Abstract
The essays collected here seek to establish bridges between virtue epistemology and philosophy of science (broadly construed, including the history of science, the use of specific scientific results to construct naturalistic philosophical theories, formal epistemology, modeling, theory choice, etc.). Since Ernest Sosa’s ground breaking essay “The Raft and the Pyramid” (1980) and Linda Zagzebski’s Virtues of The Mind (1996), epistemologists have become increasingly interested in the normative aspects of knowledge, justification, understanding and other epistemic states. Virtue epistemologists seek to ground the epistemic norms used to evaluate human cognition in a general commitment to aretaic (or virtue theoretic), rather than deontological or consequentialist, forms of normativity. Two broad defining features of this movement are often seen through a commitment to the following principles: (a) Knowledge and other important epistemic concepts are essentially normative and (b) epistemically valuable states of agents confer epistemically valuable properties on their beliefs, not the other way around. Virtue epistemology thus borrows liberally from the rich tradition in virtue ethics for a range of normative resources that have proven quite useful for epistemologists interested in addressing traditional problems regarding epistemic luck and epistemic value. While much more will be said about virtue epistemology below, and there are indeed many species of virtue epistemology on offer in contemporary literature, what unifies this movement can fruitfully be seen through the unique way virtue epistemology foregrounds the normativity of knowledge and places the agent at the center of the analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not to suggest that overtly normative epistemology was not happening prior to Sosa and Zagzebski’s work, as Roderick Firth (1978) and Roderick Chisholm had nicely articulated to rule-consequentialist structure of reliabilist theories and the deontological structure of internalist theories respectively.
- 2.
The second commitment is typically described as ‘reversing the direction of analysis’ for terms of epistemic appraisal.
- 3.
Although there are virtue epistemologists like Jason Baehr (2011) and Roberts and Wood (2007) who overtly reject the traditional project of providing an analysis of knowledge. Greco, Pritchard and Sosa clearly show interest in using virtue epistemology to pursue traditional epistemic projects such as answering the skeptic, providing an analysis of epistemic terms and properly handling ‘cases’.
- 4.
See an excellent overview from Heather Batally and a recent reader on virtue epistemology from MIT Press (Greco and Turri).
- 5.
Additional topics salient in the virtue epistemology literature include: epistemic agency (Sosa, Zagzebski, Greco), the role of motivations and emotions in epistemology (Hookway, Zagzebski, Fairweather) the nature of abilities (Greco, Millar, Pritchard), skills (Bloomfield, Greco), and competences (Sosa), the value understanding (Kvanvig, Grimm, Riggs), wisdom (Riggs, Zagsebski), curiosity (Whitcomb, Inan) and even education policy and practice (Baehr).
- 6.
See Alfano and Fairweather (2013) for an overview of situationism and virtue theory.
- 7.
See Flanagan (2006) for an interesting discussion of the varieties of naturalism, including imperialist naturalism, which is strongly reductive.
- 8.
See Duhem’s (1954) classic argument from confirmation holism and of course much of Quine’s philosophy, although Duhem was far more modest than Quine in the conclusions he drew.
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Fairweather, A. (2014). Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. In: Fairweather, A. (eds) Virtue Epistemology Naturalized. Synthese Library, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04672-3_1
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