Faith & Reason, Part 5: The Nature of Knowledge

plantinga We have tried Belief (Intro & Part 1 and Part 2), Metaphor, and Narrative and have found nothing. The armchair exploration of these joints of nature have only reinforced the notion that there is only harmony between faith and reason. But before torturing, burning, shooting, and mutilating our philosophical armchair and moving on, we have one last domain to address: Knowledge.

Before getting right to the meat, however, I want to give a layman’s introduction to the work of the new reformed epistemology, best represented by Alvin Plantinga. I am most comfortable referring to Plantinga’s work only. Without Plantinga’s presence as a world class analytic philosopher in the 20th century, the contemporary philosophy classroom would have less patience for a conservative Christian point of view. We would also be without the 20th century’s greatest effort to locate a philosophical harmony between faith and reason – capped off by Oxford’s 2000 edition of Warranted Christian Belief. To the layman, the title might suggest an exploration of Belief, rather than Knowledge. However, in Plantinga’s game Warranted Christian Belief just is Knowledge. ‘Belief’ is the place holder and ‘Warranted’ is the war.

The backdrop to Plantinga’s argument is the traditional Justified True Belief model, a model that has been refined and rarified by countless too many analytic monkeys. On this model, someone knows something if – and as any of the mathematical monkeys would say, only if - they have a true belief that is rationally justified in the right sort of way. Knowledge IS (=) Justified True Belief. It helps to symbolize (obviously): K=JTB. Here is the idea: Someone might have a belief that turns out to be true, but unless this someone also owns justification for that belief, the belief will not amount to something we would call ‘knowledge’. On this traditional model, justification comes about when a belief is rooted in the right sort of evidence in the right sort of way; the evidence comes – as it must – in the form of other beliefs, and so the model is inherently internalistic; this is an example of epistemic internalism.

One would think that humans would not be needed for this project; I suspect that a software program could have been designed for the generation of many of the published articles. But there are some interesting nuances: What this internalism means is that that which confers the status of knowledge to a true belief is that which is in principle something within the conscious grasp of the individual. Hence, the individual has the ability to sweep his own epistemic house, so to speak (as Chisholm once put it). This is a matter of one having special access to that which gives a true belief the status of knowledge. Special access is closely related to the general meaning of ‘justification’: someone can in principle justify his own beliefs. (I will take the liberty to note that this conception fits well with other illusions, such as freedom, control, inherent moral goodness or evil, and general, robust conscious awareness).

But internalism might not be true. There is the possibility that that which confers the status of knowledge to a true belief is not something the individual in principle has special access to. This would be the position called externalism. Externalism is therefore simply the denial of internalism. Alvin Plantinga is an externalist and therefore spends some of his time simply arguing against the thesis of internalism and spends some of his other time arguing for just what it is that does confer knowledge status to a true belief. For Plantinga, knowledge is warranted true belief, or K=WTB. The word ‘warrant’ is chosen to get away from the idea of internal justification while preserving the idea of normativity.

According to Plantinga’s rival definition, true belief is knowledge if and only if it is created and sustained by cognitive faculties both aimed at truth and operating the way they ought, that is to say, according to the cognitive design plan. Thus, what confers knowledge-status to a true belief does not have to be, at least in principle, accessible to consciousness; the individual does not need to have special access, at least in principle, to that which provides a true belief’s warrant for that true belief to be an instance of knowledge. This brings us to some vexed issues in the philosophy of Mind, but Plantinga employed simple psychological terms in order to make his more complex epistemological point.

Here is an example of the kind of scenario Plantinga would propose: A young man named Sam walks through the park at noon one day, just like he does every day while on lunch break. While walking mid-way through the park, Sam wonders if it is yet noon and looks up at the park clock; the clock indicates that it is in fact noon. But the clock indicates that it is noon only because it has indicated noon for the last 24 hours, ever since it broke the day before. So Sam naturally forms the belief that it is noon; and it is in fact noon; the belief is true. Sam has a true belief that it is noon. But does that true belief amount to knowledge? Does Sam know that it is noon?

The intuition you are supposed to have is that Sam does not know that it is noon since his belief that it is noon rests on a complete fluke; it just happened to be noon when Sam looked up at the clock. It could have been 11:30 and Sam would have believed that it was noon in precisely the same way and for precisely the same reason. The interesting thing, however, is that Sam is justified in believing that it is noon; Sam’s belief that it is noon is sufficiently grounded in all the right sort of evidence and in the right sort of way. How else, after all, is one to be justified in the belief that it is noon? So this is an example that counters internalism. If knowledge was justified true belief, then Sam would know that it was noon, but he didn’t. Plantinga’s externalism explains why Sam did not know that it was noon. Something had gone wrong as defined by the design plan; Sam’s cognitive faculties were not designed for an environment in which clocks were broken.

It does not have to be the environment that goes wrong; the environment could be appropriate but the cognitive faculties themselves might not be working properly, as in the case of Sam’s hallucination that birds are flying over head just when it so happens that birds are flying over head. This is also the case, according to Plantinga, with mankind’s knowledge of God after the fall: the cognitive faculty that was designed to produce and sustain true beliefs about God – the sensus divinitatis – has been damaged.

What follows from this is that that which provides warrant to Christian Belief – bringing it to the status of robust, sane, and proper knowledge of the world – need have nothing to do with empirical evidence or those critical faculties of questioning, reasoning, and discovery. Indeed, it is something intirely out of the individual’s access and control. Through the “instigation” of the Holy Spirit, one’s own sensus divinitatis part of the brain can be supernaturally and inexplicably zapped by Big Brother when the predestinated time has arrived, thereby making beliefs that are otherwise exuberant, fanciful, ridiculous, and delusional on par with the belief that you are currently awake and reading Pooh’s Think. Those who otherwise hate God are hunted down, their old nature destroyed, and irrevocably made to love the author of this doing through a rewiring of their cognitive faculties – much like O’Brien’s operation on Winston in 1984.

This is what was meant when William Lane Craig waived aside Christopher Hitchen’s narrative concerns with the fact that Christian Belief is “properly basic.”

Stay tuned for Knowledge, Part 2.

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Posted by metzler on Saturday, June 13, 2009, at 12:22 pm.
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Faith & Reason, Part 5: The Nature of Knowledge

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