Sosa’s bi-level virtue epistemology

Ernest Sosa has long defended bi-level virtue epistemology on the grounds that it offers the best overall treatment of epistemology’s central issues. A surprising number of problems “yield to” the approach (Sosa 1991: 9). Sosa applies bi-level virtue epistemology to diagnose and bypass ongoing disputes in contemporary epistemology, including the disputes between foundationalists and coherentists, and between internalists and externalists. He also invokes it to explain the nature of epistemic value and the assessment of intellectual performance, to define knowledge, and to defend against skeptical challenges, among other things. Although the two aspects of Sosa’s view, virtue theory and bi-level epistemology, are intimately connected, they are nonetheless conceptually distinct and make isolable contributions to Sosa’s overall project. This chapter will focus primarily on contributions made by virtue theory, and secondarily on contributions made by bi-level epistemology, where they are especially relevant to appreciating the limits of the work done by virtue theory in Sosa’s epistemology.