The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology

Heather Battaly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317495284
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is an epistemic virtue? Are epistemic virtues reliable? Are they motivated by a love of truth? Do epistemic virtues produce knowledge and understanding? How can we develop epistemic virtues? The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology answers all of these questions. This landmark volume provides a pluralistic and comprehensive picture of the field of virtue epistemology. It is the first large-scale volume of its kind on the topic. Composed of 41 chapters, all published here for the first time, it breaks new ground in four areas.

1. It articulates the structure and features of epistemic virtues.
2. It provides in-depth analyses of 10 individual epistemic virtues.
3. It examines the connections between epistemic virtue, knowledge, and understanding.
4. It applies virtue epistemology, and explores its impact on related fields.

The contributing authors are pioneers in the study of epistemic virtue. This volume is an outstanding resource for students and scholars in philosophy, as well as researchers in intersecting fields, including education, psychology, political science, and women's studies.

I

Epistemic Virtues: General Structure and Features

1

Telic Virtue Epistemology

Ernest Sosa

According to the telic virtue epistemology to be laid out here, the epistemic domain is one where we perform alethically, aiming at getting it right, whether through judgment (intentional and even conscious) or through functional perception or belief, where the aim would be teleological rather than intentional.

1.1 A VIRTUE THEORETIC ACCOUNT OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

1. Knowledge in this view is a form of action. It involves endeavors to get it right. More broadly it concerns aimings, which can be functional rather than intentional. Through our perceptual systems, we represent our surroundings, aiming to do so accurately, where the aiming is functional or teleological, rather than intentional. And the same goes for our functional beliefs. Through our judgments, however, we do intentionally, even consciously, attempt to get it right. What follows will focus on these epistemic intentional attempts, but the account to be sketched generalizes to the broader category of aimings, which need not be intentional. And to every “aiming” there corresponds an “action,” whether successful or not.

Attempts bring with them a distinctive normativity. For example, success is better than failure; an attempt is a better attempt, it is better as an attempt, if competent than if incompetent; and it is better to succeed through competence—aptly—than through sheer luck. (Here I stipulate, for the sake of a handy label, that an attempt is “apt” if, and only if, its success sufficiently manifests the agent’s pertinent competence.) Here we have a telic normativity in contrast with the deontic normativity of norms, obligations, permissions, and so on.

Attempts are found in domains of human performance, such as sports, games, artistic domains, professional domains like medicine and the law, and so on. These feature distinctive aims, and corresponding competences. Archery, with its distinctive arrows and targets, divides into subdomains. Thus, competitive archery differs importantly from archery hunting. In competitive archery, assessing risk (of failure) has minimal bearing on quality of performance, since the archer has so little choice over shot selection. By contrast, in a hunt, shots vary in quality according to how well selected they may be. The lower quality of an ill-judged shot is allied with the fact that “it should not have been taken.”

Domains come thus in three sorts as follows, distinguished by how their distinctive attempts are regulated by standards of appropriate risk.

A domain can be entirely unregulated with respect to appropriate risk, so that participant agents need pay no heed to any such standards. Take doodling, or “aimless” ambling in a safe riverside meadow, or drifting in a canoe on a placid lake. Here standards of risk are minimal or nonexistent. Normal adults can doodle, amble, and drift with no need to assess risk, since there is normally no risk at all. Jazz improvisation seems less subject to standards of risk than surgery, and less than much formal athletic performance, as in a tennis match.

A domain can be risk-unregulated in a different way, when participants are not allowed attempt selection, or are tightly restricted, as in competition archery. When it is an archer’s turn he must put himself in position and shoot, with minimal, highly restricted attempt selection. At that point, he must take aim and shoot. He has minimal or zero discretion with regard to the normal factors of Situation (distance, light), or Shape (no option to wait until less tired, more alert, etc.), or Skill (can’t postpone so as to hone skill). And these are the SSS factors that determine degree of complete competence.¹

The third category is of domains risk-regulated to a significant extent, some highly so. Professional domains are examples here, reaching a peak in invasive surgery. Other examples are sports such as tennis and basketball.

The archery hunt is a borderline case. How is Diana’s shot selection regulated? This depends on whether the hunt is nearing its end, how many arrows are left in her quiver, and the like. A shot that she takes with the one arrow left to her may allow less risk than one taken when the quiver is full, especially if the success of the afternoon’s hunt depends on her success with that one remaining arrow. Hunt-internal factors determine appropriate risk in a way that would tend to elicit broad agreement among knowledgeable observers. Risk may be obviously too high when she is too far from her target, with just one arrow left, and when it is likely enough that better targets will soon be available within better range in the woods teeming with game.

A shot by Diana might be deft while poorly selected, an inferior shot in that respect—if the prey is far, visibility poor, and the wind blowing hard, so that likelihood of success is extremely low. Still her dexterity as an archer might deliver the success of her shot, a highly skilled shot (in respect of manual skill) despite being so poorly selected, so ill-judged (in respect of risk assessment). Diana’s shot may thus attain first-order aptness through dexterity, without attaining “reflective” aptness full well. The latter requires aptness not only in hitting the target, through manual competence, but also in attaining the aptness of one’s shot, not only through dexterity but also through risk assessment.

Archery-external pragmatic values are here irrelevant, even when they do bear on the overall assessment of a hunter’s archery shot. Thus, the success of an archery shot may bring food to the hunter’s starving family, or may constitute a horrible murder. But these outcomes are irrelevant to the assessment of that shot as a hunter-archery shot, as an attempt to hit prey without running excessive risk of failure.

Accordingly, I leave open what value external to hunting-archery may reside in the fully apt success of such an archery shot. I put aside even whatever value—whether final or inherent or intrinsic—axiology might attribute to such archery shots and to fully apt ones in particular. That is independent of the telic normativity of hunting-archery attempts as attempts. If an attempt succeeds through a competence to succeed in such attempts, then it is apt. If an attempt aims at the apt success of a contained attempt, then, if that second-order attempt succeeds through a competence to succeed in such second-order attempts, then the first-order attempt is not only apt, but fully apt, by being thus aptly apt.

But the full aptness of such a first-order attempt is entirely compatible with its being a horrible murder, if the “hunter” is an assassin and the prey his victim. That hunter’s shot may still be outstandingly, fully apt, if it manifests the agent’s competence in both archery dexterity and shot selection. By properly managing risk, and thus competently attaining the aptness of her first-order shots, an archer assassin would make her shots not just apt but fully apt. That these fully apt shots were moral abominations would not matter to their quality as archer shots aimed at hitting certain targets and doing so aptly.

It remains only to make explicit the analogy of archery to human cognition, which seems obvious once pointed out. We need only think of a judgment that p as intentionally aimed at truth, as an intentional attempt to get it right aptly on the question whether p, by affirming that p (and by doing so aptly).

Dispositional judgmental belief is then a state disposing you to judge affirmatively upon considering the question whether p. But this too is agential, and even an action, one extended temporally like the action of those motionless human statues at tourist sites. It is a sustained policy that resides in the will.² (That is how Descartes could propose that we give up all our judgmental beliefs in one fell swoop, by an act of will. This is like giving up in one go all of the policies that make one a safe driver, such as stopping at yellow lights and signaling one’s turns.)

2. So, my footnote to Plato concerns two questions: that of the nature of knowledge in the Theaetetus (1989b), and that of the value of knowledge taken up in the Meno (1989a).

In my view, there is a level of human knowledge that involves just getting it right aptly. This “animal” epistemic level is an inferior level in just the way of Diana’s long shot in the dark while drunk. That shot is inferior in one respect if too poorly selected as a hunter’s archery shot, even if not quite as poorly selected as would be a shot aimed at the moon. Even if Diana’s too risky shot turns out to be apt by attaining success through sublime archery dexterity, it is still inferior in the particular respect of being so risky and hence so poorly selected. So now, what exactly is required for the superior “reflective” knowledge, and for “knowledge full well”?

First, we must distinguish judging from guessing. Judgment is affirmation with the intention to thereby affirm competently enough, and indeed aptly. That distinguishes judgments from mere guesses. The quiz show contestant does endeavor to affirm correctly (and thus win the prize), while taking his affirmation to be a sheer guess, far from apt epistemic performance.

A lucky contestant’s affirmation is thus “alethic.” It is aimed at truth all right, at getting it right. But it is still just a guess, not a judgment. In order to qualify as a judgment, an affirmation must aim at getting it right aptly, through competence, and not just through a lucky guess. Given its more substantial aim, a judgment is apt only if its constitutive alethic affirmation is not only apt but aptly apt. The subject must attain aptly not only the truth of his affirmation but also its aptness. And that in turn requires not only the proper operation of one’s perception, memory, inference, etc., but also that one deploy such competences through competent epistemic risk assessment.

Diana’s performance is also assessable on two levels. Diana might misjudge her chances badly, and shoot through overconfidence, so that her risk of failure is extremely high, while yet the success of her performance does still manifest her sublime archery skill, which is still (though barely) competent enough despite her horrible shape and situation. So, her attempt to hit that prey is apt even if it is not fully apt. Conversely, Diana might judge properly that her risk is quite acceptable as she aims at a deer standing still in a sunny field, well within her range. And yet that might turn out to be one of those occasions when her archery competence happens to fail her.

By contrast, spheres like the game show are devoid of risk standards. An agent who endeavors in such a sphere can still aim to minimize risk, and also to keep risk below a certain level. But that would be a subjective choice, one made relative to whatever that agent happens to care about at that point, which will determine the relevant risks and rewards. Missing from such a case are any domain-inherent standards that determine whether risk is or is not above a threshold of acceptability.

Take, however, a tennis player barely ahead in a match, who starts hitting strokes at the top of his power and as flat as possible, so that the risk of balls going out is unacceptably high. Not unacceptably high relative to his objective of scandalizing the fans. Rather, unacceptably high relative to the objective of winning the match.

A hunter archer can also be out to shock by taking crazy shots. What makes his shots “crazy” is set by excessive risk, judged by hunting-archery standards, which would tend to draw agreement from knowledgeable observers. I am thinking that hunting-archery is similar to tennis in this way, if much less formally. For one thing, there isn’t a formal definition of success (as there is in tennis with winning the match). Archery hunts vary depending on the prey hunted, the size and organization of the hunting party, and the purpose of their hunt. Most similar to formalized athletics is hunting for sport. The fully apt hunting-archery shot is then determined by how well the archer assesses risk relative to hunting-archery, or to their specific sort of archery hunt (whether for ducks, on foot, or for foxes, astride a galloping horse, etc.), and to the ends proper to such sport.

3. The epistemic normativity of interest in my account is thus one of judgments as attempts. Consider the part of epistemology containing Plato’s questions as to the nature and value of knowledge: the theory of knowledge. This is associated with the problems of skepticism, of whether and how we can ever attain knowledge. This part of epistemology is then concerned with the normativity of judgments as attempts. Of course, the domain of these attempts is not the domain of archery shots on physical targets. It is a domain of intellectual shots, of judgmental attempts to get it right on a given question, and to do so aptly.

What place does this account give to suspension of judgment? This very pertinent question does raise a problem. But the problem has a solution, one that requires clarity on the fuller aim involved in many domains of human performance. Go back to the important difference between Diana and the Olympic archer. For the huntress, selecting an appropriate target is of crucial importance, and the quality of a shot can vary in that specific respect: in how well selected it is. But her forbearing from shooting in a given instance, especially when tempted, may itself be evaluated in line with our normativity of attempts. The relevant normativity is hence not just one of attempts. It is rather one of attempts or forbearings.

Sometimes the right choice, in an archery hunt, is to forbear. But consider ag...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology
• Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Epistemic Virtues: General Structure and Features
• Part II: Analyses of Individual Epistemic Virtues
• Part III: Epistemic Virtues, Knowledge, and Understanding
• Part IV: Virtue Epistemology: Application and Impact
• Contributors
• Index