Quote

We need some standard that will determine how likely a belief is to be true given just that it is stored in one of us, including strangers that one can ask for directions, and with whom one might collaborate.

Ernest Sosa

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ernest Sosa
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 17
Philosopher
University Teacher
Cardenas
Including
Stored
Asks
Directions
Belief
Strangers
Given
Standard
True
Stranger
Might
Likely
Need
Determine
Needs
Standards
Collaborate

More quotes by Ernest Sosa

Image
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.
Ernest Sosa
Image
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.
Ernest Sosa
Image
We must distinguish judging from guessing.
Ernest Sosa
Image
Ultimately, my more significant agreement is with a virtue tradition that features Aristotle and Descartes.
Ernest Sosa
Image
We can pursue the Cartesian project without restricting ourselves to theology and a priori faculties. A better, broader perspective is properly sought if we pursue the project with reliance on science broadly and on our full span of epistemic competences, including the empirical as well as the a priori.
Ernest Sosa
Image
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.
Ernest Sosa
Image
The success of an archery shot may bring food to the hunter's starving family, or may constitute a horrible murder. But these outcomes are irrelevant to the assessment of that shot as a hunter-archery shot, as an attempt to hit prey without running excessive risk of failure.
Ernest Sosa
Image
It is possible to produce something that is grammatical either by chance or under the supervision of another. To be proficient in grammar, then, one must both produce what is grammatical and produce it grammatically, that is, in accord with knowledge of grammar in oneself.
Ernest Sosa
Image
Lowered reliability obviously yields a lesser competence. But lowered breadth does so as well.
Ernest Sosa
Image
There is no need for the scientist to go into whether an observation was made, nor into the who, what, when, or where. The data on which scientific theorizing is based are rather the propositional contents of the instrument readings recorded, or the facts detected thereby.
Ernest Sosa
Image
Success is better than failure an attempt is a better attempt, it is better as an attempt, if competent than if incompetent and it is better to succeed through competence - aptly - than through sheer luck.
Ernest Sosa
Image
A hunter archer can also be out to shock by taking crazy shots. What makes his shots crazy is set by excessive risk, judged by hunting-archery standards, which would tend to draw agreement from knowledgeable observers.
Ernest Sosa
Image
It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.
Ernest Sosa
Image
Normal adults can doodle, amble, and drift with no need to assess risk, since there is normally no risk at all. Jazz improvisation seems less subject to standards of risk than surgery, and less than much formal athletic performance, as in a tennis match.
Ernest Sosa
Image
The correctness of much testimonially based belief is no more than minimally creditable to the believer.
Ernest Sosa
Image
A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.
Ernest Sosa
Image
Judgment is affirmation with the intention to thereby affirm competently enough, and indeed aptly. That distinguishes judgments from mere guesses.
Ernest Sosa
Image
When the risk of failure is too high, the right choice is to forbear.
Ernest Sosa
Image
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.
Ernest Sosa
Image
The data on which philosophical theorizing is based are rather the intuited contents themselves, concerning the various thought experiments. At least that is so outside the epistemology of the a priori.
Ernest Sosa