Ernest Sosa

I distinguish crude virtue psychology (CVP) from sophisticated virtue psychology (SVP), arguing that situationists have only targeted the former, virtue epistemology (and virtue ethics) the latter. In contrast with the CVP attacked by Doris, Harman, and Nisbett & Ross, the character traits of interest to SVP represent a broader whole that includes fundamental motives, desires, and goals. Given how often we are evaluatively conflicted, it can hardly be a surprise that we fail to be cross-situationally consistent at the level of external situations and attendant behaviors. The consistency is found, rather, in the complex inner structure of one’s relevant character. While the move to SVP is important, it will not disarm the situationist threat alone. Sosa articulates a new account of virtue with an SSS structure: seat, shape, situation. Such competences turn out to be a special case of a “disposition to succeed,” compatible with variability and situational influence.

This chapter aims to enhance our understanding of the notions of firsthand knowledge and of understanding, of how these are related, and of their importance in a flourishing human life. On certain questions of great human interest, firsthand knowledge and firsthand understanding are closely interrelated and have high priority. Such questions are often met in the humanities, broadly conceived to include not only appreciation of art, but also appreciation of sports, food, relationships, nature, and much more. And many such questions are to be found in philosophy. All such humanistic questions stand in contrast with practical questions where mere information suffices. What follows is devoted to explaining and defending these ideas.

This chapter takes up a general epistemological and skeptical problematic, which is found in Pyrrhonism and is also important in Descartes’ epistemology, where it takes the form of the notorious Cartesian Circle. Epistemic circularity is the focus of the chapter, as part of the Agrippan trilemma that gives rise to the deepest skepticism that we owe to the schools of Ancient Greece. The question that needs to be considered, and that is considered in the chapter, is that of whether we can attain a general epistemological account of our cognitive lives without an inevitable, and an inevitably vicious, epistemic circularity.

Armchair philosophy has come under attack through experimentalist survey results. These are said to uncover disagreement in people's responses to thought experiments. These responses allegedly reflect cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, not intuitive perception of some objective order. More recently, a natural sequel to this survey-based attack has emerged that is philosophically deeper. In this paper, Ernest Sosa defends armchair philosophy by responding to this more sophisticated treatment. In the end, the dialectic has a troubling upshot, since it is not just street-corner respondents who seem to disagree to a troubling extent, and it is not just intuition that is the source of such philosophical disagreement. Expert philosophers disagree with equally troubling persistence and to a similarly troubling extent. Moreover, their disagreement derives not simply from intuition, but also from the most thoroughly and professionally conducted inquiry. Does this not cast similar doubt on the whole of philosophical method, and not just on the philosophical use of intuition?

Descartes is a virtue epistemologist. Not only does he distinguish centrally between animal and reflective knowledge - in his terms, between _cognitio_ and _scientia_ - but in additionhe conceives of _cognitio_ as apt grasp of the truth: i.e. as grasp whose correctness manifests sufficient epistemic competence. First-order knowledge is such _cognitio_ or apt belief, which can then be upgraded to the level of _scientia_ through competent reflective endorsement. So Descartes both (a) advocates aptness as an account of simple knowledge, and (b) highlights a higher knowledge that requires endorsement from a second-order perspective. This includes both main components of a sort of ‘virtue epistemology’ found in contemporary philosophy. This chapter argues that we can make sense of Descartes’s epistemological project only as a second-order project that fits with the view of his epistemology just sketched. Along the way supportive detail will reveal his commitment more fully.

This chapter considers the question ’when is it permissible to end inquiry?’ One might think that the answer to this question is that one can permissibly end inquiry regarding p when one knows p. After all, if S knows p, then any additional evidence S might get regarding p would seem to be either misleading or superfluous. This chapter argues that epistemic negligence resulting from closing off inquiry can detract from one’s epistemic performance and possibly result in the loss of knowledge. In addition, it argues that closing off inquiry can also result in the loss of rational belief since the origins of one’s belief are continually fading from view, which requires that one’s current evidence play a primary role in rational belief.

Taking up the nature of intuitions in general in the introduction, this chapter asks which of them are _rational_: if only some of them are, then what distinguishes them? Intuitions, modeled traditionally on perception and particularly on vision, would suggest that visual knowledge and visually justified or competent belief depend on visual experience — or so they do on the account assumed in this chapter. After exploring this comparison, the chapter asks does anything play for intuition the epistemic role played by sensory experience for perception? The ten sections of this chapter build up to a proposed competence-based answer to the questions posed before attempting to illuminate that answer in the concluding sections.

The main focus in what follows will be _judgment_: the act of affirmation or the disposition to perform that act. Not just any disposition to affirm counts as belief, however. One might be disposed to affirm in the endeavor to feel good about oneself, or to be a better spouse, or to gain confidence for athletic competition, and so on. None of these would constitute the sort of belief of interest to the authors. These are instead forms of “make belief,” where the subject does not really believe, since he affirms _essentially_ for pragmatic purposes. To say that he affirms “essentially” for pragmatic purposes is to say that the extent to which he affirms in the endeavor to hit the mark of truth is not by itself sufficient to yield the affirmation, in the absence of those operative pragmatic purposes. By contrast, real belief that p is a disposition to affirm that p in the endeavor to affirm correctly on that matter, with truth, where the extent to which the subject affirms in that endeavor _does_ suffice by itself to yield the affirmation. You really believe (judgmentally) all and only what you are disposed to affirm when your endeavor is epistemically pure and disinterested, and aims to attain truth reliably enough on the question at hand.

Apt means–end action, whose success manifests (sufficient) competence plausibly requires a level of knowledge of the means–end proposition by the agent. He must have at least animal knowledge that through those means he could attain his end. Consider the case of a pilot trainee who could just as easily be under simulation as flying a real plane. Since she is unable to discriminate her actual situation aloft from a simulation that she might now be under, it is implausible that, so situated, she could really know she is aloft looking down on her potential targets. We might still insist that Simone must have a level of “knowledge,” perhaps metaphorically so called, that by shooting now she would hit her target. This chapter spells out the conditions required for these various levels of knowledge, at least the animal and the reflective, conditions that will require more than just aptness.

In response to the well‐known circularity problems posed by Descartes and Moore, recommends externalist virtue epistemology, according to which a true belief amounts to knowledge if its truth is not an accident, i.e. if it was produced by apt faculties. Starting with the recognition of instances of perceptual knowledge produced by apt faculties, we can infer that our perceptual faculties must be reliable. Such reasoning invites the objection that in parallel fashion, the owner of a crystal ball can rely on his crystal ball itself to argue for its reliability. Replies that although things might be parallel as far as justification and internal coherence are concerned, a crucial difference arises when we consider the reliability of the sources in question: whereas our perceptual faculties are reliable and thus produce knowledge, the crystal ball is unreliable and thus fails to give its user knowledge. Acknowledges, however, that the exercise of apt faculties produces merely _animal_ knowledge, and thus advocates what he calls “virtue perspectivism”: the view that _reflective_ knowledge – a higher achievement than the acquisition of mere animal knowledge – arises only when we succeed in understanding _how_ we know.

A Virtue Epistemology presents a new approach to some of the oldest and most gripping problems of philosophy, those of knowledge and scepticism. Ernest Sosa argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. By adopting a kind of virtue epistemology in line with the tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes, he presents an account of knowledge which can be used to shed light on different varieties of scepticism, the nature and status of intuitions, and epistemic normativity.

This chapter aims to provide an account of Descartes's project in the _Meditations_ that will fit various passages in the text that are incompatible with earlier interpretations. It emerges that Descartes upholds in all of its parts an epistemology that has come to be knows on the contemporary scene as “virtue epistemology.” This is the robust virtue epistemology that takes epistemic normativity to be the AAA performance normativity of accuracy, adroitness, and aptness, that distinguishes between animal and reflective knowledge, and that embraces epistemic circularity.

Epistemic circularity is discussed in four sections:1. Two forms of seemingly bad bootstrapping are explained. 2. Bootstrapping to the reliability of a competence that is not reason-involving also seems bad. We cannot provide a faculty with its required epistemic standing just by drawing the conclusion that it is reliable from a track-record argument based exclusively on data acquired through trusting that very faculty. The fundamental epistemic standing of our basic faculties derives rather from their serving us well in the harvest of information proper to a rational animal. 3. Although our basic competences acquire epistemic status in the way explained, this status might still be enhanced with the help of proper reasoning. 4. An argument is advanced in defense of trust in our epistemic faculties, one that involves circularity of a sort. A transcendental argument with that conclusion, based on content externalism, has been prominent in recent decades. The transcendental argument in this section is different, though complementary.

What follows lays out and rebuts methodological objections to metaphysical analysis. Metaphysical analysis must be distinguished from conceptual or semantic inquiry, and also from the mere search for necessary biconditionals, which can fail to provide the metaphysical explanation of special interest to the philosopher. Clarity on the metaphysical project of analysis protects a traditional form of armchair analysis from two radically different attacks. Section 1 will lay out that traditional approach, which turns out to be safe from the objections aimed against more familiar approaches in Timothy Williamson’s _Philosophy of Philosophy_. Section 2 will rebut the x-phi critique of the armchair, with a defense based in part on the results of Section 1.