Abstract
While the situationist challenge has been prominent in philosophical literature in ethics for over a decade, only recently has it been extended to virtue epistemology (See also forthcoming work on this issue by Doris and Olin, Heather Battaly, Christian Miller in Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue. (Fairweather & Flanagan eds.)). Mark Alfano argues that virtue epistemology is shown to be empirically inadequate in light of a wide range of results in social psychology, essentially succumbing to the same argument as virtue ethics. We argue that this meeting of the twain between virtue epistemology and social psychology in no way signals the end of virtue epistemology, but is rather a boon to naturalized virtue epistemology. We use Gird Gigerenzer’s models for bounded rationality (2011) to present a persuasive line of defense for virtue epistemology, and consider prospects for a naturalized virtue epistemology that is supported by current research in psychology.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Henderson and Horgan distinguish a third form called “argumentative inference” to cover cases where the isomorphism between logical relations and causal relations within the information represented by the agent fails to hold.
- 3.
Greco and Pritchard both clearly endorse the “traditional epistemic project”, while others like Zagzebski and Roberts and Woods (2007) and Axtell are more revisionist in how they see the epistemic project, but not in how they see they epistemic virtues.
- 4.
See Goldman (2002).
- 5.
- 6.
See Bach (1984), Montemayor (2014) and Proust (2007) for accounts of basic action that may be amenable to a theory of basic abilities. If there are basic actions, there are very likely abilities to cause the actions. These abilities might themselves be inferential even if the basic action is not itself an inference.
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- 8.
For a nice account of recognitional abilities.
- 9.
See Boghossian 2000.
- 10.
Notice that this is quite different from having a conscious-intellectual “seeming,” which is one way of defining intuitions.
- 11.
This is a concrete way of making a point suggested to us by Lauren Olin in conversation, which is that relativism is much more troubling in the epistemic case, as compared to the moral case. If we are right, situationism is also a lot more implausible in the epistemic case.
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Fairweather, A., Montemayor, C. (2014). Inferential Abilities and Common Epistemic Goods. In: Fairweather, A. (eds) Virtue Epistemology Naturalized. Synthese Library, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04672-3_8
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