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Frictional coherentism? A comment on chapter 10 of Ernest Sosa’s Reflective Knowledge

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Notes

  1. p. 211. All page references are to Chapter 10 of Reflective Knowledge unless otherwise stated.

  2. Cohen (2002).

  3. Sosa himself makes use of a notion of presupposition throughout the chapter, but I do not know whether the gloss just placed on it would be acceptable to him and will make no assumption about that.

  4. Dretske (1970).

  5. His defense of safety-based conceptions of knowledge in Sosa (2004), leans quite heavily on the claim that safety corrals most if not all of the intuitions about cases explained by sensitivity while avoiding generating problems for Closure. Both claims are of course challengeable. For my own part, I am inclined now to think that the issues about the validity of Closure are much more fraught than I once supposed, but much of the contemporary discussion unfortunately clouds them by treating Closure as a principle about feasible knowledge acquisition—thus, in effect, confusing it with Transmission.

  6. p. 221.

  7. p. 222.

  8. See, for instance, Burge (1993, 2003), Peacocke (2004), and Wright (2004).

  9. Care is needed here over ‘non-evidential’. Both Burge and Peacocke are writing within preferred epistemological frameworks which, for their own reasons, war with the description of perception, for instance, as a source of evidence, strictly and properly so regarded. Evidence, for these authors, is essentially a matter of what is independently known or justifiably believed. That is consistent with regarding one’s perceptual state as conferring knowledge that P, or at least as enhancing the likelihood that P. So perceptual entitlement, for Burge and Peacocke, is still an evidential form of warrant in a looser, more general sense of ‘evidence’: perceptual knowledge is achieved by dint of one's entitlement to accept the ‘evidence of one’s senses’, and acceptances to which one is so entitled will, when true, count as knowledgeable on that account. My own conception is crucially different, as the discussion following in the text will make clear. ‘Entitlement’, for me, though it mandates rational acceptance, has no direct connection with knowledge, or likelihood of truth.

  10. Recurrent in Wittgenstein’s notes On Certainty.

  11. At pp. 43–34 of Wright (2007).

  12. I have heard it suggested that an independent objection to the bootstrapping inference to general reliability is furnished by the aggregation of risk of error involved in compiling the conjunction that expresses the source’s ‘track record’. But the observation that the risks of error aggregate, though correct, is not to the purpose. The same is true in ordinary cases where a genuine track record of reliability is compiled, involving independent checks on a source’s performance. That is something which sound inductive methodology has to reckon with in any case. It provides no basis for an independent criticism of the bootstrapping move.

  13. pp. 239–240.

  14. And is much the better for that, many would hold. It is pure coherentism that is open to the McDowellian complaint about “frictionless spinning in the void”.

  15. p. 239.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, New York University, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Crispin Wright

  2. The Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, AB24 3UB, UK

    Crispin Wright

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Wright, C. Frictional coherentism? A comment on chapter 10 of Ernest Sosa’s Reflective Knowledge . Philos Stud 153, 29–41 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9684-z

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