Ernest Sosa : a virtue epistemology

A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume One

Ernest Sosa - epistemology

A Virtue Epistemology: Apt belief and reflective knowledge par Ernest Sosa (2007)

Reviewed by Ram Neta: Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, May 4, 2008.
Reviewed by Heather Battaly: Analysis Reviews 69 | No. 2 | April 2009 | pp. 382–385.
Book Symposium in Philosophical Studies (2009), with Paul Boghossian, Stewart Cohen, and Hilary Kornblith as discussants.
Book Symposium in Teorema (2009), with Fernando Broncano, Juan Comesaña, Angeles Eraña, Angel García Rodriguez, Manuel de Pinedo & Hilan Bensusan, and Jesús Vega.
Book Symposium in Philosophical Studies (2009), with Jessica Brown, Earl Conee, and Duncan Pritchard.

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What dreams are made of ?

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare, The Tempest
(4.1.146-58)

“When we watch a movie, however, we undergo phenomenal experiences without being at fault for failing to take them at face value. We use them rather as an exercise of “make believe” in which our imagination is guided by what we see on the screen and hear from the sound system. We do have real visual and auditory experience (as when we view a documentary, or the nightly news), but we have switched off our full cognitive processing for the duration of the film, so as to immerse ourselves willingly in the offline illusion. And there is no irrationality in this. Similarly, then, it may be that in vivid dreams, we do have phenomenal experiences, just as we do at the movie theater, but that our full cognitive processing is switched off, enabling our immersion in the imaginative illusion of the dream.

We need not here choose between these two options on phenomenal experience, What is important for epistemology, as will emerge, is that in dreaming, we do not really believe; we only make believe”.

Ernest Sosa, (8; Dreams and philosophy)

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