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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

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Ernest Sosa
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 17
Philosopher
University Teacher
Cardenas
Irrelevant
Archery
Risk
Outcomes
Hunter
Food
Attempt
Assessment
Bring
Shot
Constitute
Success
Murder
Excessive
Family
Horrible
Hunters
Running
Shots
Starving
May
Prey
Without
Failure

More quotes by Ernest Sosa

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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
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Through our perceptual systems, we represent our surroundings, aiming to do so accurately, where the aiming is functional or teleological, rather than intentional. And the same goes for our functional beliefs. Through our judgments, however, we do intentionally, even consciously, attempt to get it right.
Ernest Sosa
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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
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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
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A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.
Ernest Sosa
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There's not much to be done about the impossibility. One must instead get rid of the desire.
Ernest Sosa
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Lowered reliability obviously yields a lesser competence. But lowered breadth does so as well.
Ernest Sosa
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The correctness of much testimonially based belief is no more than minimally creditable to the believer.
Ernest Sosa
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If the agent aims to make the attempt if and only if it would be apt, then a distinctive element of risk assessment becomes relevant: How probably would the agent succeed in attempting that fuller end?
Ernest Sosa
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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
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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
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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
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Flourishing is properly the main human end, and flourishing is activity of soul that succeeds in accord with virtue.
Ernest Sosa
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Animal knowledge is metaphysically constituted by apt belief, by belief whose correctness manifests the believer's epistemic competence, a relevant disposition to get it right on the matter at hand when one tries to do so.
Ernest Sosa
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We must distinguish judging from guessing.
Ernest Sosa
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One does not avoid incompetence if one makes an attempt whose likelihood of success is too low. This seems little more than analytic: when the performance is in a domain that imposes standards of risk, attempts may or may not meet such standards. And the relevant competence of agents then includes reliably enough meeting those standards.
Ernest Sosa
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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
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When the risk of failure is too high, the right choice is to forbear.
Ernest Sosa
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Judgment is affirmation with the intention to thereby affirm competently enough, and indeed aptly. That distinguishes judgments from mere guesses.
Ernest Sosa
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Ultimately, my more significant agreement is with a virtue tradition that features Aristotle and Descartes.
Ernest Sosa