Münster Lectures in Philosophy 3

Amrei BahrMarkus Seidel Editors

Ernest SosaTargeting His Philosophy

Münster Lectures in Philosophy

Volume 3

Series editorDepartment of Philosophy, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster,Münster, Germany

Since 1997 the Department of Philosophy at the University of Münster has hosted the Münster Lectures in Philosophy. This lecture series gives especially young researchers in philosophy and adjacent disciplines the opportunity to enter into an intellectual exchange with internationally and nationally renowned philosophers. Each volume of the series contains an evening lecture by the guest, critical contributions regarding the guest’s work provided by the participating young researchers, and commentaries of the guest relating to these contributions.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13531

Amrei Bahr • Markus Seidel Editors

Ernest Sosa Targeting His Philosophy

ISSN 2367-0991 ISSN 2367-1009 (electronic) Münster Lectures in Philosophy ISBN 978-3-319-32517-0 ISBN 978-3-319-32519-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32519-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944418

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland

Editors Amrei Bahr Philosophisches Seminar Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Münster , Germany

Markus Seidel Zentrum f. Wissenschaftstheorie Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Münster , Germany

Let me emphasize how wonderful it was to participate in the Münster events — I will always remember my visit there as one of the highlights of my life as philosopher.

Ernest Sosa

vii

Pref ace

Ernest Sosa is one of the most distinguished contemporary philosophers. His groundbreaking work in epistemology has shaped the pertinent debates with con-tinuing impact. Beyond that, he has also contributed greatly to a variety of philo-sophical areas, most prominently metaphysics, metaphilosophy and philosophy of language.

This book, resulting from the 18th Münster Lectures in Philosophy, provides the reader with exclusive insights into Ernest Sosa’s latest ideas as well as main aspects of his philosophical work of the last 50 years. It includes an original paper by Sosa on his most recent work in epistemology and seven critical papers that target a wide range of topics from Sosa’s oeuvre, as well as replies by Sosa.

In the fi rst paper of the volume, entitled Knowledge in Action , Sosa argues that knowledge is subject to a certain sort of normativity which is distinctive of action and accounts for this sort of normativity by drawing on a distinction between the three aspects of accuracy, adroitness and aptness (AAA). He introduces this account with his famous example of the archer who consciously shoots at a certain target: If the attempt of the archer to hit the target succeeds, what can be said about the shot is that it was accurate. If the attempt was skillfully performed, we can call the shot adroit. A shot that is both accurate and adroit does not have to be apt, as, for aptness, a certain connection is required between accuracy and adroitness: In order for the shot to be called apt, it must as well be the case that it is accurate because it is adroit. Sosa applies his account to actions of several kinds, including knowledge itself. In this way, Sosa’s AAA account provides a basis for a typology of knowledge that distinguishes animal knowledge, refl ective knowledge and knowledge full well.

The second paper in the volume takes up this account of knowing full well as developed in Sosa’s recent work on virtue epistemology and aims to show that it does not provide a satisfactory response to the skeptic. Also tackling potential gaps in Sosa’s virtue epistemology, the third paper considers how to integrate the phe-nomenon of testimony into Sosa’s theory of knowledge.

Arguably, knowledge full well is reserved for rational beings. Thus, it would be disastrous for human ambitions with regard to such knowledge if they were irratio-nal in general as supposedly suggested by some empirical fi ndings. The fourth

viii

paper discusses Sosa’s claim that these alleged empirical challenges to human ratio-nality rest on a conceptual confusion and presents his account of rationality as being incomplete.

Empirical challenges to philosophical claims are also in the focus of the fi fth paper, though here with respect to metaphilosophical issues raised by the so-called X-Phi movement: The authors argue that Sosa’s prominent response to the doubts regarding both philosophy’s scientifi c status and potential as put forward by the movement’s proponents remains unsatisfactory.

Both the sixth and the seventh paper are dedicated to Sosa’s work in the area of metaphysics. The sixth paper questions whether Sosa’s idea to discuss different varieties of causation could be implemented fruitfully in current debates concerning causation and constitution. The seventh paper presents several puzzles with respect to Sosa’s suggestion of a middle way between existential relativism and absolutism, questioning the relation between ontological and conceptual forms of relativism.

The relationship between concepts and the world also plays a crucial role in the eighth paper: The authors present Sosa’s account of the relation between mind and world as a form of externalistic internalism that, they argue, fails to solve a number of problems. The volume closes with a ninth paper that comprises Sosa’s replies to the seven previous papers.

As in Sosa’s archer example, the authors of this volume have aimed at different aspects of Sosa’s philosophy as targets of their critical papers. Traditionally, the Münster Lectures in Philosophy give especially young researchers in philosophy and adjacent disciplines the opportunity to enter into an intellectual exchange with internationally and nationally renowned philosophers. In line with this idea, also this time faculty members and advanced students brought up their arguments in discussion with our guest Ernest Sosa. We give thanks to all contributors for their commitment in preparing the papers and their dedication to the project. Furthermore, hosting an event like the Münster Lectures would be impossible without helping hands in the background – hence, our thanks go to those who made the Münster Lectures such a smoothly running and enjoyable event. Moreover, we thank the team from Springer Publishers for supporting us in all the various stages of the project. Most importantly, we cordially thank Ernest Sosa who was not only a great inspiration in terms of philosophy but also a truly wonderful guest.

Münster, Germany Amrei Bahr Markus Seidel

Preface

ix

Contents

1 Knowledge in Action ................................................................................. 1 Ernest Sosa

2 Manifesting One’s Competences Successfully and Aptly: Enough to Beat the Skeptic? ................................................. 15 Eike Buhr , Ludger Jansen , and Lars Kiesling

3 Putting Testimony in Its Place ................................................................. 33 Karen Meyer-Seitz , Christian Quast , and David P. Schweikard

4 Man the Irrational Animal? ..................................................................... 53 Marvin Ester , Julia Friederike Göhner , and Jan Tilmes

5 Yes There Can! Rehabilitating Philosophy as a Scientific Discipline ........................................................................... 67 Amrei Bahr , Charlott Becker , and Christoph Trüper

6 Causation, Constitution, and Existence .................................................. 85 Gordon Leonhard , Paul M. Näger , and Andreas Schäfers

7 A Snowslide of Entities ............................................................................. 101 Markus Seidel and Alexander Thinius

8 What Makes My Thought About X a Thought About X ? ..................... 119 Tim Grafe and Jan G. Michel

9 Replies ........................................................................................................ 135 Ernest Sosa

1© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. Bahr, M. Seidel (eds.), Ernest Sosa, Münster Lectures in Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32519-4_1

Chapter 1 Knowledge in Action

Ernest Sosa

Abstract It is argued that knowledge is a form of action. It is a kind of successful attempt to attain the truth. The success must avoid a particular sort of “epistemic luck”. It must derive from competence rather than luck. Knowledge, then, is a judg-ment or belief that aims at truth and attains accuracy not by luck but through the agent’s cognitive adroitness, so that the attainment is apt. A higher grade of knowl-edge then requires that the agent attain aptly not only the accuracy (truth) but even the aptness of that fi rst-order success. This more fully apt success is on a higher level of epistemic achievement, and in this respect is a special case of a general truth of performance normativity that applies across domains of human performance, whether in the arts, in sports, in the professions, and so on. An attempt in general reaches that higher level of achievement by being not only apt but fully apt.

1.1

Knowledge is a form of action, to know is to act, and knowledge is hence subject to a sort of normativity distinctive of action, including intentional action. Or so it will be argued below. 1

Actions come in two sorts: attempts and achievements. When you attempt to reach some objective, you act in so doing, so that your action is constituted by your attempt. Thus, you may attempt to turn on light L by fl ipping switch S. Whether you succeed or not, you have done something, you have at least tried. Compare the cor-responding achievement: namely, your turning on light L by fl ipping switch S. This achievement can then be conceived as constitutively a success, and therefore distinct from the attempt that it crowns.

1 This is the 2014 Münster Lecture. I am grateful to the Münster philosophers for the invitation, for their discussion of the lecture, and for the associated workshop on my published work. Special thanks are due Amrei Bahr and Markus Seidel for their warm hospitality and philosophical conversation.

E. Sosa (*) Department of Philosophy , Rutgers University , 106 Somerset St , New Brunswick , NJ 08901 , USA e-mail: ernestsosa@mac.com

2

More broadly, there are aimings of two sorts: intentional aimings, fi rst, and func-tionings, second. We focus below mainly on intentional aimings, though our account will be extensible to cover aimings generally. Thus, the account can be extended to cover also teleological functionings, as when the heart beats so as to circulate the blood.

1.2

We begin with an example favored by the Greeks, that of archery. An archer who consciously aims to hit a certain target draws, aims, and shoots. He attempts to hit the target. This attempt is immediately subject to a sort of normativity inherent to and distinctive of attempts. Attempts that succeed are preferable , simply as attempts. Success is obviously better than failure. An accurate shot is in that way a good shot, and better than one that misses.

We can also assess that attempt, as an attempt, in a second way. An attempt can be more or less skillful, more or less competent or adroit. An archery shot is adroit if and only if, as the arrow leaves the bow, it is oriented well and powerfully enough.

A shot that is both accurate and adroit can still fall short. Consider an adroitly shot arrow leaving the bow with an orientation and speed that would normally take it straight to the bull’s eye. A gust of wind comes along and diverts it, however, but a second gust then nudges it back to its original trajectory. This shot is both accurate and adroit, but it fails to be apt. A shot’s aptness requires that its success be attained not just by luck (such as the luck of that second gust). The success must rather mani-fest competence.

1.3

So, we have a AAA account of a normativity that pertains to archery shots. Generalizing from that example, we can see how the account will extend smoothly to cover attempts generally. Any attempt will have a constitutively distinctive aim, and will thus be subject to the normativity of Accuracy, Adroitness, and Aptness.

The account also extends naturally to aims that are not consciously intentional such as the psychological and biological teleology of whole organisms. Such teleo-logical aimings will also succeed or fail, and will manifest some level of compe-tence, where the success may again (or may not) manifest the competence exercised.

E. Sosa

3

1.4

Compare Aristotle:

It is possible to do something that is in accordance with the laws of grammar, either by chance or at the suggestion of another. A man will be a grammarian, then, only when he has both done something grammatical and done it grammatically; and this means doing it in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in himself. (Aristotle EN II 4, 1105a 22ff.)

An utterance can be in accordance with the laws of grammar in the sense that the uttered sentence does not violate proper grammar. This is a kind of success, pro-vided the speaker meant to satisfy grammatical propriety. But the success may fail to be properly in accordance with the laws of grammar in that its success is “by chance”. It may fail to be “in accordance with” the speaker’s grammatical compe-tence or know-how in a deeper sense, one that requires the utterance not only to accord with grammar, but to do so under the guidance of the speaker’s competence or know-how, so that the grammatical success is not just in this sense “by chance”. A monkey hitting the keys of a keyboard may happen to produce a grammatical string, such as “Snow is white”. But Aristotle would not regard this as a success in accordance with the grammatical knowledge in the monkey. In this case the gram-matical knowledge is entirely missing. But even someone competent may succeed not because of their competence, but only because someone whispers the right sen-tence in their ear. Here again the success will be due to chance and not to the gram-matical knowledge of the speaker, especially if the one who whispers is a liar, and also lacks the relevant knowledge of grammar.

1.5

How crucial such a concept of aptness is to Aristotle’s ethics may be seen in the following passage:

[H]uman good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. (Aristotle EN I 7, 1098a 16f.)

Just as the grammaticality of an utterance can be in accordance with the gram-matical knowledge or competence in the agent, so the good quality of an action or an activity can be in accordance with the virtue seated in the agent. In both cases, the good quality of the performance must be suffi ciently attributable to the compe-tence and not just to chance.

1 Knowledge in Action

4

1.6

Virtue epistemology is analogous to such Aristotelian virtue ethics, and is indeed a special case, as will now be argued.

Consider fi rst affi rmations . These can be either public, out loud, or private, to oneself in the privacy of one’s own mind. Affi rmations are more than just sayings . Thus, an actor might say on the stage “It is 11 pm”, without affi rming it. Seated in the audience, you might at that very moment look at your watch and respond to your neighbor’s question by telling him that it is 9 pm. You thereby affi rm that it is 9 pm, but you do not thereby contradict the actor. Although the actor says It is 11 pm , he does not thereby say that it is 11 pm. He speaks his lines but he does not thereby really affi rm anything. His sayings are not affi rmations.

For another example, you might say “There are unicorns” when asked for an example of a grammatical sentence. But you do not thereby declare yourself on what there is; you make no such affi rmation.

1.7

An affi rmation could have any of many and various aims, and it could even have several of them at once. It could aim at misleading someone, as when it is a lie. Or it could be aimed at showing off, or at propping someone up, or at instilling confi -dence in oneself as one enters athletic competition.

An alethic affi rmation must be aimed at truth, at getting it right. All it takes for an affi rmation to be thus alethic is that the following be among its aims: getting it right .

1.8

But we still need at least one more distinction, this time among alethic affi rmations. Some of these are after all just guesses, which are importantly different from judg-ments. How so? A game-show contestant does affi rm what he says and he does so in pursuit of truth. That is after all how he will win the prize, by getting it right. So his affi rmation is certainly aimed at getting it right. Yet it is just a guess and not a judgment. This is at least in part because, though aimed at truth, it has little regard for whether it gets it right through real competence, nor even for whether it so much as meets relevant standards of reliability. All it cares about is getting it right and winning the prize, and aptness is not at all required. In this respect a judgment dif-fers in being aimed not only at truth but also at suffi cient reliability and indeed at aptness, at non-accidentally getting it right through competence, not luck.

E. Sosa

5

A judgment is a full alethic affi rmation, one that aims at both truth and aptness. Again, an affi rmation could have more than one aim at once. In order to constitute a judgment , it must have the following two aims at once: aptness, and thereby truth (since such aptness is constitutively truth through competence ).

1.9

Judgment has thus constitutively a double aim: truth and aptness. So, in order to be (completely) apt as a judgment, its constitutive affi rmation must be doubly apt. An apt judgment is thus a fully apt alethic affi rmation, fully so because it aptly attains not only truth but also aptness.

In order to be (completely) apt as a judgment that p, the constitutive affi rmation must involve two attempts: fi rst, the attempt to get it right on the question whether p; second, the attempt to do so aptly. To be completely apt as a judgment, the con-stitutive affi rmation must hence be apt both in its aiming at truth and in its aiming at aptness. It must attain each of these aims aptly.

1.10

Humans and perhaps other species can perform acts of public affi rmation in the endeavor to truth-tell, acts with crucial importance to linguistic species. (Compare how Descartes takes language to distinguish the human species so signifi cantly from the lower orders.) Again, we need such affi rmations for activities of the great-est import for human life in society: for collective deliberation and coordination, and for the sharing of information. We need people to be willing to affi rm things publicly. And we need them to be sincere (by and large) in doing so, where sincerity involves essentially the alignment of public affi rmation with private judgment. After all, we do want to coordinate in terms of our real wants, and we do want to share information that is reliably enough known, and conveyed through the informant’s desire to join properly in the community. So, private affi rmation also acquires cru-cial importance on the present approach. And this extends naturally to the disposi-tions corresponding to these acts of judgment, the public and the private. Suppose that such judgment and judgmental belief can then be seen to be detachable from functional belief (which is just a matter of degree of confi dence, and can be implicit and functionally understood, in a way that connects it with behavior). Does that make judgment idle and of doubtful concern to the philosophical tradition? I cannot see why that would be so, given the specifi ed respects in which judgment and judg-mental belief are of such crucial importance to a social (and especially to a linguis-tic) species.

1 Knowledge in Action

6

1.11

The confi dence of an eye-exam subject is drained as their gaze moves down the chart and the letters shrink. But that need not deprive the subject of knowledge if they remain nearly infallible. Eventually full-fl edged belief is gone, while knowl-edge plausibly remains, if the subject is still infallible or nearly so. What seems determinative is the near-infallibility that can remain even once confi dence is gone. It seems most plausible to recognize this sort of sub-credal animal knowledge. Compatibly with that, we can still retain our focus on higher varieties of fi rst-order belief and knowledge and on the judgmental sort of knowledge that requires the higher-order aim not just at correctness but also at aptness of affi rmation.

1.12

Aptness fi gures crucially not only in Aristotle’s ethics but also in Descartes’s epis-temology. For Descartes, falsity is suffi cient for error, but not necessary. One can still be in error with a true belief, so long as its truth is not attributable to one’s perception – to one’s clear and distinct enough perception. One’s belief is then true by accident:

If I simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with suffi cient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error. But if in such cases I either affi rm or deny, then I am not using my free will correctly. If I go for the alternative which is false, then obviously I shall be in error; if I take the other side, then it is by pure chance that I arrive at the truth , and I shall still be at fault [...]. In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error. (Descartes [ 1641 ] 1996, Meditation IV, par. 104; emphasis added)

It is also certain that when we assent to some piece of reasoning when our perception of it is lacking, then either we go wrong, or, if we do stumble on the truth, it is merely by acci-dent , so that we cannot be sure that we are not in error. (Descartes [ 1644 ] 1985, Principle 44; emphasis added)

1.13

In the crucial second paragraph of Meditation III we fi nd a further clue. By that point we have fi nally reached a true certainty, sum res cogitans . Having wondered aloud as to what could possibly yield such certainty, Descartes answers his own question: “As far as I can see, certainty here derives from clear and distinct enough perception.” Perception of such clarity and distinctness is said to yield certainty, however, only if nothing false could ever be so clearly and distinctly perceived. It is such clarity and distinctness, then, that will properly account for the correctness of one’s perception, with no chance of falsity, so that it will perfectly explain why the

E. Sosa