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Extended Cognition and Robust Virtue Epistemology

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Abstract

Pritchard (Synthese 175,133–51, 2010) and Vaesen (Synthese forthcoming) have recently argued that robust virtue epistemology does not square with the extended cognition thesis that has enjoyed an increasing degree of popularity in recent philosophy of mind. This paper shows that their arguments fail. The relevant cases of extended cognition pose no new problem for robust virtue epistemology. It is shown that Pritchard’s and Vaesen’s cases can be dealt with in familiar ways by a number of virtue theories of knowledge.

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Notes

  1. For more on the value problem see e.g. Kvanvig (2003) and Pritchard (2008).

  2. For more on VE R and the value of knowledge see e.g. Greco (2009, 2010), Pritchard (2008) and Sosa (2003, 2007).

  3. Pritchard (2010, 137, my italics). What is the relation between the version of VE R Pritchard discusses and the one that is the target of Vaesen’s argument? On the face of it, they are different. After all, in Vaesen’s version, whether the agent satisfies the right-hand side of VE R depends on whether his abilities are the most salient part in the causal explanation of his cognitive success, while in Pritchard’s version, it depends on whether his cognitive success is “primarily creditable” to his agency. It is not clear, however, that the difference between the two statements is more than superficial. After all, plausibly, the agent’s cognitive success is primarily creditable to his agency just in case his cognitive abilities are the most salient part in the causal explanation of his cognitive success.

  4. Notice that the weaker test is not an option for the defender of VE R . After all, since VE R gives not only necessary but also sufficient conditions for knowledge, it must be able to handle Gettier cases. Crucially, however, in many Gettier cases, the agent’s cognitive success is still to a significant degree creditable to the exercise of ability. If VE R were combined with the weaker test, it would pass the wrong verdicts in at least some Gettier cases.

  5. It may be worth noting that in contexts in which we focus on Otto’s wife’s contribution to his cognitive success or on the relative merits of the new and old types of scanner, the sentences “Otto knows that he has an appointment with the doctor tomorrow” and “Sissi knows there is a bomb in the suitcase” are false. However, this is arguably acceptable for Greco. After all, Greco offers VE R as an account of knowledge attributions. Such an account can be successful if it passes the right verdict in all cases in which knowledge is intuitively correctly attributed. Craig’s thesis allows him to secure this result by ensuring that contexts of knowledge attributions are ones in which the focus is on the contribution of cognitive ability to cognitive success.

  6. That said, I do not agree with the version of VE R Sosa goes on to adopt. I adduce a number of arguments against it in Kelp (2011) and offer an alternative. The main difference between Sosa’s VE R and the one I favour concerns the nature of the cognitive success at issue in perceptual knowledge. While Sosa follows orthodoxy in holding that the relevant cognitive success at issue in perceptual knowledge consists in hitting upon the truth, I argue for a more robust proposal according to which the relevant cognitive success consists in the discrimination of the object of perception from all other objects of perception in the agent’s environment. However, since I agree with Sosa on how to unpack the because of relation in VE R ’s ability condition, these differences are of little consequence for the purposes of this paper. For that reason, the two different accounts can, for the purposes of this paper at least, be treated as one.

  7. One might object that Pritchard’s and Vaesen’s arguments are targeted specifically against versions of VE R that spell out the because of relation in terms of explanatory salience and that, as a result, the question whether one can avoid the problem by adopting an alternative account of this relation is simply irrelevant. Notice, however, that both Pritchard (2010, 139) and Vaesen (forthcoming, 2) cite Sosa as a champion of the view they take themselves to be attacking. (True, Vaesen does go on to restrict his explicit target to Greco’s and Riggs’s versions of the VE R . Notice, however, that he claims, “My case will be particularly strong if I succeed in refuting both CTK Greco and CTK Riggs [i.e., in my terminology, both Greco’s and Riggs’s versions of VE R ]” (Vaesen forthcoming, 4). Surely, however, this won’t be the case if it can be shown that it stands no chance of dislodging Sosa’s version of the view). For that reason, I take it that it is worthwhile spending a couple of paragraphs on showing that their argument is ineffective against views that unpack VE R ’s because of relation along Sosa’s lines.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to John Greco, Duncan Pritchard and the audiences of the Workshop on Knowledge, Safety and Virtue at the University of Geneva, the Philosophy Colloquium at St. Louis University and the Epistemology and Extended Cognition Workshop at the University of Edinburgh for helpful comments on this paper. This work was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship with Research Foundation – Flanders.

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Kelp, C. Extended Cognition and Robust Virtue Epistemology. Erkenn 78, 245–252 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9301-3

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