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This chapter presents a theory of knowledge as coming in two main varieties: the animal and the reflective. Animal knowledge is apt belief, which hits the mark of truth through the exercise of competence, of intellectual virtue. This account enables a further, broader approach to scepticism, both dream scepticism and the more radical scepticism of outre scenarios such as the envatted brain and others of its ilk.

This chapter addresses the traditional pragmatic view that metaphors are understood as implicit comparisons, i.e., as similes. This position, as well as the salience imbalance proposal that differentiates between literal and metaphorical similarity, are critically examined and rejected. The chapter rejects comparison theories of any kind. Instead of understanding metaphor as implicit comparisons, it is argued that metaphors are understood directly as class-inclusion assertions that create new, relevant, and useful categories. Such categories function to characterize topics that are of interest in a discourse. The concept of dual reference is introduced to account for the ability of metaphors to be paraphrased as similes (and vice-versa), and the structure of metaphorical categories is described. How people perceive metaphoricity in both nominal and verbal metaphors is discussed, as well as the determinants of metaphorical aptness.

Property attribution is examined in two forms of metaphor — nominal (e.g., lawyers are “sharks”) and predicative (e.g., the dog “flew” across the yard), as well as in compound nouns, such as “feather luggage”. It is argued that topics constrain property attribution by providing dimensions for attribution, e.g., for the topic surgeon, relevant dimensions would include skill, cost, and availability. Vehicles provide candidate properties that could be attributed to the topic, for example, incompetence, as in the metaphor “my surgeon was a butcher”. When a topic has relatively few relevant dimensions for attribution, and a vehicle has relevant and salient properties to be attributed to the topic, then the resulting metaphor is very easy to comprehend, i.e., it is apt. Experimental evidence supports these claims. With respect to compound nouns, they are often interpreted as property attributions rather than simple descriptive modifiers, as in “feather luggage”, to mean luggage that is light, vs. “feather storage” to refer to a place to store feathers. When a head noun can be seen as a topic and the modifying noun as a metaphor vehicle, the compound is given a property attribution. In both metaphors and compound nouns, topics and vehicles thus play different roles.

Fictional discourse, this chapter shows, is a truth-apt discourse that’s supported on and defers to what may be described as a pretence (or story-telling) practice that isn’t truth-apt. Nevertheless, truth-apt fictional discourse is indispensable despite its terms being empty. It’s shown how being clear that such a discourse isn’t required to honor metaphysical facts about fictional objects, but is required to be useful and true can illuminate and make sense of how we talk about fictions. It’s shown how truth-based properties can be attributed to fictional characters—the property of being depicted in such and such a story, for example—and how the identification of fictional entities within works and across works can be made cogent (despite there being no fictional objects, and consequently, fictional objects having no properties).

I develop the theory of proto-assertions, and proto-illocutionary acts, which are sentential speech-acts that can function as sentence meanings. I critique the standard semantic conception of truth. I analyse metaphor, sarcasm, and approximative assertion, and develop a theory of suppositional discourse.

This chapter discusses expressivism as a form of moral skepticism that denies the truth-aptness of moral beliefs and judgments. It focuses on whether expressivists can solve the problem of embedding (also known as the Frege problem) by allowing that some moral beliefs have a minimal kind of truth, and whether expressivists can account for the apparent objectivity of moral beliefs. It concludes that if expressivists succeed in mimicking all apparently realistic moral language, then expressivism does not really matter to moral epistemology.

This chapter defends the epistemic circularity involved in meta-aptness and thereby in the full aptness of knowing full well. It begins by explaining two forms of bootstrapping: the inference from the perceptual belief that a seen surface is red to the conclusion that in so believing we are not misled by a white surface in bad light, and the inductive inference from the track record of a gauge to the conclusion that it is a reliable gauge. Each is formally valid, yet neither could possibly provide adequate justification for its conclusion. The chapter offers an explanation for why this is so, before moving on to the reliability of a competence that is not reason-involving. Finally, this chapter advances an argument in defense of trust in our epistemic faculties, one that involves circularity of a sort, and how such circularity can be considered virtuous.

Though neither blame nor guilt are themselves good or desirable, the fact that blame or guilt would be a good thing in certain circumstances is itself a good thing, at least in the context of certain relationships like friendship. Scanlon argues that apt blame tracks the value of such relationships. It is argued that apt blame is part of what gives such relationships their value. The superiority of value-constituting over value-tracking theories of blame becomes clear once we see that blame is a form of anger and distinguish the aptness of blame-as-anger from its accuracy. We also realize that apt blame has a wider scope than is usually imagined.

This chapter discusses how Descartes uses his principle of clarity and distinctness to raise his first-order judgments to the scientia level. Error is what one must avoid, not just falsity; so he seeks not just truth but also aptness. You are to assure yourself that you attain such aptness, which is required for confidence that you avoid error and attain certainty. But this assurance is forthcoming only with assurance that the operative source of your judgment is indeed a reliable-enough competence. This raises an issue of circularity, also known as the Cartesian Circle. The chapter shows how this circle also affects contemporary virtue epistemology when it postulates a level of reflective knowledge above that of animal knowledge.

This chapter argues that judgment and knowledge itself are forms of intentional action. Such action falls under a certain normative structure of success, competence, and aptness, or success that manifests competence. Judgment is a special case falling under that structure. The chapter explains that intentional actions come in two sorts. An attempt is an intentional action, an endeavor to attain a certain objective. An attempt can fail and remain a mere attempt, whereas an achievement is a certain sort of successful attempt. Intentional actions are one sort of performance. Some performances are also aimings, however, without being intentional. These, too, can fail and remain mere aimings, to be distinguished from those that are successful.

Virtue epistemology takes its own approach to the questions of traditional epistemology. In what follows, a fresh treatment of philosophical skepticism is enabled by a distinctive notion of default assumptions, along with an analogy between epistemic and athletic performance, and between episteme and praxis more generally. The novel response to the skeptics will explain how they’ve mistaken what’s required for the epistemic quality of ordinary judgments and beliefs. Our virtue epistemological approach relies on a category of default assumptions that is different from any “default justification” or “entitlement” already in the literature, if only because ours is embedded in virtue theory and is to be understood thereby. Wittgenstein comes closest in On Certainty, though his own ideas are also unhinged from any broader virtue epistemology.

Three of the forms and assumptions of moral practice are that moral judgements are truth-apt, sometimes true, and that they express moral beliefs. Vindicating these assumptions seems inconsistent with expressivism as traditionally conceived. However, minimalist accounts of truth-aptness, truth, and belief may help the expressivist. Minimalism says that the correct account of a notion is revealed by all and only those platitudes surrounding it. Practical expressivists accept that moral sentences satisfy truth-aptness, and they also accept that moral sentences are truth-apt. This helps expressivism secure truth-aptness, but also encourages the thought that there is nothing distinctive in the expressivist position. But creeping minimalism can be resisted since there is a robust sense of belief that resists minimalism. It is in this robust sense that expressivists will deny (and descriptivists accept) that the meaning of moral judgements is to be explained in terms of their expressing moral beliefs.

Descartes is a virtue epistemologist. Not only does he distinguish centrally between animal and reflective knowledge - in his terms, between cognitio and scientia - but in additionhe conceives of cognitio as apt grasp of the truth: i.e. as grasp whose correctness manifests sufficient epistemic competence. First-order knowledge is such cognitio or apt belief, which can then be upgraded to the level of scientia through competent reflective endorsement. So Descartes both (a) advocates aptness as an account of simple knowledge, and (b) highlights a higher knowledge that requires endorsement from a second-order perspective. This includes both main components of a sort of ‘virtue epistemology’ found in contemporary philosophy. This chapter argues that we can make sense of Descartes’s epistemological project only as a second-order project that fits with the view of his epistemology just sketched. Along the way supportive detail will reveal his commitment more fully.

One hybrid theory for moral sentences is the implicature theory (IT), according to which, in producing a value utterance, the speaker U says that Jane has F for some natural property F and conventionally implicates approval of F-things—or instantiation of F. This chapter maintains that we can defend IT as a plausible view if we can make sense of conventional implicature. However, that is surprisingly challenging and touches on expressivism in a way that moves beyond mere hybridism, because to make sense of conventional implicature as a mode of unsaid content, we need already to accept a form of pure, nonhybrid expressivism about a range of locutions and constructions in natural language. The form of expressivism has to be a cognitive expressivism according to which (expressive) talk is truth apt and belief expressing. Once this expressivism is in place, we can have a hybrid theory of value sentences.

A concept of the fully apt performance is explicated, which helps guide us beyond anything found in earlier virtue epistemology. A fully apt performance is one that aims not only to attain its basic constitutive aim, but also to do so aptly. The performance must hence manifest not only the first-order performative competence, but also a second-order competence to assess properly the risk involved, through an assessment of the relevant competence of the performer. That concept is then applied to cognitive performances specifically, and is used to explicate what judgment is: namely, an affirmation that is alethic in aiming at truth, but also epistemic in aiming at alethic aptness.

This chapter turns to a topic broached already in Chapter 1: the nature of intentional action and the conditions for its aptness. In the end not even a weak subcredal form of knowledge turns out to be required for intentional action, which means that the way in which knowledge of various levels and degrees bears on action is less exclusive than appears at first consideration. Knowledge bears on action by making it more creditable than otherwise, by making it more competent than otherwise, and thereby more apt. But knowledge of no level or degree is necessarily required for action that will be minimally apt, competent, intentional, and creditable.Finally, a notion of simple intentional action is defined and used to explicate judgment and its relation to action.

This chapter characterizes a set of parallel assumptions. One, shared by many otherwise different contemporary philosophical treatments of the emotions, is that our affective responses are susceptible to assessments of rationality, fittingness, or some other notion of aptness. The other is that analogous norms of fittingness apply to those emotions directed at what is only fictional, or what is only imagined to be the case. This chapter identifies the relevant concept of emotional aptness that is at play in both kinds of assumptions, and which is at the core of the disagreement between the theses of normative continuity and normative discontinuity. The chapter then develops and assesses arguments in favor of the continuity thesis: the claim that the criteria determining such aptness of responses to contents of artistic representations apply invariantly to responses to analogous states of affairs in real life.

While much about the notion of ground in contemporary metaphysics is contested, there is large agreement that ground is closely connected to a certain kind of explanation. Recently, Jonathan Schaffer and Alastair Wilson have argued that ground is a relation that is very closely related to causation and that grounding explanations should be given an account in broadly interventionist terms through the use of structural equations and directed graphs. Such an approach offers the potential benefit of a largely unified framework for explanations with different relations, or different species of the same relation, backing different types of explanation. However, this chapter argues that this benefit cannot be realized since there are crucial differences between causal explanations and grounding explanations in how we can evaluate the aptness of the models in question.