Judgment and Agency

Virtue epistemology follows two traditions, as Ernest Sosa explains in this fine new book. One conceives of epistemic normativity in terms of the manifestation of virtuous intellectual character traits such as open-mindedness and intellectual courage. The other conceives of epistemic normativity in terms of competence in getting things right, exemplified in our reliable faculties of perception, memory, and introspection. Thus, we have character- and competence-based virtue epistemology. Sosa's work is often placed in the latter category, and correctly so. But in this new book, Sosa aims to show how a competence-based virtue epistemology can and should give a central role to epistemic agency. He continues to deny that the manifestation of character traits such as open-mindedness and intellectual courage can constitute knowledge. They are only auxiliary virtues. He nevertheless finds a constitutive place for agency in his account of knowledge: knowledge full well, the best kind of knowledge, is explained in broadly agentive terms. Sosa's interpretation of Descartes as a virtue epistemologist in the competence-based tradition is well known. In this book, he mounts a powerful argument that a competence-based virtue epistemology ought to be Cartesian in a further way: it ought to give a central role to agency, even the will.This is a book one will want to return to many times. It is not breezy, easily digested philosophy. But it more than repays careful study. It is a major achievement for epistemology, a comprehensive and profound account of knowledge, informed by the history of the subject as well as by recent trends. I cannot hope to touch on all the many issues discussed in the book, which include not only epistemology but action theory, the metaphysics of competences and generally of dispositions, as well as the normativity of performances in general. Here I will sketch his overall epistemological view and raise a few questions about its components.In past work, Sosa distinguishes between animal and reflective knowledge. Animal knowledge is apt belief, that is, competent belief that reaches the truth through the believer's competence to do so. Reflective knowledge is apt belief aptly noted, that is, apt belief accompanied by an apt belief that the belief is apt. Thus, every case of reflective knowledge is also a case of animal knowledge. But there are cases of mere animal knowledge, such as “automatic” perceptual knowledge, including the visual knowledge that there is a tree ahead and the auditory knowledge that a loud noise came from over there.In the new book, Sosa acknowledges this distinction but takes it to be of secondary importance. The more important distinction is that between animal knowledge and knowing full well. Knowledge full well is fully apt belief, that is, belief that is guided to aptness by an apt belief that one would (likely enough) form an apt belief. The aptness of this guiding belief entails that the target belief is an instance of reflective knowledge (74). Thus, knowledge full well is always reflective knowledge. But the quality of the target belief comes not from the fact that it is reflective knowledge but because it is fully apt, that is, because the target belief is guided to aptness by the belief that it would be apt.The concept of knowing full well appears in Sosa's previous eponymously titled book. The new book explores in detail the connection between knowing full well and agency. According to Sosa, all beliefs are performances, that is, states with aims. All beliefs aim at least at truth. This is itself a low-level sort of agency, insofar as it is telic. But to have an aim is not yet to take us to the sort of agency that involves the will. There is a kind of belief, however, that is within the direct control of the will: judgmental belief. Sosa understands judgment to be a kind of intentional action, an affirmation made in an endeavor to affirm the truth. But judgment involves more than this. Compare it with guessing. One would often guess in cases in which one wouldn't judge. With judgment, one aims to affirm not only truly (as with guessing) but also aptly. On Sosa's finished account of judgment, to judge that p is to affirm that p in an endeavor to affirm aptly on whether p. He takes judgmental belief that p to be a disposition to judge that p, and claims that it inherits the same aims as the corresponding judgment. Moreover, it, too, is under the direct control of the will, as it “can amount to a freely adopted policy” (210).Sosa is careful to allow that there is such a thing as a functional belief that is under the indirect control of the subject. Such beliefs he calls “hybrid functional beliefs” (94). Creatures incapable of judgment (as well as those capable of it) can develop and refine first-order competences through learning. As I understand Sosa, he also thinks that for such creatures employments of first-order competences may even be guided by representations of the likely success of a first-order competence. The range of knowledge full well is therefore not limited to judgmental beliefs. But it does have its limits. Sosa writes that “merely functional representations are doubtful candidates for full aptness” (94). If a belief is not guided by any belief-like state concerning its likely aptness, even an implicit one, it can achieve only the status of aptness, not full aptness, and so cannot be knowledge full well.We can evaluate beliefs, like other performances, with respect to how well they do in respect of their aims. Performances are better, according to Sosa, to the extent that they reach their aims, and better still to the extent that they reach their aims aptly, that is, through competence to do so. A shot attempt in basketball is better not merely if it scores points but if it does so aptly. The same is true of beliefs: any belief is better not merely if true but if apt. But we can go beyond this. Suppose a shot attempt is fully apt. Suppose it aptly scores points because it is guided by the subject's knowledge of which shots she can make competently. Such a shot is better than a merely apt shot, because less is left to luck and more is creditable to the subject's suite of competences. The same is true of beliefs. Beliefs are better to the extent that they are fully apt, guided to aptness by apt beliefs that they would be apt.Sosa claims his new account gives us a better virtue epistemology. He stresses two main benefits. One is that it enables us to better accommodate intuitions about well-known cases discussed in the post-Gettier literature, such as Norman the clairvoyant, True-Temp, and the barn case (77–81). We feel pulled in different directions by these cases, and an adequate epistemology needs to explain the different pulls. Sosa's explanation is that we are pulled in one way when we focus on the fact that the subject has animal knowledge and in another when we focus on the fact that the subject lacks knowledge full well. The other advantage Sosa claims for his new virtue epistemology is that it illuminates the skeptical problematic (74). The skeptical challenge, in both its ancient and modern forms, is best understood as directed at our judgments and judgmental beliefs.Can the new virtue epistemology deliver these advantages? Consider first the cases from the post-Gettier literature. Although Sosa focuses on judgmental belief in his discussion, the key to his accommodation of the relevant intuitions is the distinction between animal knowledge and knowledge full well, a distinction that applies more broadly than within the class of judgmental beliefs. Consider the barn facade case. Usually, we suppose the subject in the relevant cases is a person. But let's suppose that the subject in the barn case is a dog looking for shelter. Does the dog know shelter is available over there (at the barn)? I find it just as tempting to deny (or to ascribe) this knowledge to the dog as to a person capable of judgment, and for the same reasons. I think we should want the same explanation for the case of the dog as for the usual version of the case involving a human. And I think Sosa hopes to give us the same explanation. Whether we're discussing a dog or a human being, and whether we're discussing a nonjudgmental or a judgmental belief, his story is this: when we focus on whether the contained affirmation is animal knowledge (that is, is apt), we intuit “knows,” but when we focus on whether it is an instance of knowledge full well, we intuit “doesn't know.”However, I see one limitation to Sosa's account of the relevant intuitions. Consider a dog's or even a human being's nonagential automatic perceptual belief “there's a barn there.” It seems to me we are more inclined to intuit “knows” when the subject has this belief in normal barn country as opposed to when in fake barn country. But such a belief cannot be an instance of knowledge full well, regardless of whether the subject is in fake or real barn country, because merely functional beliefs cannot be fully apt.1The case of skepticism is complex, and I cannot do justice here to Sosa's nuanced discussion (see especially chapters 9–11). Sosa makes a powerful case that the Greek skeptics, as well as Descartes, conceive of skepticism as a challenge to judgments and judgmental beliefs. However, Sosa is clear in chapter 9 that the skeptic's attack on our entitlement to judge gives way to an attack on the credentials of underlying functional beliefs.2 So, he doesn't claim the skeptic is interested only in attacking our judgments, but that this is an important target of the skeptic.Still, I wonder whether we should take the skeptic's main epistemic challenge to center on functional belief, rather than judgment. The initial target may be the judgment. But if Sosa is right and a judgment is an action made in a certain endeavor, then it is hard to see why the skeptic should have an epistemic objection to the endeavor, at least if we consider an ordinary low-stakes example in which someone aims to affirm with a certain modest degree of aptness. We would seem to be within our epistemic rights to have such an endeavor, when we judge, for instance, that there is a tree out the window. The only epistemic issue will then be the credentials of the underlying functional belief that there is a tree out the window. If this belief has the right credentials, the judgment is fine; if not, not. Again, Sosa acknowledges the inevitability of the skeptic's attack on the credentials of functional beliefs, and he explores in detail ways to fight off the challenge, including appealing to self-presenting states. Perhaps my disagreement is merely over a point of emphasis, but it seems to me that all the epistemic action, so to speak, concerns the challenge to the underlying functional belief and not the challenge to the judgment or judgmental belief.Finally, an important question arises for Sosa's new virtue epistemology that did not arise for his previous views: by giving a role to agency in his account of judgmental belief is he now opening the door to pragmatic encroachment? Sosa acknowledges that indeed he is, but only of a limited kind (60). Stricter standards are employed in the courtroom and the seminar room than around the water cooler, and this is because of variation in our broadly practical interests across these social contexts. However, he stops short of embracing a kind of pragmatic encroachment that might allow justified judgment to vary with the stakes.When it comes to the courtroom or seminar room, as opposed to ordinary life, Sosa sees the varying standards as corresponding to different kinds of judgment. In ordinary life, one makes an ordinary judgment, an affirmation in the endeavor to affirm the truth with a degree of reliability/competence needed for storage of the belief. In the courtroom, one might be willing to make an ordinary judgment but forbear making an expert judgment, which differs from ordinary judgment in that the relevant endeavor is to affirm with more reliability. The same goes for the seminar room when discussing skepticism. Depending on the social context, it might be clear which kind of judgment is relevant. In an ordinary case, one typically doesn't bother considering whether to make types of judgment with which we are concerned in the courtroom let alone the seminar room.One might protest that there is a further kind of judgment—actionable judgment—that one is entitled to make when the stakes are low but not when they are high. If there were such a kind of judgment, this would amount to pragmatic encroachment of the sort Sosa wishes to avoid. Sosa denies that there is any such sort of judgment. When the stakes rise, “the degree of reliability required in a belief worthy of trust as a basis for action” will rise as well (183). But what is affected by the stakes isn't our willingness to make a special sort of judgment—actionable judgment—but rather “how we are willing to choose on a given basis” (184), or how willing we are to act on this or that judgment.I take Sosa to work with the following picture. There are many sorts of judgment, each grounded in an endeavor to affirm with a certain grade of reliability. We might label them by terms like “expert” or “philosophical,” but the main point is that they are ordered in respect of how much reliability one is endeavoring to have for one's affirmation. Pick your judgment type, the thought goes, then whether one is entitled to make a judgment of that type depends only on “purely epistemic factors” such as reliability or degree of competence. When the stakes go up—say one is considering whether to walk across the deep frozen pond—one is entitled to make an ordinary judgment but not to make more demanding sorts of judgment. But the low-stakes case is no different in this respect: one isn't entitled to make the more demanding judgment in a low-stakes case either, for example, when the frozen pond is one-inch deep and one is wearing good boots.The question remains whether the “multitude of judgments” picture captures the epistemic psychology adequately. When the stakes go up, does one have a sense of there being a multitude of judgment types, some of which one can and others of which one can't properly make? Or does one rather have the sense that one simply cannot make a judgment period? Empirical psychology is of obvious relevance here, and Jennifer Nagel (among others) has examined some of its relevant findings. Here I will point only to one consequence of the multitude approach that I find problematic—namely, that on such an approach it will follow that, for any type of judgment whose standard of reliability is less than maximal reliability, there will be situations in which it is reasonable to make apparently absurd judgments of that type. In particular, the judgments I have in mind are such as this: “here are the facts: first, the ice will hold me; second, there is a small chance it won't and if it won't and I try to cross, I risk disaster; the second of these facts is what matters for action, and so, although it is a fact that the ice will hold me, I won't attempt to walk across the pond.” This seems absurd to me. If one feels one can't act on the ice will hold me, one wants to back off from that claim, not to judge it to be true and declare it “a fact.” There is a kind of clash in combining the flat-out judgment the ice will hold me with the refusal to act on it because of worries about the possibility that it is false. This is at least how it feels to me. Here Sosa and I might simply differ, as it is plain from his discussion that it doesn't feel that way to him. But perhaps we could agree that it feels clearly better either to qualify one's judgment in such cases—“the ice almost certainly will hold me”—or to add a tone of attempted self-reassurance—“surely, the ice will hold me, but then again maybe it won't.” Can we explain why these departures from a flat-out judgment would thus seem less problematic on the multitude view? I cannot pursue the issues further here. I can only recommend that anyone interested in the question of pragmatic encroachment study Sosa's valuable discussion of it in chapter 8 of his book.I am grateful to John Greco and especially Ernest Sosa for extremely helpful comments

Competence (human resources) · Courage · Epistemic virtue · Epistemology · Theology · Virtue · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Sosa on epistemic value

  Open Access•Morag Mcgrath•Synthese•2020

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