A Dialogue between Sosa’s Virtue Epistemology and a Confucian Theory of the Rectification of Names

Bearing considerable affinities with the Confucian notion of virtues in many aspects notwithstanding, Sosa’s virtue-epistemology-based approach to a satisfactory solution of the Gettier Problem still owes readers a further account of why aptness in Gettierized-counterexample-immune knowledge attributions will not involve reflective knowledge, the achievement of which is more psychological-resource-consuming than that of animal knowledge. By contrast, the Confucian notion of the rectification of names provides a better account of how an apt knowledge attributor can use his animal knowledge alone to handle the Gettier cases within a bigger framework of Sosa’s virtue epistemology. Since this Confucian notion looks so natural when Chinese is taken as the working language of doing epistemology, this research also shows the potential capacity of Chinese for handling contemporary philosophical issues.