I finally finished Alvin Plantinga’s Warrant: The Current Debate. I’d already written him a letter apologizing for bad mouthing it and got a nice response back. But I hadn’t actually finished it. And that was a while ago, though I did write him that I was in the process of reading it and did not claim to have finished and/or fully understood it.

And I still don’t fully understand it. Or rather, there’s nothing there to fully understand.

It’s like that movie where it seems to have been entirely created to set up the sequels.

While I am looking forward to trying to read and understand Warrant and Proper Function, I hadn’t realized the extent to which Plantinga would not be making his own, positive case in Warrant: The Current Debate.

The first book is entirely dedicated to taking apart and criticizing the works and theories of contemporary epistemology and epistemologists.

I can see the value of this as a learning tool. After all, the extent to which I have kept up with modern in trends is… well, actually, I haven’t kept up at all. So the experience can be classified as a ‘learning experience.’ I know now more about contemporary theories of epistemology. But I hardly know a damn thing about Plantinga’s epistemology.

Actually, the only thing one gets from this about Plantinga is that the idea of ‘warrant’ was not something that was in wide use when he wrote the book. I got this because he quote extensively from other philosophers and no one is using that term. Which is fine. Alvin’s going out on a limb here, forging his own path. I’m down with that. That’s why I’m here, in fact. But because he doesn’t advance any positive ideas, it’s almost like ‘warrant’ is something he built to characterize other theories as comparative straw men when actually, the reader has no one idea if that’s correct because ‘warrant’ is a fully owned subsidiary of Plantinga, Inc. and he doesn’t actually say what he thinks it means.

He writes that ‘None of these views, as we saw, offers the resources for a proper understanding of warrant or positive epistemic status.’

Well, how can they (they being philosophers who argue for an internalist view of justification or, if you prefer, warrant, I guess) offer resources for a proper understanding, since, apparently, know in the world can actually know what warrant is until reading the second book.

He writes that ‘Warrant is that (whatever it is) such that enough of it together with truth (perhaps a codicil aimed at Gettier) is necessary and sufficient for knowledge…’

Really? Is that what warrant is? Because I distinctly recall him consistently talking about warrant as replacing ‘justification’ in the classic ‘justified true belief’ formulation. Apparently now, it’s fulfilling a larger role (except for this possible codicil that… wtf? where did that come from?).

Oh, and he also writes about the idea of proper function as being key to warrant and of many folks he criticized struggling with resolving it. Funny, I don’t remember this coming up before… and wouldn’t you know that the phrase ‘proper function’ appears in the title of his next book.

I’m sorry. While this book is learned, educational, mind expanding, and fascinating, it is also sometimes an exercise in playground games, where the leader of the group keeps all the other kids in second place in a made up game by raising the bar or changing the rules ex post facto.

But I’ll still slog my way through the sequel (that’s gonna be like thirty-five bucks… but this one was something like seventy bucks, so we’re moving in the right direction, not that I begrudge Professor Plantinga his royalties…)

P.S. – In a bit of fortuitous timing, I just came across this review of a more recent of Dr. Plantinga’s books.