Abstract
Review of John Greco's The Transmission of Knowledge This paper responds to the Lackey objection to virtue epistemology. Its response is one that can be used to defend Greco's virtue epistemology as well as the author's own virtue epistemology.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
A Virtue Epistemology (OUP, 2007), pp. 93-97, Lecture 5 of the 2005 Locke Lectures, where the dilemma is taken up and a resolution is proposed. I here mean to clarify that resolution, though it will remain essentially the same in its appeal to whether the coincidence between belief and truth is merely coincidental. Such reasoning then suggests the following attempt (in Knowing Full Well, pp. 88-9.) to do better justice to the importance of testimony:
S knows that p if, and only if, the correctness of S's belief that p manifests, partially or fully, an epistemic belief-forming or belief-sustaining competence of S's, in doing which it also manifests fully a (possibly more complex) competence seated at least partially in S.
A Virtue Epistemology, pp. 94–95. There the importance of joint agency is emphasized, as is the dependence of the epistemic status of the recipient’s belief on the collective competence that must be manifest in the correctness of that belief. So, it is incorrect that earlier, traditional virtue epistemology required explanation of the recipient’s correctness by exclusive appeal to individual competence.
And as we saw in section D4 above, the relevant explanatory relation is not plausibly one involving “a belief-forming way W that would produce true belief in regular, dependable ways.”
In fact, suppose it’s Jill’s style “to keep them guessing,” so that, at the door of the Palmer House, she flips a coin to decide whether she will attend that meeting after all.
And neither of them has any “keep them guessing style,” etc. And for an even stronger connection we might suppose that they are there for their wedding.
Shades of the mere coincidence between mind and body that would attend pre-established harmony.
This is so even if the two cases differ in the specifics of the modal relation involved, which is productive in the case where Jack would follow Jill but might be reflective in the case where < p > would be true if the thinker believed it. Still, despite this difference, in both cases you have a coincidence that is not a mere coincidence, not just accidental. And this is because if a given one of the members of the coincidence obtained, so would the other member, regardless of whether the modal relation derives from production or from reflection.
It is sometimes imagined that knowledge requires reflection and not production (requires that “direction of fit”), but this plausible idea is refuted by the cogito.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
T.C.: The Epistemology of John Greco
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sosa, E. John Greco’s The Transmission of Knowledge. Synthese 200, 273 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03746-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03746-3