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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
Running
Horrible
Hunters
May
Shots
Starving
Without
Failure
Prey
Risk
Irrelevant
Archery
Food
Outcomes
Hunter
Bring
Attempt
Assessment
Success
Shot
Constitute
Family
Murder
Excessive

More quotes by Ernest Sosa

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It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.
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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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
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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
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A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.
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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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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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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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.
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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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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When the risk of failure is too high, the right choice is to forbear.
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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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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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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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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We must distinguish judging from guessing.
Ernest Sosa
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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
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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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There's not much to be done about the impossibility. One must instead get rid of the desire.
Ernest Sosa