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Explaining Away Intuitions About Traits: Why Virtue Ethics Seems Plausible (Even if it Isn’t)

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Abstract

This article addresses the question whether we can know on the basis of folk intuitions that we have character traits. I answer in the negative, arguing that on any of the primary theories of knowledge, our intuitions about traits do not amount to knowledge. For instance, because we would attribute traits to one another regardless of whether we actually possessed such metaphysically robust dispositions, Nozickian sensitivity theory disqualifies our intuitions about traits from being knowledge. Yet we do think we know that we have traits, so I am advancing an error theory, which means that I owe an account of why we fall into error. Why do we feel so comfortable navigating the language of traits if we lack knowledge of them? To answer this question, I refer to a slew of heuristics and biases. Some, like the fundamental attribution error, the false consensus effect, and the power of construal, pertain directly to trait attributions. Others are more general cognitive heuristics and biases whose relevance to trait attributions requires explanation and can be classed under the headings of input heuristics and biases and processing heuristics and biases. Input heuristics and biases include selection bias, availability bias, availability cascade, and anchoring. Processing heuristics and biases include disregard of base rates, disregard of regression to the mean, and confirmation bias.

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Notes

  1. See also Mischel and Peake (1982). Epstein (1983), a personality psychologist, admits that predicting particular behaviors on the basis of trait variables is “usually hopeless.” Fleeson (2001, p. 1013), an interactionist, likewise endorses the 0.30 ceiling.

  2. For more on this controversy, see Malle et al. (2007).

  3. See Blum (1994), Driver (2001), McDowell (1979), and Rosati (1995).

  4. Doris (1998, p. 508) puts it even more strongly:

    [S]ituationism is not embarrassed by the considerable behavioral regularity we do observe: because the preponderance of our life circumstances may involve a relatively structured range of situations, behavioral patterns are not, for the most part, haphazard.

  5. See Ross and Nisbett (1991, p. 19) and Merritt (2000).

  6. Kahnemann and Tversky (1973, p. 251) were the first to use this example, but they had only anecdotal evidence. More recently, Dorsey-Palmeteer and Smith (unpublished) have corroborated Kahnemann & Tversky’s story with hard data from US Navy flight training.

  7. See Popper (2002, p. 45) on the related tendency of scientists to interpret all data in light of their current theory and therefore find confirmation everywhere (and disconfirmation nowhere).

  8. It should be noted here that many of psychologists, such as Fleeson (2001), do believe in traits, and not merely on the basis of folk intuitions. It is beyond the scope of this article to assess the success of their arguments and the extent to which those arguments apply to virtues (which are a distinctive subspecies of traits individuated not merely causally but by their characteristic reasons).

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Alfano, M. Explaining Away Intuitions About Traits: Why Virtue Ethics Seems Plausible (Even if it Isn’t). Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 121–136 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0045-9

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