Ernest Sosa Quotes

When the risk of failure is too high, the right choice is to forbear.

It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.

A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.

Epistemic competence might be posterior to knowledge conceptually, however, while still prior metaphysically.

There's not much to be done about the impossibility. One must instead get rid of the desire.

When you dream, your perceptual (and other) competence is affected. You are then unable to get it right competently with the beliefs in your dream.

The correctness of much testimonially based belief is no more than minimally creditable to the believer.

In order to qualify as a judgment, an affirmation must aim at getting it right aptly, through competence, and not just through a lucky guess.

Judgment is affirmation with the intention to thereby affirm competently enough, and indeed aptly. That distinguishes judgments from mere guesses.

We must distinguish judging from guessing.

If we have a better understanding of knowledge than we do of such justification or competence, then we can explain the latter through the former.

Lowered reliability obviously yields a lesser competence. But lowered breadth does so as well.

Any defense of common sense must allow that it is revisable.

Ultimately, my more significant agreement is with a virtue tradition that features Aristotle and Descartes.

You attain aptness by judging while in good shape and in a good situation (good light, good distance, etc.), through the exercise of good barn-sorting epistemic competence.

In my view (animal) knowledge is apt belief, where not only the belief (its existence and content) but also its correctness is creditable to the subject's competence.

There isn't a formal definition of success.

I am mainly concerned with unqualified knowledge, by contrast with the varieties of expert knowledge: scientific knowledge of various sorts, legal knowledge, medically expert knowledge, and so on.

Knowledge in my view is a form of action. It involves endeavors to get it right, and more broadly it concerns aimings, which can be functional rather than intentional.

Philosophers need not much use the word 'intuition' or the concept of intuition, except when they happen to be working on the epistemology of the a priori.

Descartes's epistemology is a special case of Aristotle's virtue ethics.

Flourishing is properly the main human end, and flourishing is activity of soul that succeeds in accord with virtue.