Abstract
Ernest Sosa draws a distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge, and this distinction forms the centerpiece of his new book, A Virtue Epistemology. This paper argues that the distinction cannot do the work which Sosa assigns to it.
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Notes
Sosa (2007).
BonJour (1985, Chap. 3).
I owe the discussion of the last three paragraphs to a conversation with Ed Gettier.
The identification is made again on p. 34:”It helps to distinguish between animal and reflective knowledge, between apt belief simpliciter, and apt belief aptly noted.” It is made again on p. 113: “There is also a higher level of knowledge–reflective knowledge, apt belief aptly noted…” See also pp. 43 and 98.
This was originally introduced by Alvin Goldman—the example was suggested to him by Carl Ginet—in “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” originally published in 1976 and reprinted in Goldman (1992, pp. 85–103). Sosa notes the similarity between these examples in note 1 on p. 96.
I am assuming here what Sosa calls “the orthodox conception” of dreaming. In chapter one of A Virtue Epistemology, Sosa offers an alternative to the orthodox conception, arguing that when one dreams that, for example, one is rushing across campus in order to take an exam, one does not actually form the belief that one is rushing across campus in order to take an exam. In Sosa’s discussion following chapter one, however, the orthodox conception is taken for granted.
Such a response will not satisfy epistemologists attracted to internalism, but Sosa’s notion of animal knowledge, quite clearly, does not present an internalist conception of knowledge. The point here is that, even for externalists, who may dismiss the evil demon out of hand, the problem of dreaming is not so easily dismissed.
References
BonJour, L. (1985). The structure of empirical knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goldman, A. (1992). Liaisons: Philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sosa, E. (1991). Knowledge in perspective: Selected essays in epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sosa, E. (1997). Reflective knowledge in the best circles. Journal of Philosophy, XCIV, 410–430.
Sosa, E. (2007). A virtue epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Joachim Horvath and Jonathan Vogel for helpful comments on a draft of this paper.
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Kornblith, H. Sosa in perspective. Philos Stud 144, 127–136 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9377-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9377-7