Knowledge And Belief-A Research About Plantinga’s Solution Of Gettier Problem

This thesis is on an investigation about whether the Gettier problem could be solved by Plantinga’s account of warrant.Edmund Gettier’s paper----Is justified true belief knowledge?that published in 1963 shows limitations of the traditional definition of knowledge by constructing two counterexamples that apply to it but are not knowledge.His paper has received great attention from epistemologists all over the world,which has forced them to reexamine the traditional knowledge definition.As Zagzebski’s analysis of Gettier cases,the problem of knowledge attribution derives from the intrinsic structure of the traditional knowledge definition in which knowledge is interpreted as justified true belief.She thinks that-for all JTB account,we can always constitute a justified false belief.And then,based on the presumption that justification is closed under deductive inference,by adding an accidental true belief in it,we can ultimately build a justified belief that is only true by accident,which is a new Gettier case.On that account,the only way to get away with the Gettier problem is to modify the account in such a way that justification(or whatever else in knowledge apart from true beliefs)entails truth.Plantinga’s interpretation of knowledge,according which knowledge is sufficiently warranted true belief,is based on the understanding that “warrant comes in degrees”.The Resolution Condition interprets a sufficient degree of warrant as the favorability of a mini-environment.Then Plantinga defines favorable mini-environment(MBE)as fallow: MBE is favorable for the exercise of cognitive power E if and only if,for any sufficiently close possible world,if the subject S were to form a belief by way of E in MBE,S would form a true belief.Due to the vagueness of “sufficiently close”,the standard for knowledge could be ambiguous.To avoid this ambiguity,Plantinga’s definition of favorable mini-environment needs to be modified.This thesis will tries to proffer a more perspicuous description for the mini-environments in Gettier Cases.Then it defines favorable mini-environment as the cognitive environment that can preclude Gettier Cases to logically eliminate the Gettier Problem on the account of warrant.Overall,this thesis argues that the modified warrant approach is actually successful.