Quotes for All
The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn’t going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We’re torn about these things. Ezekiel Emanuel
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
When I accept someone’s testimony, I am thus only a small part of the full seat of epistemic competence, which might include many others in a long chain. My own contribution might then be slight, just through the perceptual and linguistic competence involved in knowing what someone is saying or writing, etc. 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 … Read more
Given its more substantial aim, a judgment is apt only if its constitutive alethic affirmation is not only apt but aptly apt. The subject must attain aptly not only the truth of his affirmation but also its aptness. And that in turn requires not only the proper operation of one’s perception, memory, inference, etc., but … Read more
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
We can pursue the Cartesian project without restricting ourselves to theology and a priori faculties. A better, broader perspective is properly sought if we pursue the project with reliance on science broadly and on our full span of epistemic competences, including the empirical as well as the a priori. Ernest Sosa
If we have a better understanding of knowledge than we do of such justification or competence, then we can explain the latter through the former. 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
Lowered reliability obviously yields a lesser competence. But lowered breadth does so as well. Ernest Sosa