Manifesting One’s Competences Successfully and Aptly: Enough to Beat the Skeptic?

Abstract

Ernest Sosa’s account of competences and their manifestation is central for his brand of competence virtue epistemology. In this paper we scrutinize this account as detailed in his book Judgment and Agency. Regarding Sosa’s general theory of apt agency, we start with discussing the temporal relation between performances and the second-order risk evaluations that are necessary to make them fully apt. This leads us to the observation that evaluations of aptness are highly description-relative. Regarding Sosa’s specific theory of epistemic agency, i.e. of judgment and knowledge, we identify three problems: First, using Davidson’s Swampman scenario, we argue that Sosa is in trouble explaining how Swampman (or anyone else) can acquire first items of knowledge. Second, Sosa’s account of fully apt knowledge is threatened by an infinite regress. Third, Sosa lacks an account of internal mechanisms providing us with (subjective) confidence in our competences to accompany their (objective) reliability. As a solution for these three problems we suggest to acknowledge that the manifestation of reflective competences (especially for coherence checking) is a constitutive part of the second-order competence manifestation. This move would also make his account more agreeable to adherents of internalist positions. Even with this amendment, however, Sosa’s theory will fail to silence the skeptic.