Ernest Sosa. A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume I. Oxford: Oxford University Press2007. Pp. xiii + 149.

AbstractIn his Reflective Knowledge, Ernest Sosa offers a theory of knowledge, broadly virtue-theoretic in character, that is meant to transcend simple ways of contrasting "internalist" with "externalist" or "foundationalist" with "coherentist" approaches to knowledge and justification. Getting beyond such simplifications, Sosa thinks, is the key to finding an exit from "the Pyrrhonian Problematic": the ancient and profound skeptical problem concerning the apparent impossibility of validating the reliability of our basic epistemic faculties and procedures in a way that escapes vicious circularity. Central to Sosa's anti-skeptical strategy is the claim that there are two kinds of knowledge. His thought is that animal knowledge, which can be understood in purely reliabilist terms, can ground justified trust in the reliability of our basic cognitive faculties, thus elevating us (without vicious circularity) to the level of reflective knowledge. I offer a sketch of an alternative approach, linking knowledge and justification with epistemic accountability and responsible belief-management, which casts doubt on the idea that "animal" knowledge is knowledge properly so-called. However, it turns out that this approach is (perhaps surprisingly) close in spirit to Sosa's. I suggest that the differences between us may rest on a disagreement over the possibility of providing a direct answer to the Pyrrhonian challenge.

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ARE INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES TRUTH-RELEVANT?

Episteme ◽

10.1017/epi.2017.26 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 381-392

Author(s):

Blake Roeber

Keyword(s):

Virtue Epistemology ◽

True Belief ◽

Intellectual Virtue ◽

Narrow Sense ◽

Pragmatic Encroachment ◽

Intellectual Virtues ◽

Ernest Sosa ◽

Value Of Knowledge ◽

Wide Range

ABSTRACTAccording to attributor virtue epistemology (the view defended by Ernest Sosa, John Greco, and others), S knows that p only if her true belief that p is attributable to some intellectual virtue, competence, or ability that she possesses. Attributor virtue epistemology captures a wide range of our intuitions about the nature and value of knowledge, and it has many able defenders. Unfortunately, it has an unrecognized consequence that many epistemologists will think is sufficient for rejecting it: namely, it makes knowledge depend on factors that aren't truth-relevant, even in the broadest sense of this term, and it also makes knowledge depend in counterintuitive ways on factors that are truth-relevant in the more common narrow sense of this term. As I show in this paper, the primary objection to interest-relative views in the pragmatic encroachment debate can be raised even more effectively against attributor virtue epistemology.

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