Abstract
Ernest Sosa’s work in epistemology has frequently progressed through careful examination of key moments in the history of philosophy. Here I examine some of the most important cases in which this is so, including his introduction of virtues into epistemology and his reason for adding the subject’s perspective to externalism. I especially focus on the way Sosa adapts the structure of Descartes’s epistemology for his own externalist, virtue theoretic answer to skepticism.
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Notes
- 1.
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The requirement that the beliefs in the subject’s pyramid of beliefs supporting a nonbasic belief be true (as well as justified) stems from Sosa’s early attempt to solve the Gettier problem (see Gettier (1963) and Sosa (1991), p. 26). Sosa also was sensitive in his early papers to the “social aspect” of knowledge, in light of the need for the subject to meet the reasonable expectations of her epistemic community (see Harman (1973), pp. 143–4, and Sosa (1991), p. 27).
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Sosa (1991), p. 189.
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She might try counting the speckles on the part of the hen facing her, but in that case she would be acquiring the knowledge through a means other than simply relying on her present experience.
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Sosa (2009), p. 33.
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Zagzebski (1996).
- 9.
Sosa (1991), p. 271.
- 10.
See Goldman (1979) for the classic presentation of reliabilism.
- 11.
Notice, too, that the view as stated provides only a necessary condition for epistemic justification. In response to a series of objections that show reliability can be divorced from what it is rational for a subject to believe (see BonJour (1985), ch. 3), many externalists have added another necessary condition to their account, which requires that there be no undefeated defeaters for their justification.
- 12.
Goldman (1979), p. 11.
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Sosa (2007), p. 29.
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Sosa (1991), p. 274.
- 18.
Sosa (1991), p. 274. Sosa goes on to say that knowledge attributed to animals, who do not have an epistemic perspective, may be only metaphorical (275). But if the introduction of an epistemic perspective is meant to solve the generality problem, even this weakened claim is probably too strong. Without an epistemic perspective, there is no fact of the matter as to which of the animal’s processes are producing its beliefs. A fortiori, there is no fact of the matter as to whether the animal’s beliefs are reliable. Given this, it is hard to see how attribution of knowledge to animals can be correct, even in a merely metaphorical way.
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See Sosa (2011), ch. 1, for a detailed account of the way one’s epistemic perspective (or “meta-apt” competence) interacts with one’s first-order apt competences.
- 20.
Sosa (2009), p. 187.
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Sosa (1991), p. 284.
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Sosa (2007), p. 132.
- 23.
Sosa (2007), p. 132.
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Descartes (1984), p. 25 [AT vii 36 = page 36 of volume seven in the Adam and Tannery edition of Descartes’s works; this pagination is reprinted in the margins of the translation by Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch].
- 25.
Descartes (1984), p. 150 [AT vii 214].
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- 27.
- 28.
Van Cleve (1979), pp. 67–8, fn. 30.
- 29.
Descartes (1984), p. 89 [AT vii 125]. Mersenne also points out that, if Descartes is serious in his claim that he cannot be certain of anything without knowing that God exists, he will have to take back his claim to being certain that he is a thinking thing. The same would apply, presumably, to the cogito as well.
- 30.
Notice that, on the Kenny/Van Cleve interpretation, Descartes seems not to have a good answer to Mersenne’s objection: there is no good reason to deny that the atheist can have the same certainty as Descartes’s theistic meditator.
- 31.
- 32.
Ibid.
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This is the point at which Sosa’s interpretation diverges from that of Kenny and Van Cleve. All three take it to be important that the meditator acquires second-order knowledge (e.g., he comes to know that his clear and distinct perceptions are true), but only Sosa takes the second-order knowledge to have a transformative effect on the first-order knowledge (e.g., his knowledge that he is a thinking thing). For Kenny and Van Cleve the second-order knowledge is just more knowledge, exactly like the first-order knowledge.
- 34.
Speaking of an externalist Moorean approach like his own, which allows for a broader range of intellectual virtues, Sosa says that it allows for one to come to have “a comprehensively coherent view of one’s knowledge of the external world. And its epistemologically significant features would not distinguish it in any fundamental respect from the procedure followed by Descartes” (2009, p. 185, emphasis in the original). See also Sosa (1997) and (2007), pp. 127–33, for presentations of this interpretation of Descartes.
- 35.
Sosa (2009), p. 141. More strongly, Sosa says: “Descartes can see that reason might take him to a position that is sufficiently comprehensive and interlocking—and thereby defensible against any foreseeable attack, no holds barred, against any specific doubt actually pressed or in the offing, no matter how slight” (p. 184).
- 36.
Sosa (2009), pp. 136–7.
- 37.
Descartes (1984), p. 24 [AT vii 35].
- 38.
Descartes (1984), p. 25 [AT vii 36], italics added.
- 39.
The passage continues: “And since I have no cause to think that there is a deceiving God, and I do not yet even know for sure whether there is a God at all, any reason for doubt which depends simply on this supposition is a very slight and, so to speak, metaphysical one. But in order to remove even this slight reason for doubt, as soon as the opportunity arises I must examine whether there is a God, and, if there is, whether he can be a deceiver. For if I do not know this, it seems that I can never be quite certain about anything else.”
- 40.
I point this out only because some scholars attribute a distinctive epistemic status to the cogito, as somehow more certain or better grounded than any other belief the meditator might have. In fact, the cogito is no better epistemically than any other very clear and distinct perception. Why, then, does Descartes seem to place so much weight on it in the Second Meditation? Although a full discussion of that question is outside the scope of this chapter, my suggestion is that he does so for rhetorical purposes: it allows him to begin investigating his own nature as a thinking thing and to begin putting in place the pieces for his argument for dualism.
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It might be objected that this interpretation is not consistent with the way in which Descartes raises these doubts in the First Meditation. Doesn’t he there call into question the clear and distinct perception that 2 + 3 = 5? And, if he does this, isn’t he calling it into question when he is actually entertaining it? It has to be granted that this is the point at which Descartes comes closest to doubting an occurrent clear and distinct perception. However, what he actually says is “since I sometimes believe that others go astray in cases where they think they have the most perfect knowledge, may I not similarly go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if that is imaginable?” (Descartes 1984, p. 14 [AT vii 21]). Here, he is describing an activity one can engage in that would lead one to have a clear and distinct perception (adding two and three, counting the sides of a square), but he does not actually engage in that activity. So, he does not actually have the clear and distinct perception in question at that time.
- 42.
On this point, see also Cottingham (1986), pp. 66–70.
- 43.
Descartes (1984), p. 47 [AT vii 68].
- 44.
Descartes (1984), p. 48 [AT vii 69].
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Thus, the ontological argument serves as a response to skepticism in the same way that the cogito does: the very consideration of a skeptical scenario allows us to set it aside.
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Descartes’s concern with stability is evident from the very beginning of the Meditations. Indeed, he says in the second sentence of the First Meditation, “I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last” (Descartes 1984, p. 12 [AT vii 17], emphasis added). Interestingly, Louis Loeb takes stability to be a chief concern of not only Descartes but of Hume as well; see his (1992) and (2002), respectively. It is also worth noting that the ancient Stoics draw a similar distinction (and one that may well be the source for Descartes’s distinction between cognitio and scientia). According to Cicero, the Stoics “deny that anyone knows anything, except the wise person. Zeno used to demonstrate this with gestures. When he had put his hand out flat in front of him with his fingers straight, he would say: ‘An impression is like this.’ Next, after contracting his fingers a bit: ‘Assent is like this.’ Then, when he had bunched his hand up to make a fist, he would say that that was an ‘apprehension’ or grasp’. (This image also suggested the name he gave to it katalêpsis [‘grasp’], which hadn’t been used before.) Finally, when he had put his left hand on top, squeezing his fist tight with some force, he would say that scientific knowledge was like that: a state none but the wise enjoyed—though as for who is or ever was wise, even they aren’t in a rush to say” (Cicero 2006, p. 84 [Ac. 2.145]). For the Stoics, apprehensive (or “cataleptic”) impressions genuinely are cognitive, but they do not have the stability of scientific knowledge. What is distinctive of the latter is that it not only is certain in itself but also cannot be combined with anything that is not certain, for the Stoic sage is someone who “never makes a false supposition” and “does not assent at all to anything incognitive, owing to his not opining and his being ignorant of nothing” (Stobaeus, translated in Long and Sedley 1987, p. 256).
- 48.
I am grateful to Ernest Sosa for pressing the distinction between these types of stability.
- 49.
Descartes (1984), pp. 104–5 [AT vii 146].
- 50.
Descartes (1984), p. 15 [AT vii 21-2].
- 51.
Descartes (1984), p. 104 [AT vii 146]. This passage is sometimes taken as evidence that Descartes is interested only in subjective certainty rather than in knowledge—see, for example, Loeb (1992)—but I think it is more naturally read as expressing the requirement that skeptical challenges have some degree of plausibility. (Is it really plausible that the meditator is being deceived by an evil demon? Not everyone will think so. But it is important to keep in mind that the evil demon is only an “hypothesis” Descartes makes use of to express in a vivid way the possibility that one’s mind might be constructed so as to go wrong even in what seems clearest. This latter possibility, I take it, will seem plausible, even to people whose basic worldview doesn’t leave room for demons, evil or otherwise.) It is important to keep in mind that Descartes is here discussing only skeptical challenges to clear and distinct perceptions; reasonable skeptical challenges to other intellectual faculties may well be possible. In particular, the epistemological status of memory (as opposed to clear and distinct perceptions insofar as they are remembered) is not addressed in the Meditations. This is not a minor omission.
- 52.
Hatfield (2006, pp. 130–2) draws a distinction between begging the question (taking something to be known when that very thing is in question), formal circularity (using the conclusion as a premise in one’s reasoning), and methodological circularity (using a method to establish the reliability of that very method). On my interpretation of Descartes, he is guilty of none of these.
- 53.
As Kenny says, “The truth of particular intuitions is never called in question, only the universal trustworthiness of intuition, and in vindicating this universal trustworthiness only individual intuitions are utilized. There is no single faculty, or single exercise of a faculty, that is vindicated by its own use” (1968, pp. 194–5). In other words, the certainty of clear and distinct perceptions is not borrowed from the reliability of clear and distinct perception in general but rather is intrinsic to them individually (and, in turn, serves as the ground of the general reliability of the faculty of clear and distinct perception).
- 54.
Sosa (2009), p. 173.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Sosa (2009), p. 159.
- 57.
It is not possible on Descartes’s epistemology because clear and distinct perceptions are rationally convincing in a way that other faculties are not and perhaps cannot be.
- 58.
Sosa (2009), p. 200.
- 59.
- 60.
Sosa (2009), pp. 201–2.
- 61.
For this account of fallibilism, see my (2002). I argue there that fallibilists ultimately must conceive of the relation between a belief and its justification as probabilistic in nature. Justification, as I am using it here, is meant only as a placeholder. It might be fleshed out in various ways, from evidentialism to reliabilism or Sosa’s preferred performance normativity account. See also Hetherington (1999).
- 62.
Notice, too, that the thoughtful subject could reach the conclusion that she does in fact know what time it is. If this conclusion is true and reliably formed (and not subject to defeat), there is no reason why it could not itself count as knowledge. Even so, the thoughtful subject might still wonder whether she knows what time it is (and might also still wonder whether she knows that she knows what time it is).
- 63.
If this is correct, it conflicts with the standard way of understanding epistemic possibility, which accepts the following biconditional: it is epistemically possible that p for S just in case S does not know that not-p. But a view of this sort is very hard to reconcile with fallibilism. Given the sheer implausibility of the claim that I couldn’t possibly be dreaming, I take it that it is reasonable to prefer fallibilism to the above account of epistemic possibility. A more promising strategy, then, might be to link epistemic possibility to certainty, rather than to less secure forms of knowledge. Another option would be to take the space of epistemic possibility to be ordered in different ways in accordance with different degrees of knowledge (assuming that knowledge does come in degrees, ranging from certainty down to knowledge that is just well grounded enough to surpass the minimal threshold of epistemic excellence consistent with knowledge in general). For more on these ways of understanding epistemic possibility, see Reed (2010) and (forthcoming).
- 64.
- 65.
According to Plantinga (2000), “we are to follow reason, in the formation of religious opinion, but so doing does not preclude accepting certain propositions as specially revealed by God, and accepting them on that basis” (p. 81). Other philosophers, of course, have been willing to accord an even greater weight to revelation, taking it to trump reason when they conflict. For example, Pierre Bayle, the great early modern skeptic, says in his entry on Pierre Bunel, “Reason is a veritable Penelope, unraveling during the night what she had been weaving during the day. Thus, the best use that can be made of the study of philosophy is to realize that it is a misleading way, and that we ought to look for another guide, which is the light of revelation” (1965, p. 42). Although we can never be confident that Bayle is sincere when he says things like this, it is clear that many of his contemporaries—and some of ours—would agree (sincerely) with the claim.
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Acknowledgments
For comments on an earlier version of this chapter, I am grateful to Claudio de Almeida, Stephen Hetherington, Jennifer Lackey, and (of course) Ernie Sosa. For some of the material here, I rely on my paper, “Knowledge, Doubt, and Circularity,” forthcoming in Synthese.
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Reed, B. (2013). Historical Reflections: Sosa’s Perspective on the Epistemological Tradition. In: Turri, J. (eds) Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 119. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5934-3_12
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