Abstract
In this chapter I will develop and defend an account of one particular scientific virtue, one not easily identifiable among traditional lists of the epistemic or the moral virtues, though components or preconditions of this virtue are found in most such accounts. Although my special focus here will be the manifestation of this virtue of scientific character in experimental/observational praxis, I will show how this virtue functions in both experimental and theoretical contexts, and is in fact critical to the excellent function of each as a guide and constraint for the other. While there is no English term that captures precisely the meaning of the virtue I shall emphasize, the nearest approximation would be perceptual responsiveness. The virtue of being perceptually responsive is conceptually complex, and will require precise definition and clarification.
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Notes
- 1.
See Fairweather and Zagzebski (2001) for an excellent account of these debates.
- 2.
A limit-case would be rare and ephemeral experimental phenomena such as those produced by high-energy particle collisions. Many of these are not stable enough to explore, manipulate or otherwise engage in a temporally extended interaction, yet even these project a future horizon of motivated possibilities (e.g., their possible re-creation under similar experimental conditions).
- 3.
This helps us to conceive of how scientific and moral virtues could be genuinely related and yet distinguishable; that is, if they each entail forms of rationally motivated action and judgment, albeit in different spheres of praxis.
- 4.
The distributed means of evidence acquisition in contemporary scientific praxis, where experimental tasks are often divided among teams of sub-specialists and where most scientists rely heavily on peers at other institutions to confirm their results, suggests that this holism also has a strong social dimension. This is addressed further in Sect. 4 and shown to pose no difficulty for my view.
- 5.
For a fuller account of this phenomenological model of scientific experimentation rooted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘reversibility thesis,’ see Vallor (2010).
- 6.
Scholars of virtue ethics will see the parallels with the virtue of Aristotelian phronesis or practical wisdom quite clearly here, but let us make them explicit: being a practically wise moral agent entails a tendency to successfully ‘read’ the morally salient features of each practical situation, and to respond in a way that is appropriate to those features and that wisely selects among those possibilities of further human interaction that the moral situation invites (Aristotle 1999, Book IV).
- 7.
See Vallor (2010) for a related argument.
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Vallor, S. (2014). Experimental Virtue: Perceptual Responsiveness and the Praxis of Scientific Observation. In: Fairweather, A. (eds) Virtue Epistemology Naturalized. Synthese Library, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04672-3_16
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