In this concise book, one of the world's leading epistemologists provides a sophisticated, revisionist introduction to the problem of knowledge in Western philosophy. Modern and contemporary accounts of epistemology tend to focus on limited questions of knowledge and skepticism, such as how we can know the external world, other minds, the past through memory, the future through induction, or the world’s depth and structure through inference. This book steps back for a better view of the more general issues posed by (...) the ancient Greek Pyrrhonists. Returning to and illuminating this older, broader epistemological tradition, Ernest Sosa develops an original account of the subject, giving it substance not with Cartesian theology but with science and common sense. -/- Descartes is a part of this ancient tradition, but he goes beyond it by considering not just whether knowledge is possible at all but also how we can properly attain it. In Cartesian epistemology, Sosa finds a virtue-theoretic account, one that he extends beyond the Cartesian context. Once epistemology is viewed in this light, many of its problems can be solved or fall away. -/- The result is an important reevaluation of epistemology that will be essential reading for students and teachers. (shrink)

It is a piece of philosophical common sense that belief and knowledge are states. Some epistemologists reject this claim in hope of answering certain difficult questions about the normative evaluation of belief. I shall argue, however, that this move offends not only against philosophical commonsense but also against ordinary common sense, at least as far as this is manifested in the semantic content of the words we use to talk about belief and knowledge. I think it is relatively easily to (...) show with some linguistic tests that ordinary belief and knowledge attributions should be classified aspectually as state descriptions. Hence, the move some epistemologists to deny that belief and knowledge are states threatens to simply change the topic rather than open up answers to difficult questions in epistemology. I do not know fully how to answer the relevant questions about the normative evaluation of belief, but I pursue this critical point here in service of a positive proposal about the general framework in which they should be answered. In brief, the general framework is one which recognizes an important place for what I call state-norms, beside the action-norms which are more familiar from normative theory. And it locates the epistemic norms that apply to beliefs and are relevant for knowledge on the state-norm side of this divide. This turns out to be not only consistent with but indeed to underwrites the philosophical and ordinary common sense that belief and knowledge are states. (shrink)

This paper is an opinionated guide to the literature on normative epistemic reasons. After making some distinctions in §1, I begin in §2 by discussing the ontology of normative epistemic reasons, assessing arguments for and against the view that they are mental states, and concluding that they are not mental states. In §3, I examine the distinction between normative epistemic reasons there are and normative epistemic reasons we possess. I offer a novel account of this distinction and argue that we (...) in fact ought to acknowledge a threefold distinction between objective, possessed, and apparent normative epistemic reasons. In §4, I discuss the question of which normative reasons for doxastic attitudes are the epistemic ones, evaluating reasons against a simple evidentialist answer. Finally, in §5, I look at the role of reasons in epistemology, considering challenges to viewing reasons as the building blocks of epistemic normativity and maintaining that the challenges recommend a novel bi-level epistemology rather than a marginalization of reasons in epistemology. (shrink)

Here’s a nice, simple view. Knowing that p is the sole fundamental aim and achievement in the epistemic domain. It is a manifestation of epistemic competence, and we can metaphysically explain both the existence and the normative status of all other epistemic states in terms of knowledge and the competence it manifests. In this paper I will defend this view from a challenge from Ernest Sosa that knowledge is too weak and primitive to do the work the Simple View asks (...) it to do. He claims that we not only need knowing that p, but also reflectively knowing that p and knowing full well that p. I argue that Sosa is mistaken. Good old knowledge, what Sosa calls animal knowledge, when properly understood, can do all of the work that reflective knowledge and knowing full well are supposed to do. Knowledge, at least in the epistemic domain, is all you need. In section 1, I explain in more detail the challenge that Sosa poses for the Simple View, and consequently my direct virtue epistemology. I then explain Sosa’s accounts of reflective knowledge and knowing full well, further clarifying the debate. In sections 2, 3, and 4, I consider Sosa’s arguments that reflective knowledge and knowing full well are distinctive epistemic achievements. Section 2 addresses his argument from the epistemic evaluability of suspending belief. Section 3 addresses his arguments for the claim that a variety of cases can only be adequately accounted for by invoking these other states. Section 4 addresses his arguments about the role of reflective knowledge in rebutting dream skepticism. Responding to Sosa’s arguments also helps to clarify certain features of knowledge and epistemic competence. I conclude by reviewing these features. (shrink)

This paper considers the place of reasons in the metaphysics of epistemic normativity and defends a middle ground between two popular extremes in the literature. Against members of the ‘reasons first’ movement, we argue that reasons are not the sole fundamental constituents of epistemic normativity. We suggest instead that the virtue-theoretic property of competence is the key building block. To support this approach, we note that reasons must be possessed to play a role in the analysis of central epistemically normative (...) properties, and argue that the relation of possession must be analyzed in terms of competence. But while we diverge with reasons-firsters on this score, we also distance ourselves from those who deny reasons any important role in epistemology. For we maintain that possessed reasons do help to ground deontic facts in the epistemic domain (e.g., facts about what one epistemically ought to believe, may believe, or is justified in believing). Indeed, we present an argument that the possession of sufficient epistemic reasons is necessary and sufficient for propositional justification, and that proper basing on such reasons yields doxastic justification. But since possession and proper basing are themselves grounded in competence, reasons are not the end of the explanatory road: competence enables them to do their work, putting them—and us—in the middle. (shrink)

In this book, Ernest Sosa explains the nature of knowledge through an approach originated by him years ago, known as virtue epistemology. Here he provides the first comprehensive account of his views on epistemic normativity as a form of performance normativity on two levels. On a first level is found the normativity of the apt performance, whose success manifests the performer's competence. On a higher level is found the normativity of the meta-apt performance, which manifests not necessarily first-order skill or (...) competence but rather the reflective good judgment required for proper risk assessment. Sosa develops this bi-level account in multiple ways, by applying it to issues much disputed in recent epistemology: epistemic agency, how knowledge is normatively related to action, the knowledge norm of assertion, and the Meno problem as to how knowledge exceeds merely true belief. A full chapter is devoted to how experience should be understood if it is to figure in the epistemic competence that must be manifest in the truth of any belief apt enough to constitute knowledge. Another takes up the epistemology of testimony from the performance-theoretic perspective. Two other chapters are dedicated to comparisons with ostensibly rival views, such as classical internalist foundationalism, a knowledge-first view, and attributor contextualism. The book concludes with a defense of the epistemic circularity inherent in meta-aptness and thereby in the full aptness of knowing full well. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard is one of today's leading moral philosophers: this volume collects ten influential papers by her on practical reason and moral psychology ...

Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist account of normativity (...) -- Kant on the hypothetical imperative -- Against particularistic willing -- Deciding and predicting -- Autonomy and efficacy -- The function of action -- The possibility of agency -- Non-rational action -- Action -- Attribution -- The psychology of action -- Expulsion from the garden : the transition to humanity -- Instinct, emotion, intelligence, and reason -- The parts of the soul -- Inside or outside -- Pull yourself together -- The constitutional model -- Models of the soul -- The city and the soul -- Platonic virtues -- Justice : substantive, procedural, and platonic -- Kant and the constitutional model -- Defective action -- The problem of bad action -- Being governed by the wrong law -- Or five bad constitutions -- Conceptions of evil -- Degrees of action -- Integrity and interaction -- Deciding to be bad -- The ordinary cases -- Dealing with the disunified -- Kant's theory of interaction -- My reasons -- Deciding to treat someone as an end in himself -- Interacting with yourself -- How to be a person -- What's left of me? (shrink)

One of the many problems that would have t o be solved by a satisfactory theory of empirical knowledge, perhaps the most central is a general structural problem which I shall call the epistemic regress problem: the problem of how to avoid an in- finite and presumably vicious regress of justification in ones account of the justifica- tion of empirical beliefs. Foundationalist theories of empirical knowledge, as we shall see further below, attempt t o avoid the regress by locating a (...) class of empirical beliefs whose justification does not depend on that of other empirical beliefs. Extemalist theories, the topic of the present paper, represent one species of foundationalism. (shrink)

Nomy Arpaly rejects the model of rationality used by most ethicists and action theorists. Both observation and psychology indicate that people act rationally without deliberation, and act irrationally with deliberation. By questioning the notion that our own minds are comprehensible to us--and therefore questioning much of the current work of action theorists and ethicists--Arpaly attempts to develop a more realistic conception of moral agency.

Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental stage sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analyzing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts new light on such philosophical problems as scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The arguments are (...) illustrated by rigorous models based on epistemic logic and probability theory. The result is a new way of doing epistemology and a notable contribution to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This book offers solutions to two persistent and I believe closely related problems in epistemology. The first problem is that of drawing a principled distinction between perception and inference: what is the difference between seeing that something is the case and merely believing it on the basis of what we do see? The second problem is that of specifying which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., directly, or noninferentially, justified) and which are not. I argue that what makes a belief a (...) perceptual belief, or a basic belief, is not any introspectible feature of the belief but rather the nature of the cognitive system, or "module", that is causally responsible for the belief. Thus, even zombies, who in the philosophical literature lack conscious experiences altogether, can have basic, justified, perceptual beliefs. -/- The theories of perceptual and basic beliefs developed in the monograph are embedded in a larger reliabilist epistemology. I use this theory of basic beliefs to develop a detailed reliabilist theory: Inferentialist Reliabilism, which offers a reliabilist theory of inferential justification and which solves some longstanding problems for other reliabilist views by demanding inferential support for some—but not all—beliefs. The book is an instance of a thoroughgoingly naturalistic approach to epistemology. Many of my arguments have an empirical basis, and the view that I endorse reserves a central role for the cognitive sciences—in particular, cognitive neuroscience—in filling in the details of an applied epistemological theory. (shrink)

In the subsequent pages, I want to develop a distinction between wanting and valuing which will enable the familiar view of freedom to make sense of the notion of an unfree action. The contention will be that, in the case of actions that are unfree, the agent is unable to get what he most wants, or values, and this inability is due to his own "motivational system." In this case the obstruction to the action that he most wants to do (...) is his own will. It is in this respect that the action is unfree: the agent is obstructed in and by the very performance of the action. (shrink)

It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the (...) first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (shrink)

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on (...) the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

According to virtue epistemology, knowledge involves cognitive success that is due to cognitive competence. This paper explores the prospects of a virtue theory of knowledge that, so far, has no takers in the literature. It combines features from a couple of different virtue theories: like Pritchard's [forthcoming; et al. 2010] view, it qualifies as what I call an ‘impure’ version of virtue epistemology, according to which the competence condition is supplemented by an additional condition; like Sosa's 2007, 2010 view, it (...) construes the ‘because’ relation at issue in the competence condition in terms of competence manifestation. I argue that this virtue epistemology can steer clear of a number of old and new problems that arise for its rivals on both sides. (shrink)

Virtue epistemological accounts of knowledge claim that knowledge is a species of a broader normative category, to wit of success from ability. Fake Barn cases pose a difficult problem for such accounts. In structurally analogous but non-epistemic cases, the agents attain the relevant success from ability. If knowledge is just another form of success from ability, the pressure is on to treat Fake Barn cases as cases of knowledge. The challenge virtue epistemology faces is to explain the intuitive lack of (...) knowledge in Fake Barn cases, whilst holding on to the core claim that knowledge is success from ability. Ernest Sosa's version of virtue epistemology promises to rise to this challenge. Sosa distinguishes two types of knowledge, animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. He argues that while animal knowledge is present in Fake Barn cases, reflective knowledge is absent and ventures to explain the intuition of ignorance by the absence of reflective knowledge. This paper argues that Sosa's treatment of Fake Barn cases fails as it commits Sosa to a number of highly counterintuitive results elsewhere in epistemology. (shrink)

Non-moral ignorance can exculpate: if Anne spoons cyanide into Bill's coffee, but thinks she is spooning sugar, then Anne may be blameless for poisoning Bill. Gideon Rosen argues that moral ignorance can also exculpate: if one does not believe that one's action is wrong, and one has not mismanaged one's beliefs, then one is blameless for acting wrongly. On his view, many apparently blameworthy actions are blameless. I discuss several objections to Rosen. I then propose an alternative view on which (...) many agents who act wrongly are blameworthy despite believing they are acting morally permissibly, and despite not having mismanaged their moral beliefs.1. (shrink)

... and Normative Epistemology The Distinction Between Metaepistemology and Normative Epistemology Although this terminology is relatively new, ...

I argue against traditional virtue epistemology on which knowledge is a success due to a competence to believe truly, by revealing an in-principle problem with the traditional virtue epistemologist’s explanation of Gettier cases. The argument eliminates one of the last plausible explanation of Gettier cases, and so of knowledge, in terms of non-factive mental states and non-mental conditions. I then I develop and defend a different kind of virtue epistemology, on which knowledge is an exercise of a competence to know. (...) I show how the account, while circular, is not viciously so. It explains both how knowledge is a mental state, as well as the relationship between knowledge and justification, including justified false beliefs and Gettier cases. Moreover, although direct virtue epistemology is compatible with many views on the nature of belief, it can explain how knowledge might be metaphysically more fundamental than belief as well. (shrink)

Tracking accounts of knowledge formulated in terms of counterfactuals suffer from well known problems. Examples are provided, and it is shown that moving to a dispositional tracking theory of knowledge avoids three of these problems.