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Notes
Sosa (2011). Henceforth, “KFW”; all otherwise specified page number citations will refer to this work.
See BonJour and Sosa (2003).
Sosa is thus endorsing a distinction between epistemic sources that can provide epistemically basic beliefs and those whose deliverances require reflective endorsement in order to have any positive epistemic standing. I’m glad to see this, as this has been a major concern of my own (Lyons 2009), although I have focused more on inferential basicality than on hierarchical basicality (see Sosa 2009, p. 228 for the distinction). I think there may also be strong similarities between Sosa’s and my views about which beliefs are basic and why. Although I hadn’t thought to apply the basic/nonbasic distinction to the bootstrapping problem, James Simmons (unpublished ms) has.
I’ll assume that animal and reflective knowledge have corresponding senses of justification and that the relations between the respective knowledges and justifications are straightforward, with the caveat noted in the previous paragraph.
This is more prominent in some earlier work, especially Sosa (2007), but it makes an appearance here as well: “Reflective knowledge is animal belief aptly endorsed by the subject (p. 11).” “Apt belief aptly noted, reflective knowledge, is better than mere apt belief or animal knowledge (pp. 12–13).” Cf. p. 92, 150.
This is the one that is emphasized most strongly in KFW, especially Chap. 1.
“Proper reflective knowledge will after all satisfy requirements of coherence, which means not just logical or probabilistic coherence of the respective belief contents, but also the mutual basing relations that can properly reflect such coherence among the contents. Cross-level coherence, from the object to the meta, and conversely, is a special case of such coherence (p. 13, note 6).” The use of ‘proper’ here might suggest that Sosa is reserving coherence for a special species of reflective knowledge, but the appeal to coherence in Chap. 8 of KFW suggests otherwise.
This is armchair ethology here, based only on casual observations of a small (but random) selection of household pets.
I think that coherence doesn’t even imply the presence of a metabelief: “Cross-level coherence, from the object to the meta, and conversely, is a special case of such coherence [viz., the kind of coherence involved in reflective knowledge] (p. 13, note 6, italics added).”
Even on the coherence understanding of reflective knowledge, it is a contingent, and hence external, matter whether coherence produces a competence. Sosa (2009) claims that coherence doesn’t lead to truth in demon worlds, but because it does in the actual world, coherence still constitutes a competence. From an internalist’s perspective, this is a lot like saying that perception yields knowledge because it is actually reliable.
I’m not claiming that it’s plainly false that reflective justification is necessary for object-level justification, i.e., ordinary justification about external objects. I think it’s false, but not plainly so. We are considering here the view that animal justification/knowledge exists independently of reflective justification/knowledge. If so, then the latter clearly isn’t superior to the former.
References
BonJour, L., & Sosa, E. (2003). Epistemic justification: Internalism vs. externalism, foundations vs. virtues. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lyons, J. (2009). Perception and basic beliefs. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. (2007). A virtue epistemology: Apt belief and reflective knowledge (Vol. I). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. (2009). Reflective knowledge: Apt belief and reflective knowledge (Vol. II). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. (2011). Knowing full well. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Lyons, J. Sosa on reflective knowledge and Knowing Full Well . Philos Stud 166, 609–616 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0202-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0202-y