Aptness and safety: how are they related?
| Autor | Fern |
| Cargo | Texto en ingl |
A Virtue Epistemology. Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume I, distills into a slim, short book Ernest Sosa's numerous and scattered reflections on the foundations of virtue epistemology, spanning for more than twenty years. When Sosa first wrote about the idea of making the notion of epistemic virtue the crux of a model of epistemic evaluation, the idea was found novel and promissory. Today, virtue epistemology is a flourishing and branching program of research; this would be inconceivable without Sosa's contributions. Here I have the honor to comment on the mature views of the initiator of this contemporary tradition, as they appear condensed in his latest book.
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Aptness and Safety Introduced
Sosa's virtue epistemology supplies a conceptual repertoire that enables one to evaluate an agent from an epistemic point of view. Standard accounts of virtue epistemology set forth as one of its central innovations, relative to rival models of epistemic evaluation, that it shifts the focus of evaluation from the agent's beliefs to his intellectual traits. However, this should not be understood as implying that the evaluation of belief disappears from the concerns of virtue epistemology, on the contrary, many virtue epistemologists are still explicitly in the business of defining normative properties of beliefs. Sosa's own theory is an example of this: the notion of epistemic competence is used throughout the book as a component in several definientia, but the definienda are still normative properties of beliefs, especially those that distinguish mere true belief from various kinds of knowledge.
At the heart of Sosa's virtue epistemology there are two normative properties of belief that Sosa calls "aptness" and "safety", which he defines as follows:
[SAFETY] What is required for the safety of a belief is that not easily would it fail by being false, or untrue. A belief that p is safe provided it would have been held only if (most likely) p. (Sosa 2007, p. 25, his emphasis) (1)
[APTNESS] The requirement [for aptly believing] is that one believe correctly (with truth) through the exercise of a competence in its proper conditions. (p. 33, his emphasis)
Sosa's notion of aptness has gone through some evolution. In its original form, in his seminal papers of the late eighties, it meant something very close to belief formed through the exercise of a reliable virtue (Sosa's way of doing justice to reliabilist intuitions in the theory of justification). (2) In its present form, the notion emphasizes that the success of believing with truth must be attributable to the believer's competences, an emphasis not present in the earlier formulations. In what follows we will work only with his most recent notion of aptness.
Sosa's notion of safety is his version of the widely shared view that knowledge involves a modally strong condition that guarantees the non-accidentality of believing with truth. Sosa's safety contrasts, in particular, with another such modal condition that has come to be known as sensitivity: "[S]omeone's belief that p is sensitive if and only if were it not so that p, he would not (likely) believe that p" (p. 25). Sosa says that safety is the contrapositive of sensitivity, but reminds us that contraposing subjunctive conditionals does not preserve truth and therefore a belief can be safe even if it is not sensitive, a result that Sosa uses in his response to radical skeptical scenarios and sees as an advantage of his notion of safety over sensitivity in an account of knowledge. (3)
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Aptness, Safety and Two Levels of Knowledge
Sosa uses the notions of safety and aptness to draw a distinction of central importance in his epistemology between two kinds of knowledge: animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. Initially, Sosa thinks that both, safety and aptness, are necessary for animal knowledge. Regarding aptness he writes: "Animal knowledge is essentially apt belief [...]" (p. 24). Concerning safety, however, he notes that some clear cases of knowledge are not cases of "outright safe belief" (p. 26) and then replaces outright safety for "basis-relative safety" as a necessary condition for animal knowledge:
[BASIS-RELATIVE SAFETY] What is required of one's belief if it is to constitute knowledge, is at most its having some basis that it would not easily have had unless true, some basis that it would (likely) have had only if true. (p. 26)
The difference between safety outright and basis-relative safety is that the latter relativizes the safety of the belief to some further conditions. For example, my true belief that I have an awful headache right now is not outright safe, because I could easily have believed falsely that I have an awful headache; for example, if I had experienced only discomfort and believed that I had an awful headache out of hypochondria. In contrast, the belief is safe relative to the basis on which I actually believe, for I could not have believed falsely that I have an awful headache, if I believed on the basis of my having an awful headache.
Reflective knowledge is different from, but importantly related to, animal knowledge: "the key component of the distinction [between animal and reflective knowledge] is the difference between apt belief simpliciter, and apt belief aptly noted. If K represents animal knowledge and K+ reflective knowledge, then the basic idea may be represented thus: K+p [??] KKp" (p. 32).
According to this, reflective knowledge that p is simply an apt belief that one has an apt belief that p. So, aptness is necessary for reflective knowledge. Although Sosa does not explicitly address the issue whether reflective knowledge also requires basis-relative safety, he is committed to hold such a view. For given that he conceives reflective knowledge as a simple iteration of animal knowledge, and given that animal knowledge requires basis-relative safety, it follows that second-order animal knowledge requires it too. Therefore, both aptness and basis-relative safety are necessary for reflective knowledge, as much as they are for animal knowledge. (4)
However, Sosa's views on how safety and aptness relate to animal and reflective knowledge change through his book. Sosa develops his views on the matter guided by a central desideratum: respect and explain common sense, i.e. the view that we have plenty of animal and reflective knowledge in the areas we ordinarily think we know many things, for example, in standard cases of perception. If at any point his views seem to have the consequence that we lack common sense knowledge, then something must be adjusted in those views in order to avoid such a conclusion. In what follows I want to discuss the adjustments he makes to his views on how safety and aptness relate to animal and reflective knowledge, and to each other, in order to keep their consequences in line with common sense. I shall try to bring out the difficulties I met in trying to extract, from Sosa's successive adjustments, a coherent overall picture of how safety and aptness relate to animal and reflective knowledge, and to each other.
3 . First Adjustment: Dream Skepticism
The initial view that A-knowledge (5) requires safety has, in Sosa's view, the attraction of allowing a response to those forms of skepticism that exploit remote possibilities of massive error --for example, the brain-in-a-vat or the evil-demon scenarios-, a response that is not available if one regards some modal condition other than safety as necessary for knowledge. For instance, although it is true that the belief that we are not in one of those remote scenarios is not sensitive, because even if we were in one of them we would still believe that we are not, such beliefs are nevertheless safe because, given how remote those possibilities are, we would not easily believe, on the same experiential basis on which we actually believe, that we are not in one of them when in fact we are. So, if sensitivity were necessary for A-knowledge the skeptic could argue, via closure and applying modus tollens, that we lack A-knowledge of ordinary empirical propositions because we lack A-knowledge that we are not in a radical skeptical scenario. But the skeptic cannot make such a move if safety, instead of sensitivity, is necessary for A-knowledge, for one's belief that one is not in a radical skeptical scenario does satisfy the safety requirement.
However, the view that A-knowledge requires safety and not sensitivity is powerless against other skeptical threat, one that exploits what Sosa regards as closer skeptical possibilities, for example, the dreaming possibility. The dreaming possibility threatens the safety of ordinary perceptual beliefs by making fragile either the competence the believer exercised in forming the belief or the appropriateness of the conditions for its exercise. This means that, given such a possibility, it could easily have happened (hence the closeness of the possibility) that his competence was impaired, or that the appropriateness of the conditions was spoiled, by his being dreaming. In either case, the result is that the agent could easily have believed, on the same basis on which he actually believes it, that he was not dreaming while in fact he was; therefore, his belief that he is not dreaming is not safe, and hence not A-knowledge. If safety is necessary for A-knowledge, the skeptic wins. (6)
To save common sense from such skeptical conclusion Sosa's immediate reaction is to take back the claim that safety is necessary for A-knowledge, but leaving in its place the claim that aptness is:
However unsafe a performer's competence may be, and however unsafe may be the conditions appropriate for its exercise, if a performance does succeed through the exercise of that competence in its appropriate conditions, then it is an apt performance, one creditable to the performer. Knowledge is just a special case of such creditable, apt performance. Perceptual knowledge is...
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