Ernest Sosa

[ES] La creencia es considerada como una especie de expresión, que alcanza un nivel de éxito si es verdadera, un segundo nivel si es competente, y un tercero si es verdadera por ser competente. El conocimiento a un nivel es una creencia apta. La normatividad epistémica que constituye tal conocimiento es, de esta manera, una especie de normatividad de la expresión. Un problema surge para esta explicación del hecho de que la suspensión de la creencia parece caer bajo la misma especie de normatividad epistémica que la creencia misma; aunque suspender es, sin embargo, precisamente no actuar, en todo caso no teniendo como objetivo la verdad. El presente trabajo examina este problema, y propone una solución que distingue varios niveles de normatividad de expresión, incluyendo un primer orden donde la competencia de expresión está en juego, y un segundo orden en que el ejecutante tiene que evaluar el riesgo concomitante con la realización de una expresión de primer orden. Esto introduce un nivel de conocimiento reflexivo que se eleva encima del nivel animal. [EN] Belief is considered a kind of performance, which attains one level of success if it is true, a second level if competent, and a third if true because competent. Knowledge on one level is apt belief. The epistemic normativity constitutive of such knowledge is thus a kind of performance normativity. A problem is posed for this account by the fact that suspension of belief seems to fall under the same sort of epistemic normativity as does belief itself, yet to suspend is of course precisely not to perform, certainly not with the aim of truth. The paper takes up this problem, and proposes a solution that distinguishes levels of performance normativity, including a first order where execution competence is in play, and a second order where the performer must assess the risks attendant on issuing a first-order performance. This imports a level of reflective knowledge that ascends above the animal level.

Polyfacetic epistemology would answer the skeptic, provide how-to-think manuals, explain how we know, and more. To some it is the project of assuring oneself, of validating one's knowledge or supposed knowledge, turning it into real and assured knowledge, thus defeating the skeptic. To others it is a set of rules or instructions, a guide to the perplexed, a manual for conducting the intellect. To others yet it is a meta-discipline, but one whose purpose is not nearly so much guidance as understanding, understanding of what gives us the knowledge we do have, of what factors serve to justify so many of our beliefs well enough to make them knowledge. What follows is epistemology as understanding, an attempt to understand the relation between epistemic coherence and intellectual virtue at the foundation of epistemology: between the comprehensive coherence prized in the thirst for understanding and the "reliability" that makes a faculty or procedure intellectually virtuous.

I give an exposition and critical discussion of Sellars’s Myth of the Given, and especially of its epistemic side. In later writings Sellars takes a pragmatist turn in his epistemology. This is explored and compared with his earlier critique of givenist mythology. In response to Michael Williams, it is argued that these issues are importantly independent of philosophy of language or mind, and that my own take on them does not commit me to any absurd radical foundationalism on language or mind. My own take is in line with Descartes’ two-level epistemology of cognitio and scientia, a bifurcation that protects him from vicious circularity, and is adaptable for an epistemology naturalized, whether in the way of Quine, or Moore, or Davidson.