Abstract
This paper is about the role of self-knowledge in the cognitive life of a virtuous knower. The main idea is that it is hard to know ourselves because introspection is an unreliable epistemic source, and reason can be a source of insidious forms of self-deception. Nevertheless, our epistemic situation is such that an epistemically responsible agent must be constantly looking for a better understanding of her own character traits and beliefs, under the risk of jeopardizing her own status as a knower, ruining her own intellectual life.
Highlights
This paper is about the role of self-knowledge in the cognitive life of a virtuous knower
The main idea is that it is hard to know ourselves because introspection is an unreliable epistemic source, and reason can be a source of insidious forms of self-deception
Our epistemic situation is such that an epistemically responsible agent must be constantly looking for a better understanding of her own character traits and beliefs, under the risk of jeopardizing her own status as a knower, ruining her own intellectual life
Summary
Virtue epistemology is an approach to traditional epistemological problems proposed by Ernest Sosa in his seminal paper “The Raft and the Pyramid”. 3. The idea behind Sosa’s metaphors is that, on the one hand, while foundationalism is the search for foundational beliefs, promising solid grounds (but opening the possibility of infinite regress), virtue epistemology proposes foundational personal virtues (the character traits shaping the practices of the agent), instead of beliefs, as the ground for knowledge. Key to Sosa’s proposal is to describe the epistemological concept of justification as a concept that applies, first of all, to some personal capacities or dispositions of believers (or knowers) Sosa dubs these capacities as intellectual virtues. The main demand of the original proposal, still present in contemporary virtue theories of knowledge, is to apply the concept of justification primarily to the cognitive faculties or character traits of believers, secondarily to their beliefs. As we will see, while Sosa’s proposal involves reliable dispositions, central to Code’s proposal is the concept of epistemic responsibility, since virtue epistemology comes in two versions, virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism
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