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Replies to Ram Neta, James Van Cleve, and Crispin Wright for a book symposium on reflective knowledge (OUP, 2009)

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Notes

  1. Neta also replies to my “speckled hen” problem for classical foundationalism. My response to this reply of his may be found in a book symposium on A Virtue Epistemology forthcoming in Critica in the fall of 2010.

  2. Two explanatory comments: First, by “epistemic justification” I mean the epistemic normative standing that is required of a belief if it is to amount to knowledge. Although there are good reasons to prefer the expression “epistemic competence,” I will use the two expressions interchangeably. Second, it is important to distinguish our formulation from the following: “A source will yield epistemic justification for a deliverance only if the subject is justified in considering it reliable, antecedently to that use of that source.”.

  3. The idea of an epistemic project is explained in Crispin Wright’s comments for this symposium.

  4. See Cohen (2002).

  5. Vogel (2000).

  6. Van Cleve (2003).

  7. This will be relevant below in completing our case against blatant bootstrapping, near the end of section E.

  8. “Bootstrapping in General,” forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (delivered at the 2009 Rutgers Epistemology Conference as the REC YEP paper).

  9. Which he does especially in On Certainty.

  10. “In part,” I say, because blatant bootstrapping may not provide even a miniscule boost for our animal competences. In earlier discussion above this was left open. If we reject any such boost as absurd, then animal competences might of course still provide proper data (unlike arbitrarily chosen gauges) by reasoning from which we can still attain proper standing for reflective endorsement of those very competences. It’s just that the reasoning would need to be more than just blatant track-record bootstrapping.

References

  • Cohen, S. (2002). Basic knowledge and the problem of easy knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65, 309–329.

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  • Van Cleve, J. (2003). Is knowledge easy—Or impossible? Externalism as the only alternative to skepticism. In S. Luper (Ed.), The skeptics: Contemporary essays (pp. 45–59). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Company.

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  • Vogel, S. (2000). Reliabilism leveled. The Journal of Philosophy, 97(11), 602–623.

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  1. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Ernest Sosa

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Sosa, E. Replies to Ram Neta, James Van Cleve, and Crispin Wright for a book symposium on reflective knowledge (OUP, 2009). Philos Stud 153, 43–59 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9646-5

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