Ernest Sosa

Naturalism rejects a sui generis and fundamental realm of the evaluative or normative. Thought and talk about the good and the right must hence be understood without appeal to any such evaluative or normative concepts or properties. In Sections I and II, we see noncognitivism step forward with its account of evaluative and normative language as fundamentally optative or prescriptive. Prescriptivism falls afoul of several problems. Prominent among them below is the “problem of prima facie reasons”: the problem, namely that prescriptions do not properly capture the character of defeasibility of the prima facie, featured by nearly all our moral convictions. We find in Section II that, ironically, emotivism, with its emphasis on optative rather than prescriptive language, though historically more primitive, is yet better attuned to that crucial prima facie aspect of the normative and the evaluative. But even emotivism still faces serious difficulties that beset noncognitivism generally, such as the problem of embedding in subordinate clauses, and the problem of normative fallibility. That takes us up to Section III.

A tercentenary conference of March, 1985, drew to Newport, Rhode Island, nearly all the most distinguished Berkeley scholars now active. The conference was organized by the International Berkeley Society, with the support of several institutions and many people. This volume represents a selection of the lead papers deliv ered at that conference, most now revised. The Cartesian marriage of Mind and Body has proved an uneasy union. Each side has claimed supremacy and usurped the rights of the other. In anglophone philosophy Body has lately had it all pretty much its own way, most dramatically in the Disappearance Theory of Mind, whose varieties vary in appeal and sophistication, but uniformly shock sensibili ties. Only recently has Mind reasserted itself, yet the voices of support are already a swelling chorus. "Welcome," Berkeley would respond, since "... all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth... have not a subsis tence without a mind... ". In fairness, Berkeley does playa Disappearance trick of his own - with Matter now into the hat. But his act is far subtler than any brute denial of the obvious, and seeks rather to explain than bluntly to reject. Perhaps we are today better prepared to appreciate his insights.

This paper was written for a panel session, in which I was asked to represent an analytic perspective. On reflection I found that there is no such thing, however, and that what best unifies the analytic traditions is not even a set of questions, much less a set of answers, but only agreement on certain standards of clarity and argumentation, and an interest in dialectic and debate. Certain issues have long dominated the analytic agenda, it is true, and I see no better way to represent an analytic perspective than to enter into a bit of dialectic and debate on one of these, in a way that I hope will be clear and cogent.

From the back cover: "Ever since Plato, philosophers have faced one central question: What is the scope and nature of human knowledge? In this volume the distinguished philosopher Ernest Sosa has collected his essays on this subject written over a period of twenty-five years. All the major topics of contemporary epistemology are covered: the nature of propositional knowledge, externalism versus internalism, foundationalism versus coherentism, and the problem of the criterion. The resulting book is a valuable resource for scholars and can serve as a textbook for graduate seminars in epistemology."

There is a controversy in contemporary philosophy over the question whether or not knowledge must have a foundation. On one side are the foundationalists, who do accept the metaphor and find the foundation in sensory experience or the like. The coherentists, on the other side, reject the foundations metaphor and consider our body of knowledge a coherent whole floating free of any foundations. This controversy grew rapidly with the rise of idealism many years ago, and it is prominent today not only in epistemology proper but also in philosophy of science and even in ethics. The discussion of this issue has been lamentably hampered by confusion and misunderstanding, and in this neither side is wholly innocent. The reflections that follow are not meant to settle the controversy, but only to help us understand it more clearly.

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

In “Tracking, Competence, and Knowledge,” Ernest Sosa notes that in attempting to account for the conditions for knowledge, externalists have proposed that the justification condition be replaced or supplemented by the requirement that a certain modal relation be obtained between a fact and a subject's belief concerning that fact. While assessing attempts to identify such a relation, he focuses on an account labeled “Cartesian‐tracking”, which accounts for the relation in the form of two conditionals. If a person S believes a proposition P → P P → S believes P. Sosa suggests that be abandoned as a requirement, and that, equipped with his modifications, can offer promising results in connection with skepticism. He argues that modified coupled with the requirement that S's belief be “virtuous” can illuminate the nature of propositional knowledge.