Epistemic Motivation

Abstract

Abstract A growing number of epistemologists use the language of virtue and vice to elucidate the concept of knowledge, an approach now known as Virtue Epistemology (VE).1 VE shifts the focus of epistemic theorizing away from the analysis of familiar concepts like epistemic justification, warrant, and knowledge and toward the concept of intellectual virtue. Some VE theorists make this move in order to eliminate troublesome concepts like justification and even knowledge itself, while others use intellectual virtue as a means of illuminating these concepts.2 These are eliminativist and non-eliminativist variants of VE respectively. In either case, specifying the conditions under which a person possesses intellectual virtue, and when doxastic activity is appropriately connected to such a state, is the fundamental task for a VE theorist. The definitions of justification, warrant, and knowledge come later, if at all.