Robust virtue epistemology and epistemic anti-individualism

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 93, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 84-103

  Kallestrup, Jesper ^a   Pritchard, Duncan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84858212443     PISSN: 02790750     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0114.2011.01417.x     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Zagzebski, L. (1999). 'What is Knowledge?', in J. Greco and E. Sosa (eds) The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 92-116.
2. nd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, p. 105.
3. Axtell, G. (1997). 'Recent Work in Virtue Epistemology', American Philosophical Quarterly 34, pp. 410-30;
4. Greco, J. (2002). 'Virtues in Epistemology', in P. Moser (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 287-315;
5. Baehr, J. (2004). 'Virtue Epistemology', in B. Dowden and J. Fieser (eds) Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Accessed at www.iep.utm.edu/virtueep/;
6. and (2008). 'Four Varieties of Character-Based Virtue Epistemology', Southern Journal of Philosophy 46, pp. 469-502;
7. Greco, J. and Turri, J. (2009). 'Virtue Epistemology', in E. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Accessed at http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/epistemology-virtue/;
8. Kvanvig, J. (2010). 'Virtue Epistemology', in S. Bernecker and D. H. Pritchard (eds) Routledge Companion to Epistemology, London: Routledge, pp. 199-207;
9. Turri, J. and Sosa, E. (2010). 'Virtue Epis-temology', Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195396577-0123.
10. Note that we will here treat cognitive ability and epistemic virtue as interchangeable notions. While this is potentially controversial, nothing hangs on this distinction for our purposes.
11. Code, L. (1987). Epistemic Responsibility. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England;
12. Kvanvig, J. (1992). The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield;
13. Mont-marquet, J. (1993). Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield;
14. Hookway, C. (2003). 'How to Be a Virtue Epistemologist', in M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski (eds) Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 183-202;
15. Roberts, R. and Wood, W. J. (2007). Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16. Neverthe less, as we explain below, there is a rich vein of thinking within virtue epistemology which does aim to offer an account of knowledge, and it is that brand of virtue epistemology which is our concern here.
17. Luper, S. (1984). 'The Epistemic Predicament', Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62, pp. 26-50;
18. and (2003). 'Indiscernability Skepticism', in S. Luper, (ed.) The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 183-202;
19. Sainsbury, R. M. (1997). 'Easy Possibilities', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57, pp. 907-19;
20. Sosa, E. (1999). 'How to Defeat Opposition to Moore', Philosophical Perspectives 13, pp. 141-54;
21. William son, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press;
22. Pritchard, D. H. (2002). 'Resurrecting the Moorean Response to the Sceptic', International Journal of Philo sophical Studies 10, pp. 283-307;
23. (2005). Epistemic Luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press;
24. and (2007). 'Anti-Luck Epistemology', Synthese 158, pp. 277-97.
25. nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, and Hether-ington, S. (Forthcoming).
26. Greco, J. (1999). 'Agent Reliabilism', Philosophical Perspectives 13, pp. 273-96;
27. and (2000). Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philo sophical Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
28. True-as Sosa [(2007). A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 96]
29. Greco, J. (2009). 'The Value Problem', in A. Haddock, A. Millar and D. H. Pritchard (eds) Epistemic Value. Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press, pp. 313-21.
30. Pritchard, D. H. (2009). 'The Value of Knowledge', Harvard Review of Philosophy 16, pp. 2-19;
31. Pritchard, D. H., Millar, A. and Haddock, A. (2010). The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, chs. 1-2.
32. Pritchard, D. H. (2007). 'Recent Work on Epistemic Value', American Philosophical Quarterly 44, pp. 85-110;
33. Turri, J. and Pritchard, D. H. (2011). 'The Value of Knowledge', in E. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopædia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/knowledge-value/.
34. Sosa (1988). 'Beyond Skepticism, to the Best of Our Knowledge', Mind 97, pp. 153-89; (1991).
35. Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press; 2007;
36. and (2009). Reflective Knowledge: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press;
37. Zagzebski, L. (1996). Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and 1999;
38. Greco, J. (2003). 'Knowledge as Credit for True Belief', in M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski (eds) Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111-34; 2007;
39. (2008). 'What's Wrong With Contextu-alism?', Philosophical Quarterly 58, pp. 416-36;
40. and 2009.
41. Pritchard, D. H. (Forthcoming 2011). 'Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology', Journal of Philosophy.
42. Goldman, A. (1979). 'What Is Justified Belief?', in G. Pappas (ed.) Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 1-23, at p. 13;
43. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 51.
44. Goldberg claims that Goldman's process reliabilism is a branch of what he calls 'process individualism'. See Goldberg, S. (2010). Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 36.
45. More generally, Goldberg argues that the view he dubs 'knowledge individualism', according to which all of the epistemic conditions on knowledge pertain to cognitive processes inside the agent herself, is falsified by ordinary cases of testimony. In conversation with one of the authors of this paper Goldman expressed his sympathy with the view we are here calling weak epistemic individualism, a view that is closely related to knowledge individualism.
46. Goldman, 1986, pp. 62-3 and pp. 111-2.
47. Conee, E. and Feldman, R. (2004). Evidentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
48. Dougherty, T. (ed.) (2011). Evidentialism and its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
49. The locus classicus for defences of the extended mind hypothesis is Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998). 'The Extended Mind', Analysis 58, pp. 7-19.
50. While there has not been much discussion in the literature of the epistemological ramifications of the latter proposal, one exception is Pritchard, D. H. (2010). 'Cognitive Ability and the Extended Cognitions Hypothesis', Synthese 175, pp. 133-51.
51. McLaughlin, B. (1995). 'Varieties of Supervenience', in E. Savellos and Ü. Yalcin (eds) Supervenience: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16-59;
52. Kallestrup, J. (2011). Semantic Externalism, London: Routledge.
53. Jackson, F. and Pettit, P. (1993). 'Some Content Is Narrow', in J. Heil and A. Mele (eds) Mental Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 259-82.
54. Sosa, 2007, p. 29.
55. Pritchard, Millar and Haddock, 2010, §2.4.
56. According to Greco [(2009). Achieving Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 5]
57. Greco, 2009, p. 22 and p. 77;
58. Greco, J. (2007). 'The Nature of Ability and the Purpose of Knowledge', Philosophical Issues 17, pp. 57-69.
59. Kallestrup, J. and Pritchard, D. H. (Forthcoming). 'Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Twin Earth', European Journal of Philosophy-environments should be understood as the normal circumstances in which the agent is typically located and where she acquires the pertinent abilities through learning and sustains them through practice. These abilities are possessed as long as they are reliably manifested in these environments. Importantly, in so far as environments in that sense approximate worlds, such environmental dependence is compatible with the claim that the agent's cognitive abilities weakly supervene on her internal physical constitution. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for urging us to clarify this aspect of epistemic individualism.
60. Lackey, J. (2007). 'Why We Don't Deserve Credit for Everything We Know', Synthese 158, pp. 345-61, p. 352.
61. Fricker, E. (1995). 'Telling and Trusting: Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony', Mind 104, pp. 393-411.
62. Lackey, J. (2010). 'Testimonial Knowledge', in S. Bernecker and D. H. Pritchard (eds) The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. New York: Routledge, pp. 316-25.
63. Carter, J. A. and Pritchard, D. H. (2010). 'Epistemology of Testimony', Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy, DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195396577-0119.
64. Greco, 2007.
65. Greco, 2007, p. 63.
66. Greco, 2007, p. 64.
67. Pritchard, Miller and Haddock, 2010, ch. 2, §6.
68. Sosa, 2007, p. 97.
69. Goldberg (2011). 'The Division of Epistemic Labour', Episteme 8, pp. 112-25.
70. Goldberg, 2010.
71. Goldberg (2011) briefly offers a similar example, but since his hearer in the bad case has always been embedded in an environment in which unreliable testimony is rife, it is open to the virtue-theorist to deny that the hearer ever possessed the relevant discriminatory ability. Goldberg does stress that the two hearers are physical duplicates. But that may be incoherent if such diachronic, epistemic differences have an impact on the hearers' cognitive lives. In any case, the travelling story circumvents that move.
72. Turri, J. (2011). 'Manifest Failure: The Gettier Problem Solved', Philosophers' Imprint 11, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0011.008.
73. Thanks to an anonymous referee for Pacific Philosophical Quarterly for feedback on an earlier version of this article. This paper was written while DHP was in possession of a Philip Leverhulme Prize.