Abstract
Intellectual virtue and ability are potentially wide-ranging explanatory constructs. A great deal of work has been done on the parallels between epistemic abilities and moral virtues, and epistemic evaluation and evaluations of success through ability in ordinary contexts. Less has been accomplished on the question of what is characteristic of intellectual virtues or abilities, and more specifically, what distinguishes intellectual virtues from other reliable cognitive processes. In this paper, I propose that what differentiates a virtue or ability from a merely reliable process is whether the subject has effective metacognitive control over it. Metacognition, as I will use the term, is the monitoring and control of object-level cognitive processes; not just thinking about thinking, but the regulation and management of thinking. The need for successful metacognitive control to satisfy our epistemic goals is nearly ubiquitous in ordinary human cognition. Moreover, the adaptability and accuracy that effective regulation provides are hallmarks of ability and of virtuous inquiry, making the identification of virtue with capacity for regulation even more plausible.
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Notes
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Baehr (2006b) notes that we can attribute a belief to a high-level virtue if it was the most salient causal factor in the belief’s production. If you would have missed a certain implication of your data were you not so conscientious, then it would be right to say that you acquired the belief because you were conscientious. Nonetheless, you cannot employ your high-level virtues without a source of belief (in this case, reasoning from evidence) to apply them to. It seems the converse does not hold: you can employ perception, say, without manifesting any high-level virtues.
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“Process” here refers to something narrower than a belief-forming process or disposition, since belief-formation normally involves both object-level and metalevel processes. It is rather closer to how we speak of sources of belief in ordinary language.
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This is perhaps clearest in Sosa (2009a). It may be worth noting that if I am right that effective regulation is constitutive of virtue, then Sosa doesn’t need separate accounts of epistemic competences and the perspective an agent has on them. When a subject has a suitable implicit perspective on a process, that process will thereby be a competence. Such a move would remove so-called “animal” or “servomechanical” knowledge from Sosa’s taxonomy of epistemic statuses. There are those of us who would find that intuitively plausible, but it might force revisions to Sosa’s (2007, 2009b) responses to skepticism. A detailed discussion of this issues would take us too far afield, however.
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Delusional persons are sometimes described as having inconsistent occurrent beliefs—for instance, believing at the same time that the same person is both dead and in a room down the hall. Many such manifestations of beliefs are not inconsistent in the way I describe above. It is perfectly possible to be simultaneously disposed to honestly answer “Yes” when asked whether p and when asked whether not-p. It’s just not possible to be disposed to answer both “Yes” and “No” when asked whether p. Delusions, however, often do not cause actions in the ways that ordinary beliefs would. (For instance, victims of Capgras delusions, who believe that a loved one has been replaced with a look-alike imposter, generally do not report the imposters to the police. See Davies & Coltheart 2000.) One might tentatively suppose that many of the connections that these beliefs would involve have been suppressed by inconsistencies with other psychological states.For my purposes here, it seems best to say that delusions are belief-like but should not count as beliefs. With all the different connections a given state might or might not have, one imagines that there are many, many different kinds of belief-like states; but folk psychology offers us shockingly few terms with which to describe them. We are concerned here with states that are amenable to epistemic appraisal as “known” or “unknown”, “reliable” or not, etc. We don’t apply such appraisals to delusions and the like: they’re beyond unjustified. It thus seems legitimate to rule them out of consideration here.
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See Cary & Reder (2002) for discussion of the experimental paradigm.
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Lepock (2006) defends this Cartesian conception of metacognition, but we all do foolish things when we are young.
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The principle is based on Conant & Ashby’s (1970) theorem. Let R be the simplest optimal regulator of a system S. Let σ(i) be S’s response to input i and ρ(i) be R’s response to input i. Then there is a mapping h: S → R such that ∀i, ρ (i) = h[σ(i)].
- 9.
This would explain the correlation between success in strategy selection and aptitude at inductive reasoning (see Schunn & Reder 1998).
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BonJour’s (1980) reliable but unwitting clairvoyants present a more complicated case, since (as Sosa 1991 and Greco 2003 argue) it is possible for clairvoyance to be a virtue even if the clairvoyant is unaware of his power’s reliability. But the intuitive appeal of denying knowledge in BonJour’s case arises, I think, from the feeling that blindly trusting a sudden urge to believe that the President is in New York City evinces a lack of metacognitive control. It’s plausible that Norman could not avoid forming false beliefs in environments in which his clairvoyance was unreliable, or if his clairvoyant powers were to degrade over time. BonJour’s account also doesn’t address whether Norman would be able to handle informational conflicts. If Norman seemed to be shaking the President’s hand at the White House at the same time his clairvoyance told him the President was in New York City, it’s not clear what he would believe.
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In Lepock (2011), I identify a number of process desiderata (reliability, power, portability, and significance-conduciveness) and use them to try to explain why high-level virtues like those mentioned above are so valuable.
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I am using a propensity-type measure of reliability here, according to which reliability is a matter of the proportion of true beliefs generated over a range of relevant or normal situations. But my discussion should be applicable to truth-tracking and safety accounts, mutatis mutandis.
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In effect, this is to say that control requires a sensitivity to disconfirmatory evidence. It is more fruitful, I think, to put the requirement in terms of selective application and conflict resolution. Not just any sensitivity to disconfirmation is relevant for control. Suppose that Humperdink would refrain from believing the result of his algorithm if subjected to a mathematical intervention in which friends, family, and experts in mathematics would testify to the error of his ways and how it makes them feel. That is not sufficient to change our appraisal of Humperdink’s situation, since it is simply too unlikely to happen. One must be sensitive to disconfimatory evidence that is sufficiently likely to arise in situations in which one uses one’s processes. Given that it is the (consciously accessible) deliverances of our processes and our accessible background knowledge that constitute the evidence we have, by considering the needs of conflict resolution and selective application we should be able to determine what “sufficiently likely” is going to mean.
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Assuming coherence is defined in such a way that one cannot preserve coherence by merely discounting or ignoring disconfirmatory or problematic evidence; otherwise, coherence-maximizing subjects may lack control in the way described in the previous paragraph.
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In some cases, we will want to deny knowledge to agents upon learning that their belief-formation is only likely to be correct if the rest of the community is likely to be right. But it seems (at least according to my own intuitions) that when we do that, it is not because of worries about lack of control, but worries about lack of reliability. For instance, we would not say that S knows that members of his ethnic group have not perpetrated atrocities against members of another ethnic group if his only reason is that most members of his group believe they have not. This seems to be not because of any lack of control, but because community beliefs of this sort are often self-serving.
- 16.
Versions of this paper were presented at the Canadian Philosophical Association, the University of Calgary 2007 Philosophy Graduate Conference, and the 2008 Bled Philosophy Conference. At these venues I received invaluable criticism and suggestions from audience members too numerous to list. I am also indebted to Adam Morton, Jennifer Nagel, Eric Dayton, Bruce Hunter, David Henderson, and Vladan Djordjevic. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Lepock, C. (2014). Metacognition and Intellectual Virtue. In: Fairweather, A. (eds) Virtue Epistemology Naturalized. Synthese Library, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04672-3_3
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