Ernest Sosa

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 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.

Ernest Sosa extends his distinctive approach to epistemology, intertwining issues concerning the role of the will in judgment and belief with issues of epistemic evaluation. Questions about skepticism and the nature of knowledge are at the forefront. The answers defended are new in their explicit and sustained focus on judgment and epistemic agency. While noting that human knowledge trades on distinctive psychological capacities, Sosa also emphasizes the role of the social in human knowledge. Basic animal knowledge is supplemented by a level of reflective knowledge focused on judgment, and a level of 'knowing full well' that is distinctive of the animal that is rational.

This chapter takes up, in six sections, issues of realism and of ontological and conceptual relativity. Section 1 briefly lays out the kind of absolutist realism of interest in what follows. Section 2 considers arguments against ordinary commonsense entities such as bodies, and for the view that subjects enjoy a superior ontological position. No such argument is found persuasive. I find no good argument against ordinary bodies or other common-sense entities, nor any good argument that subjects enjoy any ontological superiority. Section 3 lays out three options in ontology, opts for a kind of conceptual relativism, and takes up three problems for the proposed view. Section 4 then offers a compromise position based on a kind of existential relativity meant to accommodate our most settled beliefs about what there is, while retaining a fundamentally realist and objectivist ontology. The main argument of that section relies on a distinction between semantical relativity and ontological relativity. Section 5 defends my use of the semantical-ontological distinction against objections to it in the recent literature. Section 6, in conclusion, takes up arguments for the view that, as subjects of consciousness and thought, we must after all occupy a special ontological position in objective reality, one whose status remains mysterious

The Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy was held in Boston in August 1998. Twice in this century has there been a philosophy world congress in the United States, both times in Boston. Congresses have long been held every five years, but mostly in France, Germany, Russia, England, and other European countries. Aside from the two in this country, only one had previously been held in the Americas, in Mexico. The organization responsible for holding such congresses is, and has long been, the Federation International de Societes de Philosophie.

In what way is knowledge better than merely true belief? That is a problem posed in Plato’s Meno. A belief that falls short of knowledge seems thereby inferior. It is better to know than to get it wrong, of course, and also better than to get it right by luck rather than competence. But how can that be so, if a true belief will provide the same benefits? In order to get to Larissa you do not need to know the way. A true belief will get you there just as well. Is it really always better to know the answer to a question than to get it right by luck? In part i we ponder: Is knowledge always better at least in epistemic respects? The affirmative answer is subject to doubts deriving from a conception of belief as sufficient confidence, but is defensible against such doubts. In our search for the special value of knowledge, we then explore in part ii the relation between knowledge and proper action. Part iii goes on to consider how the value of knowledge intuition acquires further interest through its equivalence with the view of knowledge as a norm of assertion. Finally, part iv steps back to examine what we might mean in saying that to know is always, necessarily better than to get it right by luck while really in ignorance. In order to defend our value-of-knowledge intuition we need first to understand it more clearly. Part iv offers an explanation.

What modal relation must a fact bear to a belief in order for this belief to constitute knowledge of that fact? Externalists have proposed various answers, including some that combine externalism with contextualism. We shall find that various forms of externalism share a modal conception of “sensitivity” open to serious objections. Fortunately, the undeniable intuitive attractiveness of this conception can be explained through an easily confused but far preferable notion of “safety.” The denouement of our reflections, finally, will be to show how replacing sensitivity with safety makes it possible to defend plain Moorean common sense against the spurious advantages over it claimed by skeptical, tracking, relevant-alternative, and contextualist accounts.