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Ernest Sosa

Ernest Sosa is a Cuban-born American epistemologist who taught for many years at Brown University and later at Rutgers. He is a leading architect…

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b. 1940 · Cárdenas (Cuba); Providence; New Brunswick, New Jersey

Traditions: Analytic

Ernest Sosa is a Cuban-born American epistemologist who taught for many years at Brown University and later at Rutgers. He is a leading architect of virtue epistemology, which treats knowledge as a kind of successful performance that is creditable to the knower's competence. In the dispute between internalists and externalists about justification, his work occupies an influential middle ground: reliable faculties do much of the work, but a reflective perspective on one's own reliability marks a higher grade of knowing.

Key ideas

  • Knowledge is belief that is apt: accurate because it manifests the believer's epistemic competence.
  • He distinguishes animal knowledge, which needs only reliable faculties, from reflective knowledge, which adds a perspective endorsing those faculties.
  • Performances in general can be assessed as accurate, adroit and apt, and belief is one such performance.
  • He defended a safety condition on knowledge as an alternative to sensitivity-based accounts.

Major works

  • Knowledge in Perspective (1991)
  • A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge (2007)
  • Reflective Knowledge (2009)
  • Judgment and Agency (2015)

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