Making a difference in virtue epistemology

Fabian Hundertmark,Steven Kindley

doi:10.1007/s11229-021-03286-2

Abstract

Virtue Reliabilism holds that knowledge is a cognitive achievement—an epistemic success that is creditable to the cognitive abilities of the knowing subject. Beyond this consensus, there is much disagreement amongst proponents of virtue reliabilism about the conditions under which the credit-relation between an epistemic success and a person’s cognitive abilities holds. This paper aims to establish a new and attractive view of this crucial relation in terms of difference-making. We will argue that the resulting theory, Difference-Making Virtue Epistemology, can deal with cases of epistemic luck and testimonial knowledge while revealing the common core of knowledge and other achievements.

Highlights

Whenever a person’s goal-directed activity succeeds, we may ask why this activity was successful
Afterwards, we argue that Difference-Making Virtue Epistemology” (DMVE) delivers plausible verdicts in cases of testimonial knowledge
Duncan Pritchard thinks that, in order to deal with cases of epistemic luck, we need to replace the because clause in virtue reliabilism with an independently motivated anti-luck condition, and thereby relinquish what we take to be one of the core ideas of the theory—i.e., that knowledge is definable as a specific kind of personal achievement

Summary

Introduction

Whenever a person’s goal-directed activity succeeds, we may ask why this activity was successful. According to the causal clause, a subject’s true belief amounts to knowledge only if it was causally produced by the subject’s cognitive abilities, and not by some other processes or dispositions that do not count as such This requirement arguably enables virtue reliabilists to deny that true beliefs resulting from so-called strange and fleeting processes, such as in Plantinga’s brain lesion case (1988, 30f.) and Keith Lehrer’s case of Mr TrueTemp The first reason for the additional requirement on knowledge expressed by the because clause is that it promises to deal with cases of epistemic luck (Nimtz, 2013, 192f.).3 In these cases, a belief is undoubtedly produced by cognitive ability, but it still seems to be a matter of luck that the subject ends up with a true belief.

Greco’s explanatory salience requirement

Difference‐making virtue epistemology avoids Lackey’s dilemma

Difference‐making virtue epistemology and its anti‐luck condition

Findings

Conclusion