Ernest Sosa

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.

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."

This chapter has four parts. The first lays out Williamson's account of mental concepts and mental states, and his characterization of knowledge as the most general factive stative attitude. The second problematizes the account of mental states and the characterization of knowledge, and offers an alternative account of when a state is purely mental; according to this account, knowledge really is mental only by courtesy of the contained belief (an internalist intuition opposed to the externalism featured in the book). The third part reflects on possible sources and support for such a conception of the purely mental. The fourth and last part takes up the KK principle, Williamson's reductio of it, and the consequences of that for the possibility of reflective knowledge.