scholarly journals Descartes’s Pyrrhonian Virtue Epistemology

Epistemology ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Reflective Knowledge ◽  
Animal Knowledge ◽  
First Order ◽  
Cartesian Circle

This chapter discusses how Descartes uses his principle of clarity and distinctness to raise his first-order judgments to the scientia level. Error is what one must avoid, not just falsity; so he seeks not just truth but also aptness. You are to assure yourself that you attain such aptness, which is required for confidence that you avoid error and attain certainty. But this assurance is forthcoming only with assurance that the operative source of your judgment is indeed a reliable-enough competence. This raises an issue of circularity, also known as the Cartesian Circle. The chapter shows how this circle also affects contemporary virtue epistemology when it postulates a level of reflective knowledge above that of animal knowledge.

scholarly journals UNREFLECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY

Episteme ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 411-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Kelp
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Difficult Problem ◽  
Knowledge Claim ◽  
Reflective Knowledge ◽  
Animal Knowledge ◽  
Is Success ◽  
The Core ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
Fake Barn ◽  
Lack Of Knowledge

AbstractVirtue 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.

Pyrrhonian Skepticism and Two Kinds of Knowledge

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Williams
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Reflective Knowledge ◽  
Animal Knowledge ◽  
Ernest Sosa ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Pyrrhonian Skepticism ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
Skeptical Problem ◽  
Vicious Circularity ◽  
Direct Answer

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.

scholarly journals Memory and reflection

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (spe2) ◽  
pp. 151-168
Author(s):  
Chienkuo Mi
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Animal Cognition ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
First Order ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Analects ◽  
Normative Status ◽  
Previous Learning

Abstract: I have argued that the Analects of Confucius presents us with a conception of reflection with two components, a retrospective component and a perspective component. The former component involves hindsight or careful examination of the past and as such draws on previous learning or memory and previously formed beliefs to avoid error. The latter component is foresight, or forward looking, and as such looks to existing beliefs and factors in order to achieve knowledge. In this paper, I raise the problem of forgetting and argue that most of contemporary theories of knowledge have to face the problem and deal with the challenge seriously. In order to solve the problem, I suggest a bi-level virtue epistemology which can provide us with the best outlook for the problem-solving. I will correlate two different cognitive capacities or processes of “memory” (and “forgetting”) with the conception of reflection, and evaluate them under two different frameworks, a strict deontic framework (one that presupposes free and intentional determination) and a more loosely deontic framework (one that highlights functional and mechanical faculties). The purpose is to show that reflection as meta-cognition plays an important and active role and enjoys a better epistemic (normative) status in our human endeavors (cognitive or epistemic) than those of first-order (or animal) cognition, such as memory, can play.

Knowing Full Well

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Epistemic Circularity ◽  
Good Judgment ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
First Order ◽  
Knowledge Norm ◽  
Epistemic Competence

This book explains the nature of knowledge through an approach originated by the author years ago, known as virtue epistemology. The book provides a comprehensive account of the author's 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. The book 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.

Grades of Knowledge

2021 ◽  
pp. 144-156
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Second Order ◽  
Animal Knowledge ◽  
First Order

Sub-credal animal knowledge requires apt alethic affirmation, but judgment aims not just at success of such affirmation but at apt success. To succeed with this aim, as one affirms, it is required that one be able to tell that one would then get it right aptly (or at least that one would likely enough get it right aptly). The judgmental knower must have a second-order grasp—an affirmative thought or presupposition—that her first-order affirmation would then be apt (or would very likely be apt, or some such thought that would enable enhanced guidance).

scholarly journals Los sueños, la agencia y el juicio

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
Matthew Soteriou
Keyword(s):  
Second Order ◽  
Reflective Knowledge ◽  
Animal Knowledge ◽  
Ernest Sosa ◽  
Virtue Epistemologist

De acuerdo con Sosa, Descartes es un epistemólogo de virtudes, y podemos entender el proyecto epistemológico de Descartes sólo como un proyecto de segundo orden que concuerda con esta manera de entender su epistemología. Mi objetivo en este artículo es el de ahondar en esta comparación con la epistemología de Descartes, principalmente mediante la exploración de una manera en la que uno podría añadir ciertos detalles suplementarios a la postura general de Sosa, con la finalidad de que ésta concuerde de mejor manera con la postura de Descartes, o al menos con la que yo considero que es la postura de DescartesPalabras clave: Ernest Sosa, Descartes, conocimiento animal, conocimiento reflexivo, cognitio, scientia.AbstractAccording to Sosa, Descartes is a virtue epistemologist, and we can make sense of Descartes’ epistemological project only as a second-order project that fits with this view of his epistemology. My aim in this paper is to pursue this comparison with Descartes’ epistemology—principally through exploring a way in which one might add certain supplementary details to Sosa’s general approach, in order to bring it into closer alignment with Descartes’ view, or at least what I take to be Descartes’ view Keywords: Ernest Sosa, Descartes, animal knowledge, reflective knowledge, cognitio, scientia. 

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