Ernest Sosa

Comprehensive and packed, Alvin Plantinga's two-volume treatise defies summary. The first volume, Warrant: Current Views, is a meticulous critical survey of epistemology today. Many current approaches are presented and exhaustively discussed, and a negative verdict is passed on each in turn. This prepares the way for volume two, Warrant and Proper Function, where a positive view is advanced and developed in satisfying detail. The cumulative result is most impressive, and should command attention for years to come. Here I cannot possibly do justice to the scope and richness of Plantinga's accomplishment. Given the limitations imposed by the occasion, I will discuss only what seem the most important and original proposals, and will compare them with some relevant alternatives.

Life may turn sour and, in extremis, not worth living. On occasion it may be best, moreover, to lay down one's life for a greater cause. None of this is any news, debatable though it may remain, in general or case by case. Now comes the news that life does not matter in the way we had thought. No resurgence of existentialism, nor tidings from some ancient religion or some new cult, the news derives from the most sober and probing philosophical argument (the extraor- dinary Parfit, 1984, Part III), and takes more precisely the following form: Even though life L is optimal (in all dimensions), and even though if it were extended L would continue to be optimal, it does not follow that it is best to extend it, even for the subject whose life L is. What is the argument? Section II will defend a certain view of the nature of persons and personal identity, and Section III will then argue for the Paradox on that basis, and reflect on its philosophical implications and on the options it presents.

The theory of knowledge has two sides - epistemology and a bridge to join them: that a belief is justified if and only if obtained by appropriate use of an adequate organon - a principle of theoretical epistemology requiring an organon or manual of practical methodology. Such organon justification is internalist. (How could one ever miss one's source for it?) But it leads briskly to skepticism on pain of regress or circularity - or so it is argued in section 1. In section 2 we consider the epistemology embodied in the Socratic elenchus, which provides a new angle on how methodology relates to epistemology and to science and metaphysics. Thus are we made to face once again the organon account of justification: our internalist bridge principle. That account proves in section 3 to be a special case ,of a more general argumentative account of justification, which in turn agrees with intuitions so powerful as to be enshrined already in our dictionaries. Good rhetoric suggests therefore that 'justification' and its cognates be yielded to the argumentative account; in which case justification must likely fall from its status as principal concept of epistemology. Justification is hence unlikely to be all that is required in general for knowledge, nor is it likely to be what is always required in any premises of use to justify anything. That way, apparently, lies regress or circularity. Better to demote justification to the status of one way for a belief to be appropriate or apt for knowledge, while allowing other ways not dependent on already attained justification: perception, perhaps, or introspection, or memory.

Since this paper is for a conference on “Contextualism in Epistemology and Beyond,” I have opted to sketch a retrospective of contextualism in epistemology, including highlights of the “relevant alternatives” approach, given how relevantism and contextualism have developed in tandem. We focus on externalist forms of contextualism, bypassing internalist forms such as Cohen 1988 and Lewis 1996, but much of our discussion will be applicable to contextualism generally. Internalist contextualism is helpfully discussed in papers by Stewart Cohen, Richard Feldman, and Jonathan Vogel, in Tomberlin 1999.

It is argued that knowledge is a form of action. It is a kind of successful attempt to attain the truth. The success must avoid a particular sort of “epistemic luck”. It must derive from competence rather than luck. Knowledge, then, is a judgment or belief that aims at truth and attains accuracy not by luck but through the agent’s cognitive adroitness, so that the attainment is apt. A higher grade of knowledge then requires that the agent attain aptly not only the accuracy (truth) but even the aptness of that first-order success. This more fully apt success is on a higher level of epistemic achievement, and in this respect is a special case of a general truth of performance normativity that applies across domains of human performance, whether in the arts, in sports, in the professions, and so on. An attempt in general reaches that higher level of achievement by being not only apt but fully apt.

Epistemology is too far-flung and diverse for a survey in a single essay. I have settled for a snapshot which, though perforce superficial and partial, might yet provide an overview. My perspective is determined by the books and articles prominent in the recent literature and in my own recent courses and seminars. Seeing that the boundaries of our field have shifted through the ages and are even now very ill-marked, I have chosen two central issues, each under vigorous and many-sided discussion in recent years and at present: (A) Scepticism, and (B) Theories of Justification; and in each case I shall focus on work either published or widely discussed within the last five years.

According to nomological accounts of causation causal connections among events or states must be mediated by contingent laws of nature. Three types of causal connection are cited and discussed in opposition to such nomological accounts: (a) material causation (as when a zygote is generated by the union of an ovum and a sperm); (b) consequentialist causation (as when an apple is chromatically colored as a result of being red); (c) inclusive causation (as when a board is on a stump in consequence of its having been placed there by a carpenter). These are all source-consequence relations or result-yielding relations and they are all cases of necessitation, each with its own distinguishing features.

According to the main tradition, knowledge is either direct or indirect: direct when it intuits some perfectly obvious fact of introspection or a priori necessity; indirect when based on deductive proof stemming ultimately from intuited premises. Simple and compelling though it is, this Cartesian conception of knowledge must be surmounted to avoid skepticism. Seeing that the straight and narrow of deductive proof leads nowhere, C. I. Lewis wisely opts for a highroad of probabilistic inference. But how can one arrive at a realm inaccessible through direct knowledge having set out from one thus accessible? How could probabilistic inference offer any help? There are two different answers to these questions in Lewis's writings, and he moves from one to the other under pressure of well known objections from perceptual relativity. Our action divides into three acts, which we review in turn.