Knowledge, Competence, and the Establishment of Warrant

Ernest Sosa sees the establishment of warrant for our knowledge in part as an a priori mode of establishing externalist warrant for our beliefs and their underlying competences. I clarify the place of this a priori warrant in Sosa’s understanding of the aptness hierarchy — i.e., how knowledge progresses to better knowledge — by showing that it makes sense of the attainment of better knowledge through a tight connection between the a priori mode of warrant establishment and another mode, called the dispositional , representing the brute reliability of our disposition to take our apt first-order beliefs at face value.