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A sensitive virtue epistemology

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Abstract

We offer an alternative to two influential accounts of virtue epistemology: Robust Virtue Epistemology (RVE) and Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology (ALVE). We argue that while traditional RVE does offer an explanation of the distinctive value of knowledge, it is unable to effectively deal with cases of epistemic luck; and while ALVE does effectively deal with cases of epistemic luck, it lacks RVE’s resources to account for the distinctive value of knowledge. The account we provide, however, is both robustly virtue-theoretic and anti-luck, having the respective benefits of both rival accounts without their respective shortcomings. We describe this view here.

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Notes

  1. See Greco (2011, pp. 229–230). As a note, our analysis of knowledge is concerned with only empirical and contingent truths. In the literature, there is a worry that safety and sensitivity conditions cannot account for epistemic luck in the case of necessary truths. We want to avoid this lengthy discussion here and thus limit our claim to empirical and contingent truths. In saying this, though, we do think sensitivity can be naturally modified to deal with necessary truths. See James Henry Collin, “Does modal epistemology rest on a mistake?” manuscript.

  2. This, then, is the tertiary value problem.

  3. That RVE has these unique resources for explaining the distinctive value of knowledge is a point that modest virtue epistemologists have conceded. See (e.g.) Pritchard (2012) and Kallestrup and Pritchard (2012).

  4. For a discussion on this problem see Pritchard (2009, p. 5).

  5. See Pritchard (2012).

  6. See Pritchard (2010, p. 50).

  7. See Pritchard (2010, pp. 34–40).

  8. Greco (2013).

  9. See Venn (1876) and Reichenbach (1949).

  10. Reichenbach summarizes the role of reference classes in assessing probabilities:

    If we are asked to find the probability holding for an individual future event, we must first incorporate the case into a suitable reference class. An individual thing or event may be incorporated in many reference classes, from which different probabilities will result. This ambiguity has been called the problem of the reference class (Reichenbach 1949, p. 374).

  11. It should be clear that this reference class problem is distinct from the generality problem that pertains to belief forming (see Goldman 1979; Feldman 1995; Conee and Feldman 1998). That problem becomes apparent when one notices that a belief forming process is a token of many different belief forming process types, and some principled way of picking out the relevant type is required. A solution to the generality problem will not supply a solution to the reference class problem for environment-relative reliabilist accounts such as Greco’s.

  12. Pritchard (2010, pp. 41–42). It’s important to note that Pritchard offers this definition in the course of describing the notion of achievement made use of in RVE. Pritchard’s ALVE only requires a modest ability condition and rejects the primary credit requirement. RVE, however, is not in a position to reject primary credit given the advantages it has on circumventing Gettier-type problems, such as the Barney case.

  13. Here we use ‘success from ability’ and ‘success because of ability’ synonymously.

  14. Chisholm’s sheep case, for example, is a more standard Gettier case. See Chisholm (1977, p. 105). In this standard case, then, the agent forms the belief that there is a sheep in the field by looking at a dog disguised as a sheep. There is, however, a sheep just out of view. While the belief that ‘there is a sheep in the field’ is in fact true, the true belief is not primarily creditable to the agent. In Pritchard’s words, it is not primarily creditable “in the sense that it is to some substantive degree down to her agency that she holds a true belief.” Pritchard (2010, p. 40).

  15. In the end, we reject Pritchard’s claim that Barney forms the true belief because of his cognitive abilities (where this notion implies primary credit). While Barney does display some cognitive abilities, he is not primarily creditable in this instance. More on this below.

  16. Pritchard (2010, p. 51).

  17. Interestingly, Greco (2011, p. 229) himself recognizes the connection between success from ability and the agent’s ability to discriminate between p and \(\lnot \hbox {p}\). Greco, though, fails to note the link between discrimination and sensitivity. We discuss this in more detail below.

  18. There is a general worry here about credit and testimony that has been discussed at length in the literature. We won’t consider this objection here, but the reader should note Jennifer Lackey’s important paper Lackey (2007) on this topic. Lackey argues that in cases of testimony you get knowledge without achievement (testimonial knowledge is too easy for the agent to get credit for the true belief). For a response to Lackey, and one that we think is generally right, see Riggs (2009).

  19. See Dretske (1970) and Nozick (1981) for early presentations of sensitivity principles, and Becker (2007) for a recent method-relative formulation of the principle, with a discussion of how to expound the notion of a method.

  20. See also Greco (2010, p. 76): ‘Henry does not have the ability to tell barns from non-barns relative to the environment he is in. Relative to normal environments, we may assume that Henry can perfectly well discriminate between barns and non-barns. Relative to Fake Barn Country, however, Henry does not have that ability.’

  21. A version of the safety principle was first given by Luper (1984), though it is more commonly associated Sosa (1999) who parsed the condition as ‘a belief by S that p [is safe] iff: S would believe that p only if it were so that p\(^{\prime }\) (142). More recently, Pritchard (2007, 2008) has endorsed the more sophisticated formulation:

    Safety: S’s belief is safe if and only if in most nearby possible worlds in which S continues to form her belief about the target proposition in the same way as in the actual world, and in all very close nearby possible worlds in which S continues to form her belief about the target proposition in the same way as in the actual world, the belief continues to be true.

  22. See Baumann (2012) for discussion and for an argument that the standard closure principle licenses bootstrap-ping and should be rejected.

  23. Perhaps for sociological, rather than philosophical reasons, closure failure is widely perceived to be a problem for sensitivity alone. This perception is not reflected in the work carried out in this area.

  24. Though we do not deal with objections to sensitivity here, we do offer a positive defense. We note, for example, the particular advantages sensitivity has over safety with respect to the value problem. This is consistent with a central aim of the paper–to note the connection between sensitivity and virtue epistemology. In the end, the claim regarding sensitivity is merely conditional.

  25. Cf. Kallestrup and Pritchard (2012).

  26. Irenic, but not utterly ecumenical, since Pritchard rejects the sensitivity condition in favor of safety (Pritchard 2005).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous referees at this journal for their helpful comments, and special thanks to Kyle Scott for his many critical insights on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Virginia Commonwealth University, 915 W Franklin St., Richmond, VA, 23284, USA

    Anthony Bolos

  2. School of Divinity, New College, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH1 2LX, UK

    James Henry Collin

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  1. Anthony Bolos
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Correspondence to Anthony Bolos.

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Bolos, A., Collin, J.H. A sensitive virtue epistemology. Synthese 195, 1321–1335 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1273-z

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