Epistemic Virtues

Abstract

Broadly, virtues are excellences. Applied to epistemology, then, virtues are excellences of epistemic agents, thinkers, or cognizers. As virtue epistemology has risen to prominence in the past several decades, virtue-theoretic approaches to epistemology have become numerous, systematic, and diverse. Accordingly, the work on epistemic virtues and vices, the focus of such approaches, has blossomed in number, extent, and diversity. This bibliography will cover a range of central issues in the philosophical reflection on epistemic virtues and vices, and lay out some of the central views, monographs, edited collections, and articles in the field. Two main approaches to the nature of epistemic virtue have come to occupy central roles: views that take something like skills, abilities, or competences as definitive of epistemic virtues, and theories that analyze epistemic virtues as kinds of intellectual traits of character. Another central debate concerns the relation of epistemic virtues to the wider debate in epistemology regarding internalism and externalism on positive epistemic status. As with the advent of any significant family of philosophical theory, objections will soon be levied against it. In particular, worries extended from the situationist challenge to moral virtues and concerns about epistemic luck and credit have become major players in the literature on virtue epistemology. This bibliography will also devote extensive discussion to specific epistemic virtues, as work on them has boomed relatively recently in step with work on epistemic virtue in general. Two more recent discussions—on vice epistemology and social epistemic virtue—will also merit their own sections. Finally, this bibliography will discuss the applications of epistemic virtues, both within different branches of philosophy and in other professional fields outside of it.