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A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.
Ernest Sosa
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Ernest Sosa
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: June 17
Philosopher
University Teacher
Cardenas
Humans
Enables
Account
Accounts
General
Successful
Knowledge
Understand
Human
More quotes by Ernest Sosa
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
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
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
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
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
Lowered reliability obviously yields a lesser competence. But lowered breadth does so as well.
Ernest Sosa
The correctness of much testimonially based belief is no more than minimally creditable to the believer.
Ernest Sosa
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
It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.
Ernest Sosa
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
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
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
There isn't a formal definition of success.
Ernest Sosa
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
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
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
When the risk of failure is too high, the right choice is to forbear.
Ernest Sosa
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
We must distinguish judging from guessing.
Ernest Sosa
There's not much to be done about the impossibility. One must instead get rid of the desire.
Ernest Sosa