Plantinga's Proper Function and the Epistemic Status of Religious Belief — Epoche C2
The objection to be examined is that Alvin Plantinga's theory of warrant, by locating what turns true belief into knowledge outside the believer's awareness, leaves religious belief epistemically arbitrary: a believer who can give no account of why he believes has, on this theory, nothing to answer for. The objection is usually put as a charge that Plantinga lacks an adequate account of epistemic responsibility. It misfires, but not for the reason usually given in his defence. It is not that Plantinga replaces internal responsibility with an external substitute. It is that he grants the believer internal responsibility in full, and denies that responsibility was ever the thing that converts true belief into knowledge. Establishing this requires separating two arguments made seventeen years apart, which the objection routinely runs together. Two arguments, two books The first argument is in "Reason and Belief in God" (1983), the long essay that gave reformed epistemology its name. Its claim is negative and about proper basicality: belief in God can be held basically — not inferred from other beliefs one holds — without epistemic fault. The second argument is the theory of warrant developed in Warrant and Proper Function (1993), whose companion volume Warrant: The Current Debate surveys and rejects the alternatives. Its claim is positive and general, about the conditions under which any belief whatever amounts to knowledge; theism is not mentioned in the analysis. Only in Warranted Christian Belief (2000) are the two joined. The distinction matters because the two arguments answer different objections. If the complaint is "you have offered no argument for God's existence, so your belief is unjustified", the 1983 essay answers it. If the complaint is "even granting your belief is blameless, blamelessness is not knowledge", the 1993 theory answers it — and gives the same answer for perceptual and memorial belief. The 1983 argument: the criterion defeats itself The 1983 essay's target is a specific doctrine, which Plantinga calls classical foundationalism: a proposition is properly basic for a person only if it is self-evident to him, or incorrigible for him, or evident to his senses. This is the standard by which evidentialist objectors — Plantinga's chosen exemplars are Clifford, Flew and Scriven — hold that belief in God, being none of these, requires propositional evidence. His objection is short and self-referential. Consider the criterion itself. It is not self-evident; it is not incorrigible, since a person can be mistaken about it; it is not evident to the senses, being about propositions rather than about anything one can see. Nor is there any plausible argument for it from premises that meet its own conditions. So by its own terms, no one is entitled to accept the criterion. The doctrine is not merely unsupported but self-defeating, and a doctrine that convicts itself cannot convict theism. The constructive half of the 1983 argument is what makes the negative half more than a debating point, and it is regularly overlooked. If criteria of proper basicality cannot be got by intuition, where do they come from? Plantinga's answer, adapted from Chisholm's treatment of the problem of the criterion, is broadly inductive: one assembles cases in which a belief clearly is properly basic and cases in which it clearly is not, and frames hypotheses that fit the data. A procedure of this shape has no neutral starting set — the theist will quite properly include some of his own beliefs among the data, just as the naturalist includes his — and there is no higher court to adjudicate between the starting sets. Two features of the position follow, and they are the direct reply to the charge of arbitrariness. First, properly basic is not the same as groundless. Plantinga holds that theistic belief arises in identifiable circumstances — reading scripture, a sense of guilt, gratitude, the contemplation of the night sky — which function as its grounds in just the way that being appeared to in a certain fashion is the ground of a perceptual belief, without being a premise from which the belief is inferred. Second, the belief is defeasible: it can be undermined by counter-evidence, and the believer who acquires a defeater and does nothing about it is at fault. Why warrant is not justification The turn now is from what the believer may permissibly do to what makes a belief knowledge, and it is the turn the internalist critique tends to miss. Plantinga's technical term is stipulated to be neutral: warrant is whatever must be added to true belief to yield knowledge, however that turns out. The question is then which of the going candidates fills the role. Internalist justification, on his diagnosis, is a descendant of the Cartesian and Lockean picture of epistemic duty — a belief is justified when the believer, in holding it, has flouted no intellectual obligation. Plantinga's objection is not that there are no such obligations. He thinks there are, and that ordinary believers usually meet them. His objection is that meeting them is insufficient. Take someone whose cognitive faculties are seriously malfunctioning through no fault of his own: he may deliberate scrupulously, weigh what seems to him to be evidence, and violate no duty at all, while forming beliefs that are not knowledge even when true. Duty-fulfilment is something one can achieve from the inside; knowledge is not. The consequence for the objection under examination is decisive. The complaint that Plantinga "discredits epistemic responsibility" reverses the dialectic. He affirms epistemic responsibility, locates it where internalists locate it, and denies only that it is what the analysis of knowledge requires. The earlier version of this essay described him as offering an externalist account of epistemic responsibility; that is not quite right and should be corrected. Responsibility stays internalist in his hands. What becomes externalist is warr