Our focus in this paper will be on the beginning (§A.1-4, pp. 153-163) and the end (§B.4, pp. 173-184). We will discuss the first Tuesday and the second on Wednesday. You should read the rest (i.e., the middle 10 pages) because Sosa will draw on it in various ways in the final section, but we will give it less attention in discussion.
Although this paper dates from about 25 years after Gettier’s, Sosa had been working on epistemology for most of that time: he was one of the first to discuss the Gettier examples (his paper on them ends on the page on which the one by Saunders and Champawat begins). You can associate most of the people he mentions with the same period. Some exceptions are G. E. Moore (1873-1958), who with Bertrand Russell founded analytic philosophy in Britain and who had a longer continuing influence on Wittgenstein than Russell did, and J. L. Austin (1911-1960) and P. F. Strawson (1919-2006), both among the “ordinary-language” philosophers, who were influenced by Wittgenstein’s later work and were most influential during the two decades before Gettier’s article.
• Sosa’s writing can be a little dense, and you are likely to find the earlier parts of the discussion of skepticism especially slow going. Do keep moving, though, even if you aren’t sure you understand the first parts of it, because the latter half of §A is probably the most interesting for our purposes.
• The first subsection (i.e., §A.1) is mainly a list of definitions that Sosa will use in the next couple of sections. Read through it, but it’s mainly designed to refer back to later.
• Don’t worry if the argument in the section on Nozick’s views (§A.2) is hard to follow. We’ll discuss it in class, and what’s more important in the long run is just the basic idea of tracking. Sosa may not accept TA as an account of knowledge; but it, and especially the condition (d), incorporates insights about knowledge that he will employ in other contexts. (Two typos: on p. 155, “q > q” should be “p > q” and on p. 156 “K’(f)” should be “T’(f)”.)
• The discussion of Stroud in §A.3 is a little less dense, and the extended discussion of the quotation on p. 158 is worth thinking through.
• Although the ideas from Wittgenstein mentioned in §A.4 are not in the material read in Phi 346, the spirit is similar. The incompatible beliefs D and D′ are part of the ancient Sorites Paradox (or “heap paradox”), which Sosa also alludes to on p. 177.
• The four accounts of justification Sosa considers in §B can be classified as either “externalist” (just reliabilism) or “internalist” (roughly all the rest though some of them incorporate externalist aspects). Sosa is clearly more sympathetic to internalism, and he will highlight the difference between the two approaches in his discussion of reliabilism.
• What Sosa calls the “evil demon problem” for reliabilism will be addressed also in the case of other accounts of justification. He describes this in §B.1 (p. 164) as a “Twin Earth” situation where people in an alternative universe match us internally one by one (so each of us has a doppelganger in that universe—as does each of them in ours) but their external environment is different from ours in ways that don’t affect our mental lives. The question is whether we and they could differ in the justification of our beliefs, and someone like Sosa with internalist sympathies will say they couldn’t. Dependence on external differences is associated with indexicality—i.e., a dependence on “pointing”—since something different will be pointed at in these two universes; but Sosa will be more sympathetic to some other forms of indexicality (such as those associated with the terms us and now).
• In §B.2, it is fine to focus on the brief discussion of Bonjour. How do you think he might respond to the problem Sosa poses for him. (The sign ⊃ is used here for the conditional, so ‘p ⊃ q’ says ‘if p then q’, where this is understood to be true unless it is the case both that p is true and q is false. The notation shows up again, along with ∀ meaning ‘for all’, in Lehrer’s principle C, which says roughly that a belief P coheres with a system A for a person S if and only if every belief that competes with P is beaten or neutralized.)
• The problem of “projectibility” mentioned in §B.3 (on p. 170) concerns the fact that the extent to which predictions are supported by observations can depend on the terms in which the observations are stated. If a term grue will change its range of application from that of green to that of blue at some point in the future (say next Jan. 1), the fact that observed emeralds are uniformly grue (since they are green) will not lead us to expect them to be grue next year. Since grue and the analogous bleen (blue now, green later) stand in no different relation to blue and green than the latter terms do to them (e.g., the range of application of green will change from that of grue to that of bleen on Jan. 1), there is no basis for distinguishing them apart from the way observations seem projectible into the future as predictions.
• Sosa first motivates his account of justification in §B.4 by considering a series of problems, and then concludes with a “summary sketch” of it in ten points. Along the way, he introduces three ideas you should think about: epistemic virtues (why does he call them virtues?), perspectivism (you will find helpful earlier comments on “epistemic perspectives” on pp. 169, 175), and aptness (the term in this sense seems to be first used in the summary, on p. 182).