Character, reliability and virtue epistemology

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 223, 2006, Pages 193-212

  Baehr, Jason ^a  

^a LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34748875096     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2006.00437.x     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. The terms 'virtue reliabilism' and 'virtue responsibilism' originate (respectively) with Lorraine Code, 'Toward a Responsibilist Epistemology', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45 (1984), pp. 29-50
2. and Guy Axtell, 'Recent Work in Virtue Epistemology', American Philosophical Quarterly, 34 (1997), pp. 1-27
3. For recent surveys of the field, see J. Greco, 'Virtue Epistemology', in E. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2002/entries/epistemology-virtue)
4. and 'Virtues in Epistemology', in P. Moser (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Epistemology (Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 287-315
5. L. Zagzebski, 'Virtue Epistemology', in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 617-21
6. A. Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 1992), pp. 157-8
7. Greco, 'Virtues in Epistemology', p. 311
8. 'Virtues in Epistemology', pp. 296-7
9. See, e.g., his Putting Sceptics in their Place (Cambridge UP, 2000)
10. E. Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 144, 239-42, 289-90. As I note below, an additional requirement for what Sosa calls 'reflective' or 'human' knowledge is that the knower must have an 'epistemic perspective' on the known belief, which consists of a coherent set of additional beliefs concerning the source and reliability of the original belief (ch. 11). My concern here, however, lies with the virtue component of his analysis
11. Greco, 'Virtues in Epistemology', pp. 287, 302. For simplicity, I shall mostly ignore avoiding error, and focus instead on the end of reaching the truth. However, similar points apply to the former end
12. See, e.g., Greco, 'Knowledge as Credit for True Belief, in M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski (eds), Intellectual Virtue (Oxford UP, 2003), pp. 155-79
13. Robert Roberts and Jay Wood draw a similar connection between intellectual character virtues and Alvin Plantinga's reliabilist or quasi-reliabilist epistemology, in 'Proper Function, Emotion, and Virtues of the Intellect', Faith and Philosophy, 21 (2004), pp. 3-24. But they say little about how a reliabilist might incorporate the insight that character virtues are often crucial to an agent's reliability or proper function
14. Greco, 'Virtue Epistemology', in J. Dancy and E. Sosa (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 520-2, at p. 521
15. See, e.g., Goldman, 'What is Justified Belief?', in G. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge (Boston: Reidel, 1981), pp. 1-25
16. See Goldman, 'Reliabilism', in E. Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/P044SECT1), sec. 1, para. 7; my italics. The notion of causation also seems to unify or explain several other common ways of stating the reliabilist's central claim, for instance, that knowledge is true belief arrived at 'by way of, 'through', 'as a result of, etc., an exercise of intellectual virtues; or that it is true belief 'produced by', 'generated by', 'with its source in', etc., intellectual virtues
17. One of many examples is M. Stocker, 'Emotional Identification, Closeness, and Size: Some Contributions to Virtue Ethics', in D. Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics (Georgetown UP, 1997), pp. 118-27
18. See Greco, Putting Sceptics in their Place, ch. 7. While Greco often speaks of 'cognitive character', he seems mainly to have in mind one's native cognitive endowment