Abstract
Paul Boghossian discusses critically my account of intuition as a source of epistemic status. Stewart Cohen takes up my views on skepticism, on dreams, and on epistemic competence and competences and their relation to human knowledge. Hilary Kornblith focuses on my animal/reflective distinction, and, along with Cohen, on my comparison between how dreams might mislead us and how other bad epistemic contexts can do so. In this paper I offer replies to my three critics.
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Notes
Appendix: Here I add two subsidiary points. i. Even the modular competences come in degrees of sophistication and reliability. An archer who would fail without a special effort, since the target is unusually distant, may succeed with the special effort. In that case, he has a competence to hit that distant target with special effort, though he lacks the competence to hit it with normal effort. Similarly, someone may have a competence to hit the mark of truth while sleep-deprived given unusual concentration, though not otherwise. ii. About the killer red light, we need to see the case more fully developed. As it stands, it seems not to bear on reflective knowledge. Reflective knowledge that p requires that the exercise of your metacompetence would not too easily have issued a false belief. If the jokester operates by shining red light on that surface, then the subject dies. Doesn't our requirement then have the wrong result: namely, that the subject's exercise of his metacompetence would not too easily have issued a false belief? But then the kaleidoscope perceiver seems after all to enjoy reflective knowledge, a bad result. Appearances may here deceive, however; it is less than obvious, surely, that the bad result really follows. For, suppose you are the kaleidoscope perceiver, and suppose indeed that the red light would kill you. What is the effect of this fact on the truth or falsity of the proposition that your exercising your metacompetence would not too easily have issued a false belief? This is not distinctly clear. After all, you cannot exercise your metacompetence just as you die from the red light.
A Virtue Epistemology, p. 41.
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Sosa, E. Replies to commentators on A Virtue Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2007). Philos Stud 144, 137–147 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9374-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9374-x