Abstract
Ernest Sosa has long defended bi-level virtue epistemology on the grounds that it offers the best overall treatment of epistemology’s central issues. A surprising number of problems “yield to” the approach (Sosa, Knowledge in perspective. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1991. p. 9). Sosa applies bi-level virtue epistemology to diagnose and bypass ongoing disputes in contemporary epistemology, including the disputes between foundationalists and coherentists and between internalists and externalists. He also invokes it to explain the nature of epistemic value and the assessment of intellectual performance, to define knowledge, and to defend against skeptical challenges, among other things. Although the two aspects of Sosa’s view, virtue theory and bi-level epistemology, are intimately connected, they are nonetheless conceptually distinct and make isolable contributions to Sosa’s overall project. This chapter will focus primarily on contributions made by virtue theory and secondarily on contributions made by bi-level epistemology, where they are especially relevant to appreciating the limits of the work done by virtue theory in Sosa’s epistemology.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
I don’t intend to equate describing something neutrally, as I use that term here, with describing it objectively or factually. For all I’ve said, reality might not be neutral, and evaluative descriptions might denote objective facts. For more on Sosa’s view of objectivity in matters of value, see Chap. 2 of this volume.
- 3.
- 4.
Precursors of this line of thought can be found earlier in Sosa’s writings. For example, see Sosa (1988: 171) (Reprinted in Sosa 1991: cf. 127–8).
- 5.
Sosa’s solution to this problem for a time also relied on the claim that the belief in question was not only virtuously based on the relevant experience, but also safely (Sosa 2003a: 138–9); see Michael Pace’s discussion of the problem of the speckled hen in Chap. 6 of this volume. More recently, Sosa has abandoned any substantive safety requirement; see Sosa (2007) (especially Chaps. 2 and 5), my discussion below in Sect. 3, and Juan Comesaña’s discussion of Sosa’s views on safety in Chap. 9 of this volume.
- 6.
I follow Sosa in calling it “ontological internalism” (Sosa 2003a: 146). (Compare Sosa 1991: 136: “What is internal in the right sense must remain restricted to … that which pertains to the subject’s psychology.”) The view is also called “mentalism” in the literature, following Conee and Feldman 2001.
- 7.
Sosa also calls this “Chisholmian internalism”: “the view that we have special access to the epistemic status of our beliefs … by means of armchair reflection” (Sosa 2003a: 145).
- 8.
A fourth important point is that dispositions are relative to an overall internal condition. You might be disposed to remain calm when well-rested, but disposed to grow irritated when sleep deprived. A bowling ball is disposed to roll down a hill when its surface is at roughly room temperature, but it isn’t disposed to roll when it’s so hot as to melt or deform on contact. For present purposes, I set aside this further detail of Sosa’s view.
- 9.
Compare Sosa 2003a: 156–61 and 2009: 71–4, where he writes: “An important concept of justification involves evaluation of the subject as someone separable from her current environment …. [W]e might still enjoy such (internal) justification even when victims of the evil demon …. After all, the basis for evaluation is not the demon world but the actual world inhabited by the evaluators who are considering, as a hypothetical case, the case of the victim.”
- 10.
For punctilious readers dutifully checking the original sources, note that Sosa’s earlier stipulative definitions of the terms “apt” and “adroit” differ importantly from his later stipulative definitions of those same terms. For example, compare Sosa 1991: 144, 289 and Sosa 2003a: chap. 9 to Sosa 2007: chaps. 2 and 5. In this chapter, I have chosen to restrict “apt” and “adroit” to their official meaning in Sosa’s current system, where they name crucial statuses in the AAA-model of performance assessment, discussed in Sect. 3 below.
- 11.
- 12.
Sosa 2009 takes up the charges and complaints at great length.
- 13.
A wrinkle added as of late: “A belief … might well be apt without being knowledge. Beliefs are relevantly apt only if they are believings in the endeavor to attain truth. This must now be understood implicitly in the account of animal knowledge as apt belief. The aptness of the belief must be in the endeavor to attain truth” (Sosa 2011: 21).
- 14.
See Turri 2011 for more on this solution to the Gettier problem.
- 15.
For much more on safety in Sosa’s work, see Juan Comesaña’s discussion in Chap. 9 of this volume.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful conversation and feedback, I’m happy to thank Ian MacDonald, Ernest Sosa, and Angelo Turri.
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Turri, J. (2013). Bi-Level Virtue Epistemology. 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_8
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