A ROBUST ENOUGH VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY Fernando Broncano-Berrocal (published in Synthese) Abstract What is the nature of knowledge? A popular answer to that long-standing question comes from robust virtue epistemology, whose key idea is that knowing is just a matter of succeeding cognitively—i.e., coming to believe a proposition truly— due to an exercise of cognitive ability. Versions of robust virtue epistemology further developing and systematizing this idea offer different accounts of the relation that must hold between an agent’s cognitive success and the exercise of her cognitive abilities as well as of the very nature of those abilities. This paper aims to give a new robust virtue epistemological account of knowledge based on a different understanding of the nature and structure of the kind of abilities that give rise to knowl- edge. Keywords: robust virtue epistemology; ability; cognitive ability; aptness; safety. What is the nature of knowledge? A popular answer to that long-standing ques- tion comes from robust virtue epistemology, whose key idea is that knowing is just a matter of succeeding cognitively—i.e., coming to believe a proposition truly—due to an exercise of cognitive ability. Versions of robust virtue episte- mology further developing and systematizing this idea offer different accounts of the relation that must hold between an agent’s cognitive success and the ex- ercise of her cognitive abilities as well as accounts of the very nature of those abilities. This paper aims to give a new robust virtue epistemological account of knowledge based on a different understanding of the nature and structure of the kind of abilities that give rise to knowledge. To motivate these alternative accounts —of ability and knowledge— and to compare them with current views of the notion of cognitive ability as well as with the theories of knowledge that result from them, I will find it useful to introduce 1