is not epistemic but merely psychological or action-theoretic. I aim to fill that explanatory gap: to specify exactly how a testifier’s assurance can create genuine epistemic warrant. In doing so I explain (a) how the illocutionary norm governing the speech act proscribes not lies but a species (...) of bullshit, in an extension of Harry Frankfurt’s sense, (b) how that norm makes testimony fully second-personal, in Stephen Darwall’s sense, or bipolar, in Michael Thompson’s sense, and (c) how that species of second-personality or bipolarity is more fundamental than the practical species that Darwall and Thompson discuss. One attraction of this new Assurance View of testimony is that it allows us to reconceptualize the natures of normativity and responsibility more generally, viewing the assurance as implicating us in normative relations of recognition, and therefore of justice, that are not yet moralized with reactive attitudes. (shrink)

Direct Realism often emerges as a solution to a certain type of problem. Hume and, especially, Berkeley, wielding some of the most powerful arguments of 18th Century philosophy, forcefully attacked the notion that there could be good inferences from the occurrence of one’s sensations to the existence of external, mind-independent bodies. Given the success of these attacks, and also given the assumption, made by Berkeley and arguably by Hume as well, that our knowledge of and rational belief in the existence (...) of material objects would depend upon there being such good inferences, a problem arises: We cannot know of or rationally believe in the existence of material objects. Reid’s Direct Realism then emerges as the solution to this problem. Reid admits the success of Berkeley’s and Hume’s attacks against the possibility of successfully grounding our material world beliefs on inferences from our sensations,[1] but claims that our belief in the existence of material objects can be perfectly rationally acceptable, and can amount to knowledge, despite the lack of such inferences. Though he did not use the terminology, it seems to be Reid’s position – and it’s this position that I will be referring to as his “Direct Realism” here – that certain perceptual beliefs whose content is such that they imply the existence of material objects are properly basic: they are rationally held, and if true can amount to knowledge, without having to be based on any other beliefs, including, most notably, beliefs about one’s own sensory experiences. (shrink)

In Warrant: The Current Debate, I canvassed contemporary accounts of warrant, and found them inadequate. In this chapter, I begin to develop my own account of warrant. After introducing the notions of proper function, a cognitive environment, and a design plan, I arrive at the following first approximation of warrant: a belief B has warrant for an agent S if and only if the relevant segments of S's cognitive design plan are functioning properly in a (...) cognitive environment, sufficiently similar to that for which they were designed, and the modules of the design plan governing the production of B are aimed at truth, and such that there is a high objective probability that a belief formed in accordance with those modules is true.. (shrink)