Lorenzo Peña
«Naturalized Epistemology and Degrees of Knowledge».

(delivered to the I Conference of SOFIA (Sociedad de Filosofía Iberoamericana), Tepoztlán (Mexico), August 1988.)

Eleven main components of my proposal are as follows:
  1. There are infinitely many degrees of truth of propositions, or of existence of the states of affairs (facts) those propositions would correspond to. The structure of those degrees is an atomic one (in an algebraic sense).
  2. There can be infinitely many degrees of existence of [the state of affairs consisting in] someone's believing something.
  3. Knowledge is nothing else but true belief.
  4. Justification or warrant matters, since maximizing warrant is our only way of maximizing true belief.
  5. Warrant is relative, which means that a belief is warranted whenever it is warranted by something or other. Mutually incompatible beliefs may be both warranted by different warrantors.
  6. A belief can be warranted by nothing but other beliefs of the same subject: nothing external to the subject's doxastic system may be either a sufficient condition or a necessary one for bestowing a warrant upon one of his beliefs.
  7. Every belief, up to a point at least, is to be warranted by other beliefs. However, some beliefs are (in a way) self-warranting to a higher degree than others.
  8. Every warranting relation is inferential in character.
  9. A chain of warranting relations may go on indefinitely.
  10. An inference rule can be warranted by beliefs which may in turn be warranted through a process involving the operation of the rule at issue.
  11. The world is epistemically optimal.
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