Credence First: Against Plantinga's Warrant as an Epistemic Upgrade
A critique of binary knowledge and warrant language in favor of graded confidence and measurable calibration.
Source Paper
This page is a simplified guide to the paper. The source document is linked below; the guide here keeps the main idea accessible and tied back to the site’s model.
Open on Academia.eduLow-Register Abstract
This paper argues that asking whether a belief has warrant can distract from the more useful question: how well calibrated is the person’s confidence? A belief can be held with great certainty even when the evidence does not deserve that certainty.
The paper treats credencing as a better target than knowledge-talk because credencing stays continuous. It asks how much confidence is justified, not whether a belief has crossed some special status line.
How It Fits Credencing
This supports the site’s move away from all-or-nothing belief language. It also explains why overconfidence is not merely a social flaw; it is a measurable mismatch between evidence and assigned confidence.
The critique is especially relevant to religious or ideological certainty, where a person may treat inner confidence as if it were itself evidence of truth.
How to Read It
Read this after the basic credencing pages. Do not worry if the Plantinga discussion is technical; the practical point is that a high-confidence state still needs calibration against evidence.