Need knowing and acting be SSS‐Safe ?

Abstract

Throughout the years, Sosa has taken different views on the safety condition on knowledge. In his early work, he endorsed the safety condition, but later ret-racted this view when first developing his much dis-cussed virtue epistemology. Recently, Sosa has further developed his virtue theory with the notion of competence and has developed an accompanying, modified safety condition that he maintains is entailed by that theory: the SSS-safety condition. Sosa's view is that this condition holds on both knowledge and action, because both knowledge and action are the manifestations of competence. The SSS-safety condition, roughly, says that if S were to make an attempt at φ -ing under certain specified shape-situation pairs, holding fixed their seat , then S would φ . The argument of this paper is that this new SSS-safety condition does not hold on either knowledge or action. We argue for this conclusion by providing a principled way to generate counterexamples to the condition for both knowledge and action. The reasoning is that there can exist a non-empty symmetric difference between the sets of shape-situation pairs under which distinct agents can manifest their