Acting in order to know, knowing in order to act: Sosa on epistemic and practical deliberation

Abstract

The questions ‘Do I know p?’ and ‘shall I take p as a reason to act?’ seem to belong to different domains — or so claims Ernest Sosa in his Judgment and Agency (2015), the latest version of his virtue epistemology. According to Sosa, we may formulate the first question in a purely epistemological way — a matter of knowledge “full stop” —, while the second one is necessarily intruded by pragmatic factors — a matter of “actionable knowledge”. Both should be answered, in his view, considering the reliability of my belief, but the former could be faced in total abstraction from my personal practical concerns. In this paper, I dispute Sosa’s view, and claim that no purely epistemic level of knowledge “full stop” is conceivable, at least within a reliability framework. A case is put forward in order to show that some given belief may not be considered as reliable by itself, as a token, but always as a member of a type, belonging to some class of reference of other beliefs. And the relevant class of reference may only be chosen considering personal practical interests.