Ernest Sosa

Testimony is a crucial source of knowledge: we are to a large extent reliant upon what others tell us. It has been the subject of much recent interest in epistemology, and this volume collects twelve original essays on the topic by some of the world's leading philosophers. It will be the starting point for future research in this fertile field. Contributors include Robert Audi, C. A. J. Coady, Elizabeth Fricker, Richard Fumerton, Sanford C. Goldberg, Peter Graham, Jennifer Lackey, Keith Lehrer, Richard Moran, Frederick F. Schmitt, Ernest Sosa, and James Van Cleve.

1. Sensa and propositional experience. 2. An option between propositions and properties (as objects or contents of sensory experience). 3. The property option and adverbialism. 4. Sensa as images, images as intentionalia. 5. Do we refer directly to sensa? 6. Focusing and the supervenience of images and our reference to them: a question raised. 7. Internal and external properties of images and characters. Strict vistas introduced. 8. A correction on strict vistas. 9. Focusing and experience: the question answered. 10. Conclusion.

The mind-body problem arises because of our status as double agents apparently en rapport both with the mental and with the physical. We think, desire, decide, plan, suffer passions, fall into moods, are subject to sensory experiences, ostensibly perceive, intend, reason, make believe, and so on. We also move, have a certain geographical position, a certain height and weight, and we are sometimes hit or cut or burned. In other words, human beings have both minds and bodies. What is the relation between these? Religion often tells us that we are really embodied souls released at death from our bodily prisons. Could this be right?

An intellectual virtue is a quality bound to help maximize one’s surplus of truth over error; or so let us assume for now, though a more just conception may include as desiderata also generality, coherence, and explanatory power, unless the value of these is itself explained as derivative from the character of their contribution precisely to one’s surplus of truth over error. This last is an issue I mention in order to lay it aside. Here we assume only a teleological conception of intellectual virtue, the relevant end being a proper relation to the truth, exact requirements of such propriety not here fully specified.

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 study aims primarily at an account of sensory experience and perception uncommitted to objectual sense data or sense impressions. In the end it does make room for sense impressions, but only as entities somehow abstracted from phenomenological attention to sense experience. The "phenomenological standpoint" is attained by imagining "that a transparent screen has been placed at right angles about three feet from your eyes between you and all the objects before you," and by imagining further that the projection of the objects on such a screen has been cleverly painted on it so as to present an appearance just like that presented by the objects then actually before you. "It is to this possible picture that your attention must now be directed in order for you to be said to be attending to your sense experience itself".