Acknowledgments
My earlier books have drawn from previously published articles or from lecture series. This book has reversed direction, as it was conceived whole, divided into its four parts. Only subsequently have a couple of its chapters overlapped substantially with journal articles. Chapter 3 overlaps with “Suspension as Spandrel,” Episteme (2019): 357–368. Chapter 9 overlaps with “Reflection and Security,” Episteme (2019): 474–489. Chapter 11 overlaps with “Intuitions and Foundations: the Relevance of Moore and Wittgenstein,” in The A Priori in Philosophy, ed. by Albert Casullo and Joshua C. Thurow (Oxford University Press, 2013).
I have benefited from presenting this material in seminars and workshops at Rutgers over several years, receiving helpful feedback in that connection from Bob Beddor, D Black, Laura Callahan, Chris Copan, Megan Feeney, Will Fleisher, Carolina Flores, Danny Forman, Georgi Gardiner, Igal Kvart, James McIntyre, Andrew Moon, Paul Pietroski, and Caroline von Klemperer. In that connection, and also more recently, discussion with Matt McGrath and Chris Willard-Kyle has been helpful, especially on the nature and epistemology of suspension. Discussion with Stephen Grimm has long been helpful, including in connection with several events organized by him at Fordham. Finally, I am also grateful for the epistemological work and input of many friends and interlocutors, over many years, including Robert Audi, Guy Axtell, Jason Baehr, Heather Battaly, Matt Benton, Sven Bernecker, Paul Boghossian, Rodrigo Borges, Bob Brandom, Bill Brewer, Brit Brogaard, Fernando Broncano, Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, Jessica Brown, Otavio Bueno, Tyler Burge, Al Casullo, Leo Cheung, Matthew Chrisman, David Christensen, Eli Chudnoff, E.J. Coffman, Stewart Cohen, Annalisa Coliva, Juan Colomina-Alminana, Juan Comesaña, Earl
Conee, Josep Corbi, Alberto Cordero, Charles Cote-Bouchard, Jonathan Dancy, Marian David, Claudio de Almeida, Mike DePaul, Keith DeRose, Kate Devitt, Imogen Dickie, Jose Diez Calzada, Pascal Engel, Angeles Eraña, Jesús Ezquerro, Jeremy Fantl, Richard Feldman, Miguel Angel Fernandez, Dick Foley, Bryan Frances, Lizzie Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Jane Friedman, Richard Fumerton, Manuel García-Carpintero, Angel Garcia Rodriguez, Claudia Lorena García, Tamar Gendler, Brie Gertler, Hans-Johann Glock, Sandy Goldberg, Alan Goldman, Alvin Goldman, Thomas Grundmann, Anil Gupta, Michael Hannon, John Hawthorne, Allan Hazlett, David Henderson, Stephen Hetherington, Chris Hill, Eli Hirsch, Frank Hoffman, Terry Horgan, Joachim Horvath, Paul Horwich, Robert Howell, Yong Huang, Michael Huemer, Bruce Hunter, Guillermo Hurtado, Alex Jackson, Carrie Jenkins Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Frank Jackson, Bredo Johnsen, Mark Kaplan, Jason Kawall, Tom Kelly, Andrea Kern, Jens Kipper, Peter Klein, Hilary Kornblith, Saul Kripke, Jonathan Kvanvig, Jennifer Lackey, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Adam Leite, Keith Lehrer, Noah Lemos, Clayton Littlejohn, Manolo Liz, Kirk Ludwig, Michael Lynch, Jack Lyons, Susanna Mantel, Peter Markie, John McDowell, Aidan McGlynn, Brian McLaughlin, Guido Melchior, Anne Meylan, Michael Mi, Alan Millar, Jennifer Nado, Jesús Navarro, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Michael O’Rourke, Michael Pace, Carlotta Pavese, Chris Peacocke, Carlos Pereda, David Perez Chico, Manuel Perez Otero, Christian Piller, Alvin Plantinga, Joelle Proust, Jim Pryor, Peter Railton, Baron Reed, João Carlos Salles, Carolina Sartorio, Jonathan Schaffer, Josh Schechter, Susanna Schellenberg, Fred Schmitt, Eric Schwitzgebel, Daniele Sgaravatti, Joseph Shieber, Susanna Siegel, Nico Silins, Waldomiro Silva Filho, Brian Skyrms, Michael Slote, Martin Smith, Jason Stanley, Pedro Stepanenko, Matthias Steup, Stephen Stich, Joshua Thurow, Claudine Tiercelin, Josefa Toribio, Nick Treanor, Cheng-Hung Tsai, John Turri, Luis Valdés Villanueva, Margarita Valdés, Jim Van Cleve, Jesús Vega, Enrique Villanueva, Brian Weatherson, Ralph Wedgwood, Michael Williams, Tim Williamson, Nick Wolterstorff, Crispin Wright, Linda Zagzebski, and José Zalabardo.
I was much saddened by the passing of Tony Brueckner, Jaegwon Kim, Adam Morton, and Barry Stroud, with all of whom I discussed epistemology very helpfully for many years.
Large chunks of this text have been presented at various venues, where critical discussion and formal commentaries have led to much improvement. This includes the Episteme conference organized by Jennifer Lackey in honor of my work and held in Tenerife in 2019, with proceedings later in the journal; four lectures at the Urbino summer school in epistemology, organized by Adriano Angelucci and Daniele Sgaravatti; the 2020 conference in my honor in La Laguna, organized by Margarita Vazquez and David Perez Chico, and whose proceedings will appear in a volume edited by Perez Chico and Modesto Gomez Alonso; lectures in Paris organized by Joelle Proust at the Jean Nicod, by Pascal Engel at the Ecole Normal Superiore, by Claudine Tiercelin at the College de France, and by Jean-Baptiste Rauzy at the Sorbonne; the 2020 conference held at Fudan University in Shanghai, whose proceedings will appear in a book, Ernest Sosa Encounters Chinese Philosophy, edited by the organizer, Yong Huang, and published by Bloomsbury Press; and a series of three lectures at UC-Irvine, organized by Duncan Pritchard, with comments by Pritchard and by Annalisa Coliva.
I am especially grateful for repeated interaction on ideas in this book, in depth and over a span of recent years, with Adam Carter, Modesto Gomez Alonso, Peter J. Graham, John Greco, Chris Kelp, Matt McGrath, Lisa Miracchi, Ram Neta, Duncan Pritchard, Blake Roeber, Mona Simion, David Sosa, Kurt Sylvan, and Chris Willard-Kyle.
Preface
This book develops an improved virtue epistemology and uses it to explain several epistemic phenomena.
Part I takes up a sort of firsthand knowledge and understanding particularly suitable for the humanities, and lays out a telic virtue epistemology that accommodates such knowledge alongside other varieties.
Chapter 1 takes up that distinctive sort of understanding, and proposes a virtue-theoretic account of its normative standing. The widespread desirability of such understanding holds two lessons concerning humanistic issues, including many in philosophy: first, one about the place of disagreement over such issues; second, one about the epistemic standards appropriate for them.
Chapter 2 lays out a telic virtue epistemology that accommodates such knowledge and understanding. Based on that telic account, the chapter also distinguishes two sides of epistemology: the theory of knowledge (“gnoseology,” for short) on one side, and intellectual ethics on the other.
Part II develops an epistemology of suspension.
Chapter 3 explains what it is to suspend judgment, and how such suspension attains normative status. Problems are raised for a competing view, strict evidentialism, and virtue-theoretic solutions are offered for those problems.
Chapter 4 refocuses on suspension, on degrees of confidence, and on inquiry; along with their explanatory interrelations.
Chapter 5 takes up when and how suspension is epistemically apt.
Chapter 6 explores varieties of suspension and the relation of proper suspension to being in a position to know.
Part III develops a substantially improved telic virtue epistemology.
Chapter 7 introduces a distinctive idea of default assumptions, and explains how that idea reconfigures earlier virtue epistemology.
That earlier virtue epistemology now seems a first approximation whose insights require appeal to default assumptions, as is next shown more fully, in Chapter 8.
Chapter 9 introduces a metaphysical hierarchy of epistemic categories, and defends in particular a category of secure knowledge.
Chapter 10 explains how our expanded view makes room for a sort of “epistemic justification” constitutive of knowledge.
Part IV is about the Moore–Wittgenstein episode in twentieth-century epistemology.
Chapter 11 considers Wittgenstein’s On Certainty response to Moore’s epistemology, and places it in a broader epistemological context, by relation to Part III , and to Chapter 7 in particular.
Insight and Understanding
Let us explore a particular sort of understanding, understanding why, and a related sort of knowledge why—firsthand knowledge why—and the place of this in the humanities, including philosophy.
We shall focus on one dimension of the humanities, not the whole, and on the humanistic side of philosophy, though there’s a lot more to philosophy than that.
I’ll be arguing for the importance of firsthand intuitive insight. And that in turn will bear interestingly on two questions in the epistemology of the humanities, including philosophy.
First question: Given that firsthand intuitive insight has special value and standing in the humanities, how is the epistemic standing of our own beliefs affected when we encounter the disagreement of others?
Second, if firsthand intuitive insight is shown to have such special standing and value, how if at all does this affect what epistemological standards are properly operative in humanistic domains?
Eventually, we will come to these two questions about the humanities, one about the place of disagreement, and the other about the proper epistemic standards. But first we take up the place and value of intuitive insight.
1. Of the varieties of understanding, one has special importance for our project, namely understanding why, understanding why it is so that p. Such understanding why is correlated with knowing why, and both come in degrees of quality, as in the following example.
Suppose a woman contracts an infection, which we attribute to the germs on her airplane tray table. Suppose she did pick up germs on those surfaces and transferred them to her nose or eyes. But what if the germs would not have affected anyone with normal defenses? Suppose
Epistemic Explanations: A Theory of Telic Normativity, and What it Explains. Ernest Sosa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Ernest Sosa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856467.003.0001
they would have come nowhere near doing so. Our woman acquires the infection in part because of the germs but mainly because her defenses are very much lowered (by her cancer treatment).
Suppose contact with the germs was indeed essentially involved in how and why the woman was infected. If so, we do have some knowledge of why she got infected. And so we do gain some understanding of why it happened. She was infected at least in part because of her contact with the germs. But our understanding in that case falls short. We have some understanding without understanding fully. Just as you might have some justification for a certain belief without being justified outright in holding that belief, so you might have some understanding of a certain phenomenon without understanding it well enough to really understand it outright.
2. We would like to understand a distinction between questions properly settled through epistemic deference, and questions that require or invite firsthand assessment, beyond sheer deference.
Many questions call just for information. Take utilitarian questions, whether financial, legal, or medical. Answering such questions has a practical value fully realized with no need for deeper understanding. By contrast, humanistic questions hold scant practical value, at least in the short term.
Although we focus on humanistic questions, we’ll consider an account that extends to many questions in the liberal arts more generally; in fact, we begin with an example in geometry, a discipline not usually placed in the humanities.
A young teenager still innocent of plane geometry is told by his teacher that the Pythagorean Theorem is true. The teacher lays out the theorem (not any proof, just the theorem), and affirms it to be true. A smart kid with a good memory, the student thereby knows through deference the truth of the theorem. But he falls short in his understanding of why the theorem is true, lacking as he does an adequate grasp of any proof.
It does not help if the student accepts by sheer deference the conditional that conjoins in its antecedent all the premises of some proof, and contains the theorem itself as its consequent, along with accepting by deference also the truth of the antecedent. He still does not grasp the
truth of that conjunction well enough firsthand. He accepts it just through deference to the teacher.
That is why he falls short in his understanding of the truth of that theorem. The desired level of understanding requires insight of one’s own into the premises and into the immediate inferences that constitute a proof.1
3. Nevertheless, although an insightful proof would constitute a higher attainment, deference to the geometry teacher can still enable knowledge of the theorem’s truth, even absent understanding. Compare also humanistic domains such as art and its appreciation, the nature and content of morality, and many issues in philosophy. In these domains, knowledge through deference seems again available. Prima facie, someone trustworthy might answer aptly some normative yes/no question, which provides some secondhand knowledge to their hearers. Many others might then add their powerful support, with no dissent in view, enhancing the quality of that secondhand knowledge. So, what distinguishes moral, aesthetic, and other humanistic domains is not that secondhand knowledge is there unavailable, but rather that firsthand knowledge is both available and particularly desirable. What is further available in those domains, and particularly desirable, is also knowledge, firsthand knowledge, attained when the thinker gets it right sufficiently through firsthand competence.
4. Why might normative humanistic questions invite, reward, and even require understanding, and not just information?
Here is one reason: Because anyone who navigates uncritically, on mere instinct or tribal mores, or on mere deference, neglects their rational standing.2 But why do we prioritize firsthand knowledge as we
1 And it is not just understanding-why and knowledge-why that admit our distinction between a grasp that is merely deferential and one that is firsthand. Expressionless and in a flat voice, you may tell me you have a headache, and I may thus acquire deferential knowledge of your headache. But your firsthand knowledge has higher quality, is more certain.
2 Any proper human life will include a set of values—prudential, political, moral, aesthetic—supported by a humanly relevant outlook on oneself and the environing world. Such a view would then contain degrees of the coherent generality that underwrite corresponding degrees of understanding.
so often do? Because it is so often through such knowledge that you flourish as a rational animal. Practical, utilitarian questions are properly answered with mere information acquired through sheer deference. But deeper choices require rational guidance beyond deference.
5. That is the high road, which I am myself willing to take, but there is also a less lofty route.
Suppose human flourishing does not require that we prioritize firsthand thought. Suppose instead that each of us has leeway on how much of that to go in for. That is bound to depend on one’s specific situation, interests, and abilities.
A life of tilling the land is far removed from the Aristotelian life of pure contemplation. But no one is to blame for a life of hard labor if they have no choice all things considered. Of course such a life can be admirable, even if deprived of much rational attainment.
We need not even agree with Aristotle’s hierarchical claims. Suppose we recognize the widest range of proper life plans, and we put them all on the same level, or anyhow we omit any hierarchy. Suppose we just focus on lives that do make room for intrinsically motivated desire to understand. For such lives, our distinction between the utilitarian and the humanistic still comes to the fore.
That distinction then has extremely broad application. It is not restricted to highbrow interests in the fine arts, the humanities, and pure philosophy. On the contrary, firsthand judgment is apposite in athletic stadiums and arenas as well as in symphony halls and museums, in barroom arguments as well as in seminar dialectic. It may be even more jarring to just defer in lowbrow venues.
On this more democratic, less prescriptive approach, when is firsthand judgment preferable to mere deference? This now depends on the agent’s desire for understanding, whether highbrow or lowbrow; and it depends also on whether such understanding requires firsthand insight. So, we are still left with an interesting question to consider: Just when is a desire for outright understanding satisfiable only through firsthand insight?
6. When and why does outright understanding require a firsthand approach? According to our account, you understand well enough why
p if, and only if, you know well enough why p, which requires knowing, for some fact, that p because of that fact. That is a minimum necessary condition.
Even when that is not sufficient, however, what is required in addition may just be more of the same. That is suggested already by our case of infection caused by germs on a tray table, where we learn that the woman’s defenses are low. More generally, what is needed for enhanced understanding may be just more knowledge, more propositional knowledge that is properly interrelated.
We thus face the following challenge.
Suppose you know why it is so that p. Might you not know this simply because you know, about some rich and deep enough set of facts, that it is because of those facts that it comes about that p? Is such rich and deep enough knowledge attainable only through a firsthand approach?
Not clearly. Why can’t it be attained through deference to testimony that p because q, r, s, ? Such testimony might be provided through a textbook or through a treatise. And this now threatens to drive a wedge between two things that seemed to be bound together: namely, the desirability of going beyond testimonial deference, and the thirst for understanding, with the latter explaining the former. It has become less clear why we need to go beyond deference. How is this challenge to be met?
7. Here first is a concession. We need not insist that, on any possible question, outright understanding requires firsthand access, beyond deference. In order to understand better why the woman got infected, for example, I need to know also that her defenses were extremely low. Her infection is more fully explained when we attribute it not only to the germs but also, and mainly, to the lowered defenses. But this further fact is one available through testimonial deference.
So much for our concession. Not all important questions call for thoroughly firsthand understanding and knowledge-why. On many questions a deep, full explanation might amount to a rich enough set of facts, whose grasp through deference enhances understanding.
However, questions in the humanities might still require a particularly large and salient element of direct rational appreciation. If so, why might this be so?
8. Why might a question call for much more than deference? Because it might call for a kind of rational understanding.
Consider first the aesthetic assessment of an artwork. Is it original, arresting, elegant? Let’s focus here just on whether it is (artistically, not just financially) successful. If it is indeed successful, there will be reasons why that is so, reasons that will form the ground of its success, in virtue of which the work attains that success.
And there is then a notable distinction between the following two cases:
In the first case one knows through sheer deference about the success of a certain artwork (identified just as the seventh on a certain list).
In the second case one spots at least implicitly the reasons why the work is successful, so that one’s knowledge of its success is based on those grounding reasons (even if this basing remains implicit).
In the latter case, one has firsthand knowledge of the work’s success along with understanding its success by knowing why it is successful, through insight into the grounds for that success. Here firsthand humanistic knowledge comes with understanding attained through insightful rational explanation. One experiences the work in the relevant way—be it a piece of music, a painting, or a novel— and one discerns the reasons for the work’s success through firsthand experience.
9. Objection
Not so fast! Suppose a critic explains that the work has features F1, F2, . . . Fn, and that these are the features that make it successful. Would that not enable one to know why the work is successful? Reply
Yes, if the critic is reliable enough, then deferring to their testimony may enable us to know that much. But one might still fall short significantly in one’s understanding. Recall the student who knows the Pythagorean theorem to be true, and also knows to some extent why it is true, but only by deferring throughout to the teacher.
10. Our point about aesthetic judgment applies also to moral judgment. An adolescent may defer to a parent’s moral advice, for example, with no proper firsthand appreciation of the features that make the recommended action right, nor of the fact that they do so. The mother may say: “Tommy, you must apologize.” She may have seen the whole action and may be sensitive to various features of the case that she is unable to specify fully in an English formulation. She may have seen the level of grief in the eyes of the friend at being bullied by Tommy. The behavior was not terrible, but it was definitely bad enough to require an apology. Tommy may just defer to the mother and go ahead with his apology. But even later that day he may fail to appreciate on his own when an apology is required.
In that case, the child gains from the mother some understanding of why he must apologize. She tells him that it’s because of the bullying and the grief that it caused. And Tommy does sincerely defer. But his secondhand knowledge falls short. It manifests insufficient appreciation of the behavior that matters, and of the relevant level of upset. He takes it entirely on deferential trust that his behavior and the upset that it caused were bad enough to require apology. And this gives only truncated understanding.
11. The Pythagorean example is comparable in its own way. Also comparable in a different way is a tourist’s deference to a museum guide who attributes a painting’s success to how the pastel colors contrast with the darker reds. The tourist gains some appreciation and understanding of why the painting is successful. But what if he is color blind? In that case, the tourist falls short in his understanding, even as he views the painting firsthand.
Understanding through firsthand knowledge is salient for normative issues generally, and for moral issues more specifically. It is salient in the humanities generally, where we should and do often prioritize firsthand, nondeferential judgment.
12. Something similar applies to another side of the humanities, namely metaphysics.
Suppose the topic of social construction comes up in bar-room conversation and someone points out that we are sitting on bar stools, artifacts composed of disks attached to legs. But she then adds that this observation is partial and superficial. What matters more deeply is that such items are given a certain purpose by the culture, one that their physical constitution enables them to serve. Bar stools are constructed by carpenters, true enough, but more deeply they are socially constructed. If that function were not conventionally assigned to objects so shaped, they might constitute side tables rather than stools. From there we might turn to more gripping issues of gender, or race, or the nature of persons, or justice, or knowledge, as Socrates might have done. (Recall the Euthyphro on the direction of grounding. Does it go from god-love to goodness, or from goodness to god-love?)
Through reflection we might attain a kind of firsthand insight as to what grounds various phenomena of great human interest. What we need is insight into thought experiments that will reveal the relevant metaphysical by-relations, the metaphysical basis, so that the phenomenon of interest comes to be thereby. Of course, if such subject matter eludes one’s grasp, or its subtlety leaves one bored or impatient, then one may forego such insight, and that is fine. Such metaphysics is not for everyone, nor is philosophy, nor the humanities.
Such issues of social construction illustrate a sort of understanding that some of us do find enlightening.
Humanistic understanding can thus be desirable for at least two sorts of reasons. First, it can be required for the understanding of values and choices that should guide a rational animal. Second, it can also be desirable just for its own sake, for the satisfaction of our curiosity. This latter is crucial in the humanities, and in the liberal arts more generally, as with geometry.
It remains only to draw some lessons about the proper epistemology for the liberal arts, including the humanities, and philosophy more specifically.
13. First lesson
Note first the intimate connection between testimony and disagreement, which holds a lesson about disagreement.
There is a notorious problem of disagreement in the humanities, philosophy being no exception. How can we claim to know much at all in fields with so much disagreement? Faced with that, should we just suspend on all disputed issues? Not if we downgrade deference, for this now has an interesting implication.
Once we properly aim for firsthand knowledge in pursuit of understanding, while bracketing secondhand information, we can properly discount disagreement. Disagreement must be discounted along with testimony, disagreement being a special case of testimony. In any such domain we properly aim for aptness of judgment unaided by deference. More generally, we aim for aptness of judgment unaffected by sheer deference.
In any case, we cannot have it both ways. Where deference is optional and best avoided, there disagreement does not after all render our judgments so problematic.
Firsthand knowledge in pursuit of understanding requires that you reach your answer through competence seated in yourself, not through sheer deference to others. The mere fact that someone else holds a contrary opinion need not move you to revise, not in the slightest.3 It may instead prompt just an exchange of views. But even when engaged in such exchange, you may still aim to judge autonomously.
That makes for a hopeful epistemology of the humanities, including issues of aesthetic and moral interpretation and appreciation, and issues of armchair philosophy more generally.
Humanistic disciplines tend to be organized differently from what is familiar and important in the sciences. A lot of humanistic inquiry tends to be individual, with no deference to others. In philosophy the attitude is pervasive. Everything is subject to critical scrutiny. Nothing significant is accepted through sheer deference. That’s how it is, and plausibly how it should be, which fits our discussion of the main role of testimony in philosophy. The interesting implication is that disagreement should not be as troubling in the humanities as it is often taken to be. In philosophy specifically, we should not be so much moved by disagreement, since we
3 Except when “in my opinion no one holds any opinion contrary to my own,” and such cases.
should rarely be moved to assign much weight to the sheer say-so of someone else, no matter how well placed. We can be moved to reconsider, yes. We can even be obliged to reconsider, on pain of negligence; but not to revise, not in the slightest. Note the distinction that matters here: reconsidering is to be distinguished from revising. You can do the former seriously, without doing the latter, without being moved in the slightest by the sheer say-so of someone else.
That view of humanistic accomplishment, in philosophy specifically, aligns well with Descartes’s Meditations. These are a record of the author’s meditations, but they also serve, and are surely meant to serve, as a script for the reader’s own performance. A main aim of the work is the enlightenment of the reader, not through deference to the author but through guidance to firsthand insight and understanding.
A geometry teacher might also aim to provide a script meant to aid students attain their own insight into a proof of the theorem. In providing such guidance, she goes beyond merely presenting the abstract structure whose necessary truth underlies the soundness and validity of the argument. Rather, the teacher presents a script for a student’s own performance through inferences by natural deduction. The student would be guided to the insights required, tied together by immediate inferences in proper sequence. By following that script properly, the student can attain firsthand insight into the truth of the Pythagorean theorem. In this respect, the cases are identical, even if Cartesian reflection is conducted in the first person, unlike geometry.
Correct judgment deriving from firsthand competence can of course depend on the conduit to reasons provided by testimony. That is how you can properly depend on guidance by Descartes, or by a geometry teacher. Having been made aware of good available reasoning, you can then make it your own, so that the success of your judgment is then a firsthand success. And the accomplishment will then depend not at all on sheer deference to someone else.
14. Objection
We are assuming that in humanistic domains we aim to answer our questions and to get it right in so doing. How then can we coherently have this aim while refusing to defer to others recognized as more reliable than we are?
Reply
That is a good question, but it has a good answer, by analogy with the case of archery, our model of evaluable performance.
As an archer I would normally want to hit my target through firsthand competence. This might be in the sport of archery or as a hunter in the woods. When I allow a coach to guide my hands, by contrast, the desire for firsthand performance is suppressed. Not so when I perform as a competitor or a hunter. There I dispense with external aids. I cannot defer to a coach’s direct guidance as I draw my bow and prepare to shoot. And this is so even if I still very much want to hit the target and know perfectly well that I could do so much more reliably with the coach’s help!
In many domains agents aim for firsthand success attained aptly, through competence. Often, external aids that would boost competence must be shunned. Many are forbidden formally, as are performance enhancing drugs. An artist who performs on the stage with a coach at their elbow would ridiculously violate the conventions of artistic performance. Even when there are no laws, rules, or conventions that prohibit such aids, moreover, performers still aim for fully apt firsthand success.
15. The point is brought home by a striking example.
Of two aficionados addicted to the NY Times crossword puzzle, one tries to solve the puzzle with no external aids, and often succeeds. Another always waits for the answer to be published the next day, then dutifully fills it in, and gets the solution exactly right.
Why does that seem so foolish? Because the whole point of a crossword puzzle is to give you the amusement that goes with a challenge that can be met but not too easily, one that calls on your own resources and engages your attention pleasurably.
Both agents want equally to get it right, yet one of them foolishly neglects the proper objective. Truth is a part of the objective, but only a part. Attaining the truth by just copying the right answer is not in the right spirit. Rather, your aim must be not just success but firsthand success. In that specific respect humanist judgments are like crossword solutions. Indeed, given our broad understanding of humanist questions, crossword puzzles constitute a light humanistic domain, where it is preferable and generally preferred to reach one’s answers firsthand, not just through deference.
