Accidentally True Belief and Warrant

The Proper Functionist account of warrant – like many other externalist accounts – is vulnerable to certain Gettier-style counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. In this paper, I briefly survey the development of the account, noting the way it was altered in response to such counterexamples. I then argue that Alvin Plantinga’s latest amendment to the account is flawed insofar as it rules out cases of true beliefs which do intuitively strike us as knowledge, and that a conjecture recently put forward by Thomas Crisp is also defective. I conclude by presenting my own suggestion as to how the account can be made less vulnerable to counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. Although I stay within the confines of Proper Functionism here, I think that my proposal (modulo a few details) could be attached to other externalist accounts of warrant as well. “Warrant” is Alvin Plantinga’s term for the “elusive quality or quantity enough of which, together with true belief, is sufficient for knowledge” (Plantinga 1993b, v). According to Plantinga’s Proper Functionist account of warrant, a belief B is warranted for a subject S if and only if the following conditions are met: (1) B is produced by a properly functioning cognitive faculty (or “module” of such a faculty), (2) The “design plan” governing the relevant faculty or module specifies that it is aimed at acquiring truth, (3) B is produced in a cognitive environment that is “favourable” for S’s cognitive faculties (i.e., it is “sufficiently similar” to the sort of environment for which S’s cognitive faculties were designed), (4) The design plan is a good one with respect to that environment (i.e., there is a high objective probability that a belief produced by that faculty in that sort of environment is true).1 A number of authors have pointed out that the Proper Functionist account of warrant fails to cope with Gettier-style counterexamples involving what might be called “accidentally true” beliefs.2 In this paper, I briefly survey the development of the account, noting the way it was altered in response to such counterexamples (Sections 1–2). I then show that Plantinga’s latest amendment to the account is flawed insofar as it rules out cases of true beliefs that do intuitively strike us as knowledge (Section 3), and that a conjecture recently put forward by Thomas Crisp is also Synthese 137: 445–458, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.