Ernest Sosa

Truth centered epistemology puts truth at the center in more ways than one. For one thing, it makes truth a main cognitive goal of inquiry. For another, it explains other main epistemic concepts in terms of truth. Knowledge itself, for example, is explained as belief that meets certain other conditions, among them being true. And a belief is said to be rationally or epistemically justified or apt, which it must be in order to be knowledge, only if it derives from a truth-conducive faculty, an intellectual virtue. What defensible theories of truth are open to such truth-centered epistemology? That is our main question.

Survey results are in the first instance utterances, which require interpretation. Moreover, when the results seem to involve disagreement in intuitive responses to a thought experiment, the results are most directly responsive to the scenario as envisaged by the particular subject, where the text of the example can give rise to relevantly different scenarios, depending on how the scenario is shaped by the subjects involved, under the guidance of the text. All of this opens up a defense of intuitions against results that ostensibly imply extensive intuitive disagreement based on cultural or socio-economic background. Critics of the armchair have replied to this defense in recent publications. This paper takes up some of those replies

The first paragraph of the article reads: "Classical analysis is concerned neither with cataloguing usage nor with intellectual therapy (except of course by aiming to satisfy curiosity and remove puzzlement). Of recent sorts of analysis, it's the attempt to find the "logical structure of the world" or the "logical form" of various facts that chiefly claims our attention. But philosophers in every period have been absorbed by such analysis. Think of the Greek search for real definitions. Or think of metaphysical appearance/reality distinctions, and attempted reductions of appearance to reality: to monads, to spirits and ideas, or to atomic facts."

Ever since Plato it has been thought that one knows only if one's belief hits the mark of truth and does so with adequate justification. The issues debated by Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa concern mostly the nature and conditions of such epistemic justification, and its place in our understanding of human knowledge. Presents central issues pertaining to internalism vs. externalism and foundationalism vs. virtue epistemology in the form of a philosophical debate. Introduces students to fundamental questions within epistemology while engaging in contemporary debates. Written by two of today’s foremost epistemologists. Includes an extensive bibliography