Abstract
Virtue epistemology has been divided into two camps: reliabilists and responsibilists. This division has been attributed in part to a focus on different types of virtues, viz., faculty virtues and character virtues. I will argue that this distinction is unhelpful, and that we should carve up the theoretical terrain differently. Making several better distinctions among virtues will show us two important things. First, that responsibilists and reliabilists are actually engaged in different, complementary projects; and second, that certain responsibilist critiques of reliabilism miss the mark. With these distinctions on the table, we can see that the virtue reliabilist project is in some ways more fundamental than the responsibilist project, since the latter importantly depends on the former. I argue that the distinctively epistemic value of the responsibilist’s character virtues is derived from their connections to the reliabilist’s constitutive virtues. While this will give us a unified account of the epistemic value of intellectual virtues, it is not a reduction of the responsibilist project to the reliabilist one; rather, it as a way of securing the separate importance of each project by clarifying how they relate to one another.
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Notes
Greco seems to prefer the term “abilities,” but we can set that aside for the purposes of this paper.
It’s worth noting that many responsibilists, including Baehr and Zagzebski, also recognize the value of the truth of beliefs. However, we might distinguish this alethic value from epistemic values that go along with notions like warrant and justification.
Though they differ on whether the faculties count as virtues, or are at all epistemically important. For instance, Montmarquet (1993) and Zagzebski (1996) want to limit virtue talk entirely to character virtues, while Baehr (2011) and Battaly (2007, 2008) argue for the importance of such faculties in understanding some kinds of knowledge.
I am not the first to suggest that the two projects are not in conflict, but are rather complementary (see Axtell 1997 and Battaly 2007, 2008 for this kind of argument). However, other attempts to bridge the divide have relied heavily on the faculty/character distinction. Battaly, for instance, suggests that reliabilist faculty virtues can be used to explain “low-level” knowledge, and character virtues to explain “high-level” knowledge. I will instead suggest a different relationship exists between instances of knowledge and different kinds of virtues. My approach is thus entirely different, even if some of the goals are shared.
Baehr’s responsibilism is what he calls “weak conservative VE,” and Battaly (2008, p. 643) calls “virtue-expansionism.” The theory is conservative in that it has implications for traditional problems in epistemology, such as the nature of knowledge and the normativity of evidence. It is weak in that Baehr does not think that it can provide all the answers to traditional problems (e.g., he does not think that there is a plausible analysis of knowledge using responsibilist virtue theoretic concepts). Baehr rejects “strong conservative” views of virtue epistemology. These are views like Zagzebski’s, which claim that appeal to ICVs can provide answers to traditional epistemological problems. For instance, Zagzebski provides an analysis of knowledge in terms of character trait virtues (1996). Baehr provides a strong argument against such views in Baehr (2011).
Thanks to Megan Feeney for pointing this out to me, and to Lisa Miracchi for helpful discussion. Also, see Miracchi (2015) for relevant discussion.
Cf. Sosa (2007, 2010). This definition leaves out some of the complexities in some reliabilist accounts, including those meant to help deal with Gettier problems, and with defeaters. This is done for both ease of presentation and to make the account more ecumenical. I think that the distinctions, and the account I give below of the collective auxiliary competences that are necessary for responsibilist character virtues, are consistent with a variety of views, both reliabilist and otherwise.
Note that I am not claiming that such a specification is sufficient to individuate or evaluate competences.
For more on this idea of a competence partially constituting knowledge, see Chap. 1 of Sosa (2010).
Constitutive competences need not be perceptual, or non-inferential in nature, however. A subject might (hopefully!) have competences for evaluating evidence before coming to a conclusion, or competences to perform logical or mathematical deduction.
This means that the subject is competent both in getting into the appropriate position to deploy her constitutive competences, and is sensitive to the fact that she is in the proper position.
This distinction is inspired by the old distinction in the history and philosophy of science between the context of discovery and the context of justification. However, I don’t mean to take on any commitments from the old debate about this distinction in the HOPOS literature. Specifically, I don’t want to take on any of the baggage of the debate dealing with actual history of science vs. our current justification for a theory. Why a theory was historically accepted, for instance, isn’t relevant here. The inspiration is the only connection here.
Compare this example with Roberts and Wood’s appeal to Jane Goodall’s example. They say that certain traits of character were necessary for her knowledge (2007, p. 109). This seems correct, but I want to suggest that the way the traits in question, like perseverance and courage, were necessary was different than the way her evidence-evaluation abilities were necessary. Her character virtues were needed to put her in a position to know. They involved auxiliary, discovery competences that enabled the formation of her knowledge.
It may also be true that some of these competences can be called “constitutive,” in that they may be constitutive of some successful creative process, such as in Levi’s (1983) notion of abduction. Thus, there is a relevant auxiliary/constitutive distinction with respect to the context of discovery. However, this distinction won’t concern us here, as it is not appropriately relevant to knowledge and belief formation. With respect to the reliabilist’s concerns, all discovery competences will be auxiliary. The constitutive competences that are relevant are those constitutive of knowledge.
Knowledge requires that a belief be true and justified or warranted; hence the title “justificatory.”
Notice, however, that this category of constitutive, justificatory competences is not exhausted by the so-called “faculty virtues” that responsibilists like Zagzebski (1996) and Baehr (2011) point to as the supposed focus of reliabilists. I give an example below involving the visual competences of a botanist.
Consider again our example of Clara attempting to form beliefs about her cat’s location. She has a constitutive competence to form visually-based beliefs about cats. She also has an auxiliary deployment competence, which reliably deploys the constitutive competence in appropriate potential locations. Furthermore, she also has a competence for remaining alert, so that both of her other competences are enabled to properly function. Thus, we can describe her as exercising two justificatory auxiliary competences in the service of her constitutive competence.
Let alone in vernacular English.
For these reasons, I have chosen the label “justificatory” for these competences. Note that both of these senses of “justification” refer to kinds of doxastic justification; neither corresponds to propositional justification.
It is also worth noting that there might be another sense of being “justified” that corresponds to having excellent discovery-relevant competences. An investigator who is excellent at coming up with hypotheses might be more justified in coming to believe one such hypothesis than another investigator who is less likely to think of all the relevant hypotheses. The first investigator is more justified because she is less likely to miss things. This does not present a problem for my distinctions, though; as I said, justificatory competences are not meant to explain all the senses of “justification” in philosophy or ordinary language.
One might begin having worries about the generality problem (cf. Goldman 1979; Feldman 1985; Conee and Feldman 1998) here. As I suggest below, I think that my way of distinguishing competences may well help with the generality problem. However, the problem is one that arises for any view of knowledge that requires well-foundedness or doxastic justification (Comesaña 2006). I think there are solutions to the problem, but arguing for them is beyond the scope of this paper.
There are, I take it, deep metaphysical waters here with regard to the individuation of dispositions. Furthermore, it is almost certain that any singular, constitutive competence will be describable (even reducible) in terms of the dispositions of sub-personal cognitive mechanisms. Examples of such attempted descriptions abound in vision science, for example. What is important here, however, is that the dispositions that are relevant to epistemological evaluation are singular. It might be that any visual competence can be further reduced to talk of sub-personal cognitive mechanisms. In that sense, it may be that there are a wide variety of such mechanisms, the possession of which are necessary for a subject to possess the visual competence. However, the best description for the purposes of epistemology, the person-level description, involves the subject’s singular competence to successfully form beliefs (of a certain type, under certain conditions, etc.). Thus, the sub-personal does not concern us here, and I will set this point aside.
Such a competence is still singular, even while deploying a set of competences, because it has just one of each of the four features: one kind of performance, one success condition, one reliability threshold, and one environmental standard.
Or at least often grouped together in common vernacular, or when investigating character virtues.
Since collective competences are sets, this has the result that, in some sense, the collective competence is not itself causally efficacious. Instead, the member competences are the ones which will feature in causal explanations of the subject’s behavior.
I suspect that we might be able to reduce character virtue talk entirely, in favor of collective auxiliary competences. That is, all there is to having an intellectual character virtue is having a certain collective competence. However, arguing for this further, more radical conclusion is beyond the scope of this paper. At the moment, I am simply arguing that character virtues involve collective competences. The benefit of this move will become clear below.
This relation could be one of mere family resemblance, or it could be something more robust, such as a genus-species relationship (i.e., “open-mindedness” could be a name for a genus consisting in several species of more narrow auxiliary competences). Either of these options is compatible with the distinction I am drawing: collective competences may come in several varieties. Thanks to Georgi Gardiner for pointing out the need to address this point.
Although, as I note above, I hope to make the argument that we can reduce the notion of a character virtue to collective auxiliary competences; but that argument is beyond the scope of this paper.
If the reader is concerned that it is the falsity of Donna’s belief doing the work to distinguish the Careful Intern case, we could substitute a version of the case where Donna also chooses design 12, but does so only by luck; she is actually quite unreliable at choosing safe bridge designs. Thanks to Logan Douglass for helpful comments on this point.
Thanks to an anonymous referee at this journal for pressing these points.
I think they will be narrow or singular (in order to combat the generality problem).
See Sosa (2015) for a similar example. Thanks to Ernest Sosa for discussion on this point.
Any account that appeals to derivative value in axiology requires some solution to the “swamping problem” (Zagzebski 1996, 2003). At least, my view here certainly does. Providing one is beyond the scope of this paper, though I am confident that some account will end up being adequate. Cf. Pritchard and Turri (2014).
For explanation of this notion of “widely or globally active” see Sect. 3.4.
I think there is agreement even between reliabilists and evidentialists (who have, after all, the same explanandum in mind). For ease of presentation, however, I will assume some form of virtue reliabilism is correct with respect to knowledge and doxastic justification. I think the argument will hold, mutatis mutandis, even if the appropriate account of justification turns out to be evidentialist.
Or at least the disposition deployed must be a competence most of the time the deployment competence is operative.
Although I have framed this discussion entirely in terms of one subject’s competences, there is no reason why there couldn’t be a social dimension to this. It might be that one subject’s competence is auxiliary to another subject’s constitutive competence. At least, nothing I have said rules this out.
As discussed in the last section, I think it is important to keep the aspects of courage that are morally valuable distinct from those of epistemic value. As such, I will focus on intellectual courage as an epistemic virtue, and not on cases of intellectual courage where one is (only) morally creditable for pursuing truth in the face of danger.
Or, as I mentioned above, perhaps these competences are species of the same genus called IC, but I will focus on the former option.
The most straightforward amended definition would be to simply identify IC with a collective auxiliary competence, effectively reducing talk of character virtues to talk of such competences. As I note in footnote 29, I think this is probably the right way to go. However, that would require additional argument in favor of such a reduction, which is a separate project for future research. So I am here only endorsing the weaker claim, that IC involves or necessarily requires the possession of a collective auxiliary competence.
Notice also that there are two distinct possible projects of elucidation that we might engage in. First, we might elucidate all of the competences that comprise IC as such, meaning all of the competences that any subject may have which would count as part of her IC. Second, we might attempt to give an account of all of the relevant competences that an actual intellectually courageous subject possesses. Presumably, we might count a subject as having IC even if she does not have every competence which could be part of that intellectual virtue, so the two projects come apart.
For more on the importance of distinguishing rashness from courage, cf. Roberts and Wood (2007, Chap. 8).
Roberts and Wood’s appeal to the example of Jane Goodall is also relevant, here. She “subjected herself indiscriminately to the dangers of the forest” (2007, p. 224), not recklessly, but because of the value of the inquiry.
Perhaps one might be concerned here that there is no room for rashness in a purely epistemic version of intellectual courage. That is, from a purely epistemic viewpoint it might seem that it is always better to continue inquiry in the face of danger. It is only when we admit moral or practical considerations, the objection goes, that it seems like the epistemic benefit of further inquiry can be outweighed by the danger. I am not convinced of this, however. For one thing, if there really is no hope of epistemic benefit from further inquiry, then it really does seem rash to face danger for no reason. It seems like a failure to recognize a lack of epistemic value. Moreover, I think there are probably other cases in which the benefit is just not adequate to justify the danger. In such cases, I am tempted to suggest that a small chance of uncovering evidence or otherwise gaining value through inquiry could be outweighed by the danger because the danger would prevent us from gaining other knowledge later. Or one might inappropriately risk losing knowledge from death or other damage. So, I think that it can be rash and not intellectually courageous to engage in risky behavior for slight epistemic gain.
I will sidestep the issue of doxastic voluntarism. I think Baehr is correct in suggesting that the virtue theoretic account of IC will survive even a pretty robust version of doxastic involuntarism.
It is worth noting that this last feature of my account makes it compatible with the situationist literature in psychology (see Doris and Stich 2014). Psychological experiments tell us that many people’s behavior can be altered by small changes to their environment, and this casts doubt on the notion of global character traits. By explaining global character virtues in terms of sets of auxiliary competences, my account can easily allow for this. What has happened in the psychology experiments is that the environmental conditions have been changed.
Furthermore, I think this might help defuse a complaint that a responsibilist might raise against my account. That is, intuitively, such character virtues are unitary features of a subject. However, given the aforementioned situationist psychology literature, this intuition (like many psychological intuitions) turns out to be misguided. My view can easily account for this, while the traditional “unitary” notion of character virtues cannot. Thanks to Eliabeth Fricker for helpful comments on this point.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank three anonymous referees at this journal, as well as Logan Douglass, Elizabeth Fricker, Andy Egan, Branden Fitelson, and audiences at Oxford University and Northern Illinois University for helpful comments on this paper. Special thanks to Megan Feeney, Georgi Gardiner, Lisa Miracchi, David Black, Bob Beddor, and Ernest Sosa for repeated readings and comments on several versions of this paper.
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Fleisher, W. Virtuous distinctions. Synthese 194, 2973–3003 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1084-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1084-2