Warrant Entails Truth

Abstract

Warrant is that, whatever precisely it is, which makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.' S knows that p, therefore, if and only if S's belief that p is warranted and p is true.2 This is a purely formal characterization of warrant. Warrant may, no doubt, be a messy item: a substantive analysis might be full of disjuncts and conjuncts and conditionals and caveats. But if there are true beliefs that are not knowledge, then there is something that all beliefs that are knowledge share, and all merely true beliefs lack. This is warrant. I want to argue that warrant, whatever it is that makes the difference between mere true belief and knowledge, entails truth. Pollock, Lehrer, Nozick, Dretske, Goldman, and Tomberlin, among others, provide accounts of warrant that entail truth.3 So in one sense the claim