C. Thi Nguyen's Response to Commentaries

Abstract

In this chapter, the author concentrates on only two of the issues raised by these commentaries—two that he find particularly interesting. Intellectual playfulness is not defined in terms of intellectual ends. If that’s right, this raises a dilemma: either intellectual virtues are not essentially concerned with intellectual ends or intellectual playfulness is not an intellectual virtue. The core idea is that thinking about intellectual playfulness reveals that some epistemic ends are self-effacing. Self-effacing ends are those ends that aren’t best achieved through direct pursuit. To be epistemically virtuous, one might think, one must be actively and consciously concerned with the various epistemic goods—like truth, and reliability. Another way to put it: each mode of intellectual pursuit arises from a motivation. It seems plausible to think that each motivation comes with certain constraints. Normal intellectual life is vulnerable to epistemic traps that modify plausibility.