Abstract
In a recent paper, Christopher Bobier (2014) has argued that Duncan Pritchard’s (2012) Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology (ALVE) cannot account for knowledge that we have through Divine Revelation. This gives philosophers who believe that Divine Revelation can be source of knowledge reason to reject ALVE. Bobier’s arguments are specifically against ALVE, but they serve as arguments against all sorts of (modest) virtue epistemologies. In this paper then, I will critically examine Bobier’s argument, and contend that (modest) virtue epistemologies are compatible with knowledge through Divine Revelation.
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Notes
In turn we can understand safety in the following way: S’s belief that p formed on the basis of some method m is safe just in case in the great majority (if not all) of the nearby worlds in which S forms a belief that p using method m, S’s belief that p is true. Cf. Pritchard (2009).
If you don’t think that these propositions are actually revealed, change the example to fit your religious beliefs. The general point holds.
Bobier’s challenge to ALVE and virtue epistemology in general is to explain why in the one case there is knowledge, but in the other case there is not. This challenge, however, strikes me as premature. For it seems that even if God were to reveal a future event is to take place to someone, and this person believes that the future event will take place because she thinks (rightfully) God has revealed it to her, she might still lack knowledge. After all, she might possess a defeater for her knowledge: e.g., she might have overwhelming reason for doubting that God had revealed anything to her. The upshot of this is that Bobier’s cases (and my modified version of them) do not serve as obvious cases of knowledge on the basis of Divine Revelation.
How we should understand such defeaters if we subscribe to ALVE is an interesting question; the obvious answer is that somehow possessing these defeaters keeps our belief from either being safe or creditable to our epistemic agency. The details are sketchy. Of course, ALVE might be unable to give a satisfactory account of all the kinds of defeaters we might possess for knowledge; but this problem, if it exists, is a general problem that does not depend on issues with Divine Revelation. Furthermore, whether or not ALVE can makes sense of defeaters for knowledge, modest forms of virtue epistemology that simply claim that there are virtue/credit conditions on knowledge could still be true.
Says Bobier:
One might think that there is an easy solution that has been staring us in the face all along – specify in a more fine-grained manner the cognitive processes that gave rise to [our dreamers’] beliefs. It might thought that [one person’s] belief was formed on the basis of a divinely-caused dream, which is reliable, whereas Bob’s belief was formed on the basis of a mere dream, which is unreliable… While I think that this is the most promising line of attack, I that it falls short for a number of reasons. First, God-caused dreams are still dreams, and divine revelation via dreams is still revelation through a dream. It appears to be ad-hoc to claim that God-caused dreams are in a class of their own, distinct form mere dreams. What reason, apart from wanting to avoid an unpleasant conclusion, do we have for claiming that a sub-class for dreams (those that are divinely caused) is distinct from all others? Second, Pritchard himself is hesitant to relativize belief-forming processes to environment in a fine-grained manner, and this suggests that he would be hesitant to draw a distinction between dreams and divinely caused dreams… That is, Pritchard has argued that there is no linguistic precedent to relativize our faculty of sight to a local environment, and it might though that his argument applies to the claim that we need to relativize dreams to their causes… Third, and most importantly, forming safe beliefs on the basis of divinely caused dreams does not appear to satisfy the virue-condition for three reasons. (1) Dreams are not features of well-integrated cognitive processes…(2)… [D]ivinely caused dreams are not a stable belief forming process. (3) Divinely caused dreams do not appear to be ‘creditable’ to the agent who has them. (Bobier 2014, 319).
References
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Anscombe, G. E. M. (2008). What is it to believe someone? In M. Geach & L. Gormally (Eds.), Faith in a hard ground (pp. 24–33). Exete: Imprint Academic.
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Pritchard, D. (2009). Safety-based epistemology: whither now? Journal of Philosophical Research, 34, 33–45.
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Milburn, J. Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology as Religious Epistemology: A Response to Bobier. Philosophia 43, 427–434 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9592-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9592-8