Sosa Quote on Judgment: Faculties in the Right Environment

Quote

"Our judgments are correct when our faculties function well in the right environment."

— Ernest Sosa, Judgment and Agency (2015)

Context

This statement appears in Judgment and Agency (2015), the third volume of Sosa's virtue epistemology trilogy, following A Virtue Epistemology (2007) and Knowing Full Well (2011). In this volume, Sosa extends his competence-based framework from belief to judgment, developing a fuller account of epistemic agency — the capacity to exercise control over one's own beliefs through deliberate judgment.

The earlier volumes had established the core idea: a belief is apt when it is true because produced by a competent faculty. Judgment and Agency addresses a lingering question: how does this framework apply to judgments that we actively make, as opposed to beliefs that simply arise in us? When you look at a thermometer and judge that the temperature is rising, you are not passively receiving a belief; you are actively endorsing a proposition on the basis of evidence. Sosa needs to show how the competence-based account extends to this active, agential dimension of cognition.

The "right environment" clause is central to this extension. Competence is not an intrinsic property of a faculty considered in isolation; it is a relation between a faculty and the conditions in which it operates. A faculty that functions reliably in normal conditions may break down in abnormal ones — vision fails in darkness, memory fails under stress, testimony fails when the speaker is coerced. Sosa's framework therefore requires a tripartite structure: the faculty (a competence), the environment (the conditions of operation), and the fit between them.

Meaning

Sosa's claim is that the correctness of a judgment depends on two factors working together: the faculty must function well, and it must do so in the right environment. Either condition alone is insufficient.

A faculty that functions well in the wrong environment will produce error. Consider a person with excellent eyesight looking at a stick partly submerged in water: the faculty of vision is functioning perfectly, but the environment (refraction) is misleading, and the resulting judgment — that the stick is bent — is incorrect. Conversely, a faculty functioning poorly in a forgiving environment may, by luck, produce a correct judgment, but the correctness is not attributable to competence and so the judgment is not apt.

The "right environment" is the set of conditions in which the faculty is calibrated to deliver truth — the conditions for which it was, in Sosa's terms, "designed" or in which it has been shaped to be reliable. For perception, this includes adequate lighting, normal viewing distance, and the absence of distorting media. For memory, it includes conditions free from trauma, suggestion, or the decay that comes with time. For testimony, it includes a context in which the speaker is competent, sincere, and free from coercion.

The judgment itself, on Sosa's account, is an act of epistemic agency. Unlike a belief that simply arises in us, a judgment is something we do: we endorse a proposition, taking responsibility for its correctness. This active endorsement is subject to the same competence-based assessment as passive belief, but it adds a dimension of control. We can choose whether to assent, withhold, or dissent, and the aptness of the resulting judgment depends on whether our assent is guided by competent faculties operating in appropriate conditions.

Philosophical Significance

Sosa's extension to judgment and agency has reshaped several areas of epistemology:

Epistemic agency and doxastic voluntarism: By treating judgment as an act, Sosa carves out a domain of epistemic agency without collapsing into the implausible thesis that we can believe at will. We cannot choose our beliefs directly, but we can choose our judgments — whether to endorse a proposition on the basis of our faculties. This middle path between doxastic involuntarism and voluntarism has influenced debates about epistemic responsibility, doxastic wronging, and the ethics of belief.

Environmentalism and the extended mind: The emphasis on the "right environment" connects Sosa's framework to situated and extended approaches to cognition. Competence is not locked inside the head but depends on the surrounding conditions, tools, and social structures that make a faculty reliable. This resonates with work on extended cognition, distributed knowledge, and the social dimensions of epistemic competence, suggesting that epistemology must attend to the environment in which knowers operate.

Safety, sensitivity, and modal conditions: The "right environment" requirement introduces a modal dimension to knowledge: a belief counts as apt only if it would still be true in nearby possible worlds where the faculty operates in similar conditions. This connects Sosa's virtue epistemology to the safety and sensitivity conditions developed in modal epistemology, offering a way to integrate virtue-theoretic and modal approaches to knowledge.

Reflective knowledge and metacognition: Judgment and Agency develops Sosa's account of reflective knowledge — knowledge that is not merely apt at the first order but also endorsed from a higher-order perspective. The agent who judges must be able to assess their own judgment as apt, deploying meta-competence to endorse their first-order competence. This two-tier structure has influenced work on metacognition, epistemic self-regulation, and the role of higher-order evidence in epistemology.

Sources

1. Sosa, Ernest. Judgment and Agency (Oxford University Press, 2015). Context in: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/
2. "Virtue Epistemology," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/
3. "Virtue Epistemology," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/virtue-epistemology/
4. Sosa, Ernest. Knowing Full Well (Princeton University Press, 2011).
5. Greco, John and Turri, John, eds. Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings (MIT Press, 2012).