Epistemic Virtues Research Articles

PERFORMING HISTORY: HOW HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP IS SHAPED BY EPISTEMIC VIRTUES

ABSTRACTPhilosophers of history in the past few decades have been predominantly interested in issues of explanation and narrative discourse. Consequently, they have focused consistently and almost exclusively on the historian's (published) output, thereby ignoring that historical scholarship is a practice of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, in which successful performance requires active cultivation of certain skills, attitudes, and virtues. This paper, then, suggests a new agenda for philosophy of history. Inspired by a “performative turn” in the history and philosophy of science, it focuses on the historian's “doings” and proposes to analyze these performances in terms of epistemic virtue. It argues that historical scholarship is embedded in “practices” or “epistemic cultures,” in which knowledge is created and warranted by means of such virtues as honesty, carefulness, accuracy, and balance. These epistemic virtues, however, are not etched in stone: historians may highlight some of them, exchange one for another, or reinterpret their meaning. On the one hand, this suggests a rich area of research for historians of historiography. To what extent can consensus, conflict, continuity, and change in historical scholarship be explained in terms of epistemic virtue? On the other hand, the proposal outlined in this article raises a couple of philosophical questions. For example, on what grounds can historians choose among epistemic virtues? And what concept of the self comes with the notion of virtue? In addressing these questions, philosophy of history may expand its current scope so as to encompass not only “writings” but also “doings,” that is, the virtuous performances historians recognize as professional conduct.

Duhem–Quine virtue epistemology

The Duhem–Quine Thesis is the claim that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation because any empirical test requires assuming the truth of one or more auxiliary hypotheses. This is taken by many philosophers, and is assumed here, to support the further thesis that theory choice is underdetermined by empirical evidence. This inquiry is focused strictly on the axiological commitments engendered in solutions to underdetermination, specifically those of Pierre Duhem and W. V. Quine. Duhem resolves underdetermination by appealing to a cluster of virtues called ‘good sense’, and it has recently been argued by Stump (Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci, 18(1):149–159, 2007) that good sense is a form of virtue epistemology. This paper considers whether Quine, who’s philosophy is heavily influenced by the very thesis that led Duhem to the virtues, is also led to a virtue epistemology in the face of underdetermination. Various sources of Quinian epistemic normativity are considered, and it is argued that, in conjunction with other normative commitments, Quine’s sectarian solution to underdetermination amounts to a skills based virtue epistemology. The paper also sketches formal features of the novel form of virtue epistemology common to Duhem and Quine that challenges the adequacy of epistemic value truth-monism and blocks any imperialist naturalization of virtue epistemology, as the epistemic virtues are essential to the success of the sciences themselves.

Book Review: Illustrating Objectivity in an Atlas of Epistemic Virtues

Book Review: Illustrating Objectivity in an Atlas of Epistemic Virtues

Another Particularism: Reasons, Status and Defaults

This paper makes the non-monotonicity of a wide range of moral reasoning the basis of a case for particularism. Non-monotonicity threatens practical decision with an overwhelming informational complexity to which a form of ethical generalism seems the best response. It is argued that this impression is wholly misleading: the fact of non-monotonicity is best accommodated by the defence of four related theses in any theory of justification. First, the explanation of and defence of a default/challenge model of justification. Secondly, the development of a theory of epistemic status and an explanation of those unearned entitlements that accrue to such status. Thirdly, an explanation of the basis of epistemic virtues. Finally, an account must be given of the executive capacity of rational decision itself as a ‘contentless ability’. This overall set of views can accommodate a limited role for generalizations about categories of evidence, but not such as to rescue a principled generalism. In particular, the version of particularism defended here explains why one ought not to accept the principled “holism” that has proved to be a problem for Dancy’s form of particularism. Ethics certainly involves hedged principles. However, principles cannot be self-hedging: there cannot be a “that’s it” operator in a principle as Richard Holton has claimed that there can be. Practical reasoning is concluded by the categorical detachment of the action-as-conclusion itself.

Cognitive Enhancement, Virtue Ethics and the Good Life

This article explores the respective roles that medical and technological cognitive enhancements, on the one hand, and the moral and epistemic virtues traditionally understood, on the other, can play in enabling us to lead the good life. It will be shown that neither the virtues nor cognitive enhancements (of the kind we have access to today or in the foreseeable future) on their own are likely to enable most people to lead the good life. While the moral and epistemic virtues quite plausibly are both necessary and sufficient for the good life in theory, virtue ethics is often criticised for being elitist and unachievable in practice for the vast majority. Some cognitive enhancements, on the other hand, might be necessary for the good life but are far from sufficient for such an existence. Here it will be proposed that a combination of virtue and some cognitive enhancements is preferable.

Introduction

The history of the science of consciousness is difficult to trace because it involves an ongoing debate over the aims involved in the study of consciousness that historically engaged people working in a variety of different, often overlapping, philosophical projects. At least three main aims of these different projects can be identified: (1) providing an ultimate foundation for natural science; (2) providing an empirical study of experience; and (3) promoting human well-being by relieving suffering and encouraging human flourishing. Each of these aims has its own problems and its own methods for solving them that endorse different epistemic virtues characteristic of science in different historical periods through a variety of "styles of science".

Moral and Epistemic Virtues: A Thomistic and Analytical Perspective

The article elaborates on the concept of ethics, noting the contrasting definitions of morality virtue-based and rule-based ethics. It highlights the related distinction between virtue epistemology and rule epistemology, stating that the main difference lies in the appreciation of the ethics of belief by either discipline. It also discusses the claim by philosopher Linda Zagzebski that epistemology is a branch of ethics, focusing on the contrary arguments including the perspectives of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

On the Subject of Goethe: Hermann von Helmholtz on Goethe and Scientific Objectivity

In their recent book, Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison oppose the image of the scientist as a rational, objective, an dispassionate investigator of nature with that of the intuitively guided and emotionally volatile artistic genius. The authors argue that the emergence of objectivity as an epistemic virtue in nineteenth-century scienti?c practices was intimately tied to a newly perceived threat to knowledge: that of the subjective self. In their discussion, Daston and Galison cite the artist’s creative imposition of ideas on the world as quintessentially subjective and opposed to science.

Dealing With Disagreement: Distinguishing Two Types of Epistemic Peers

Epistemologists have recently debated how we should respond to apparent cases of rational disagreement. Is it possible for two people to disagree and have both people still be rational? Those involved in this debate make use of the idea of epistemic peers. Two people are epistemic peers if they share the same knowledge of a given topic and have similar epistemic virtues. My paper argues that we have different kinds of epistemic peers; close peers who think similarly to ourselves, and remote peers who think very differently. I argue that remote peers are genuine peers, but that we should respond to disagreement from remote peers differently than disagreement from close peers.

Epistemic Virtue in the Assessment of Claims to Refugee Status

Epistemic Virtue in the Assessment of Claims to Refugee Status

Moral and Epistemic Virtues

Moral and Epistemic Virtues

VIRTUE ETHICS AND VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY

Abstract:The aim of this essay is to test the claim that epistemologists—virtue epistemologists in particular—have much to learn from virtue ethics. The essay begins with an outline of virtue ethics itself. This section concludes that a pure form of virtue ethics is likely to be unattractive, so the virtue epistemologist should examine the “impure” views of real philosophers. Aristotle is usually held up as the paradigm virtue ethicist. His doctrine of the mean is described, and it is explained how that doctrine can provide a framework for an account of epistemic virtue. The conclusion of the essay is that a virtue epistemology based on analogies with virtue ethics, though well worth developing and considering, will face several challenges in fulfilling the significant promises that have been made on its behalf.

Flexible Realism, Flexibility, and Holism

In this paper I describe flexible realism, a view being developed by Peter Hare in his later papers. Hare advocated a conceptual flexibility that recognized that epistemic standards are deeply contextual and provided an account of the epistemic virtues that would respond to this feature of justification. After placing Hare's view in the framework of Morton White's holistic pragmatism this paper explores Hare's account of flexible realism as it applies to overbeliefs.

The Social Virtues: Two Accounts

Social (epistemic) virtues are the virtues bound up with those forms of inquiry involved in social routes to knowledge. A thoroughly individualistic account of the social virtues endorses two claims: (1) we can fully characterize the nature of the social virtues independent of the social factors that are typically in play when these virtues are exemplified, and (2) even when a subject’s route to knowledge is social, the only epistemic virtues that are relevant to her acquisition of knowledge are those she herself possesses. A social (or anti-individualistic) account of the social virtues, by contrast, denies one or both of these claims. I will offer some reasons for thinking that the individualistic account is not acceptable, and that one or the other social account provides a better understanding of the social virtues. The argument is not decisive, but it does suggest that the social dimension of social epistemic virtues is not fully characterizable in individualistic terms.

Bolzanian knowing: infallibility, virtue and foundational truth

The paper discusses Bernard Bolzano’s epistemological approach to believing and knowing with regard to the epistemic requirements of an axiomatic model of science. It relates Bolzano’s notions of believing, knowing and evaluation to notions of infallibility, immediacy and foundational truth. If axiomatic systems require their foundational truths to be infallibly known, this knowledge involves both evaluation of the infallibility of the asserted truth and evaluation of its being foundational. The twofold attempt to examine one’s assertions and to do so by searching for the objective grounds of the truths asserted lies at the heart of Bolzano’s notion of knowledge. However, the explanatory task of searching for grounds requires methods that cannot warrant infallibility. Hence, its constitutive role in a conception of knowledge seems to imply the fallibility of such knowledge. I argue that the explanatory task contained in Bolzanian knowing involves a high degree of epistemic virtues, and that it is only through some salient virtue that the credit of infallibility can distinguish Bolzanian knowing from a high degree of Bolzanian believing.

A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume 1, by Ernest Sosa.

Virtue epistemology, as Ernest Sosa thinks of it, is the project of making an externalistic attitude to knowledge that gives credit to human rationality. High-minded externalism. This is not the only way of thinking of virtue epistemology, and I shall describe some connections and tensions with other conceptions. Sosa’s main foci are on what he calls apt belief and on the distinction between animal and reflective knowledge. Both depend on the way he treats epistemic virtues. For him these are not traits such as care with evidence or clever hypothesis-formation, but rather capacities to receive information from various sources combined with dispositions to accept this information when appropriate. Inference gets very little attention, and there is no attention to information-gathering strategies. Sosa is interested in the ways that we give credit to people for successful believing, with perception and testimony as his main examples. (He may think that they are typical enough that we can get the outlines of epistemic credit from them.) To this end, he distinguishes between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge. The point is not to capture intuitions about the meaning of ‘know’ but to record important distinctions about how well we capture truths. Animal knowledge is belief that is ‘apt’, in the sense that its truth can be credited to the agent’s capacities, and reflective knowledge is belief such that the agent knows that the conditions for animal knowledge are met. (In other work, Sosa has described other ways of believing well that cannot be described as kinds of knowledge.)

Philosophy and Public Policy: A Role for Social Moral Epistemology

abstract Part 1 of this essay argues that one of the most important contributions of philosophers to sound public policy may be to combat the influence of bad Philosophy (which includes, but is not limited to, bad Philosophy produced by accredited academic philosophers). Part 2 argues that the conventional conception of Practical Ethics (CPE) that philosophers bring to issues of public policy is defective because it fails to take seriously the phenomenon of the subversion of morality, the role of false factual beliefs in this subversion, and the vulnerability to the exploitation of our moral powers that our social‐epistemic dependency entails. Given the serious risks of the subversion of morality through the propagation of false factual beliefs, CPE's near exclusive emphasis on identifying sound moral principles greatly constrains its potential contribution to the Negative Task of Practical Ethics, the endeavour to reduce the incidence of the most grievously wrong behaviour. Practical ethicists should focus more on the ethics of believing, and develop a more sophisticated conception of the moral and epistemic virtues of individuals and of institutions, one that includes protective meta‐virtues, whose function it is to guard us against the more frequent and predictable subversions of morality, including those subversions that are facilitated by the processes of belief‐formation that our social institutions and practices foster.

Knowledge of God * By ALVIN PLANTINGA AND MICHAEL TOOLEY *

Knowledge of God takes the form of a debate between Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley. Plantinga opens the batting with a seventy-page laying out of his case ‘that theism has a significant epistemic virtue: if it is true, it is (very likely) warranted; this is a virtue naturalism emphatically lacks’ (1). Indeed, Plantinga argues that ‘if naturalism were true, there would be no such thing as knowledge’ (19). It will be recalled [e.g. Plantinga (1993a; 1993b) and Plantinga (2000)] that Plantinga's position is that warrant, understood as whatever it is that needs to be added to true belief to make it knowledge, relies on a notion of proper function and that he is of the belief that ‘no one has been able to come up with a naturalistic analysis of proper function that is anywhere nearly adequate or accurate’ (29). (For discussion, see Beilby, 2002.) Of course, given a choice between holding that Theism (or, at the least, something very much like it) is true and holding that Plantinga is mistaken in his analysis of knowledge, not everyone goes the way Plantinga goes. Step up to the wicket/plate then Michael Tooley.

Knowing and becoming in the higher education curriculum

If a curriculum in higher education is understood to be an educational vehicle to promote a student's development, and if a curriculum in higher education is also understood to be built in large part around a project of knowledge, then the issue arises as to the links between knowledge and student being and becoming. A distinction is made here between knowing as such and coming to know, with the focus on the latter. It is argued that the process of coming to know can be edifying: through the challenges of engaging over time with disciplines and their embedded standards, worthwhile dispositions and qualities may develop, the worthwhileness arising through the formation of ‘epistemic virtues’. Examples of such dispositions and qualities are identified, with differences between dispositions, on the one hand, and qualities, on the other hand, being observed. Educational implications of understanding the nurturing of student being in this way are sketched, with a set of 10 principles offered for curricula and pedagogy. It is suggested, finally, that the clarifying of the relationship between knowing and being is not only a value‐laden but also a pressing matter.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York, Zone Books, 2007, pp. 501, 32 colour plates, 108 black and white illus., £25.95, $38.95 (hardback 978-1-890951-78-8).

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York, Zone Books, 2007, pp. 501, 32 colour plates, 108 black and white illus., £25.95, $38.95 (hardback 978-1-890951-78-8).