Virtue Epistemology Strikes Back
Abrol Fairweather & Carlos Montemayor
1. Anscombe’s exhortation and epistemic situationism
In “Modern Moral Philosophy”, G.E.M Anscombe famously exhorted moral
philosophers to avoid speculation regarding ethical norms until they could be
grounded in an adequate moral psychology (Anscombe, 1958). Anscombe’s claim
that moral philosophy is “not profitable” without “an adequate philosophy of
psychology” places something like the following empirical constraint on a moral
theory: An adequate moral theory must be empirically adequate, and empirical
adequacy will be achieved through an empirically adequate moral psychology. We
see this as applicable to normative theories generally, including epistemology. Call
this broad demand for empirical adequacy in normative theory Anscombe’s
exhortation. Anscombe argued that Natural Law theory and Kantian ethics fail to
meet the empirical demand, and looked instead to an ethics of virtues and vices.
Virtue theory appears an attractive way to heed Anscombe’s exhortation in ethics
because it is capable of grounding norms about proper functioning in facts about
human nature and human flourishing1. This appealing moral psychology became a
significant reason for the resurgence of virtue ethics in mid to late twentieth century
moral theory.
If virtue ethics has an empirically adequate psychology, there is reason to think that
the prospects for virtue epistemology are good as well. However, a wide range of
psychological research on trait attribution and rationality has chipped away at what
appeared to be a solid empirical footing, thereby challenging the adequacy of virtue
ethics on the very point that appeared to be a primary strength2. Philosophers such
as Gilbert Harman (2000) have been led to question the very existence of character
traits, and others like John Doris (2003) have denied their robustness and
explanatory value. Character trait attributions enjoin predictive and explanatory
commitments that simply fail too often to meet norms that require virtue
manifestation for success . Situationist’s argue that Anscombe’s turn to virtue ethics
fails precisely because it does not meet her own demand for empirical adequacy.
Multiple forms of the situationist challenge have now been developed in virtue
ethics, as well as numerous virtue theoretic responses, and the debate in moral
psychology continues to be a live one.
Only recently has the situationist challenge been applied to virtue epistemology. In
two recent papers, Mark Alfano (2011, 2012) presents a thorough criticism of virtue
epistemology from a diverse range of empirical results about rationality, inferential
abilities and trait attribution. Alfano nicely frames the challenge as an inconsistent
Annas (2005) rightly notes that virtue theories in ethics do not need to be
naturalistic in this way as seen in Stoic and religious accounts of the virtues.
2 The literature on relevant research is enormous, for some comprehensive
treatments see Doris (2002), Miller (2008), Alfano (2011, 2012, and forthcoming)
1
triad: a) non-skepticism: most people know quite a bit; b) Virtue epistemology:
knowledge is true belief acquired and retained through intellectual virtue; and c)
cognitive situationism: people acquire and retain most of their beliefs through
heuristics rather than intellectual virtues. The dilemma for the virtue
epistemologist is that empirical adequacy will require accommodating the empirical
work presented by situationists and thus will accept (c) to heed Anscombe’s
exhortation. But the research shows that all too rarely will an agent meet virtue
theoretic standards for epistemic success, and will thus be unable to account for (a).
Failing to meet the non-skepticism desiderata would be a normative inadequacy in
virtue epistemology because any such theory will be unable to assign positive
epistemic standings in a way that keeps pace with the frequency of human
knowledge. Call this the challenge of epistemic situationism. We agree with Alfano
that this normative requirement is a necessary desiderata for a theory of
knowledge, but will argue that the right understanding of (b) can be made
consistent with (a) and (c).
While we are confident that Alfano’s challenge can be met, it raises a pressing
concern and extends Anscombe’s demand to virtue epistemology3. The examination
of current research in psychology required for a virtue theoretic response should be
profitable in further understanding the empirical basis of epistemic virtues, and is
thus a valuable contribution to the literature on virtue epistemology as a whole.
However, Alfano’s argument must meet certain constraints to constititute a
refutation of virtue epistemology. Focusing on (b) in Alfano’s triad, we say that any
virtue epistemology will define knowledge as a form of “success from ability” (see
Pritchard, Greco, Sosa)4. This involves at least the following three commitments as
necessary conditions for knowledge from epistemic virtue: (1) Epistemic Success –
an agent must be reliably successful (2) Cognitive Ability – an agent must possess
the relevant ability, competence or character trait (3) Etiological Epistemic Value –
an agent’s epistemic success must be ‘from’ or ‘due to’ their cognitive ability,
competence or character. The last condition requires that epistemic success must
be related to the agent’s abilities in the right way for that success to constitute
knowledge. This is required for any success to be sufficiently from ability. These
conditions are intended to capture uncontroversial constitutive commitments for a
virtue epistemology. Situationists like Alfano must undermine either the condition
for epistemic success, epistemic ability or the etiological condition to claim any
victory against virtue epistemology. If situationism cannot falsify any of the three, it
has failed to undermine virtue epistemology.
The most obvious situationist target is the success condition. The research on
rationality used by Alfano appears to show that agents often fail to achieve the
Guy Axtel (2009) has developed a response to situationism in virtue epistemology
which differs from the approach taken here.
4 There are forms of virtue epistemology that do not aim to define knowledge, for
example the ‘regulative’ virtue epistemology of Roberts & Wood (2007). We here
pursue what Greco calls the classical project (2009)
3
outcomes expected of rational agents. Human beings are not successful enough
according to virtue theoretic norms to support the frequency of knowledge
attributions as captured in his (a) above5. However, we should not assume that
epistemic success is rightly defined in terms of the models of ideal rationality
employed in the research Alfano relies on. We argue that, properly understood,
psychological research on rationality does not undermine a virtue theoretic account
of epistemic success. With an improved theory of epistemic success in hand, we
argue that Alfano’s triad is consistent.
Central to our argument will be an account of frugal virtues. This will be a
reliabilist account, so it remains to be seen if responsibilist virtue epistemology can
be defended in a similar way. We proceed as follows: Section 2 raises a normativity
objection to Alfano in defending the success condition for epistemic virtue; Section
3 examines a challenge to the etiological condition available to situationists based
on epistemic luck which is not fully explored by Alfano, but which may provide a
different kind of threat from situationism; the concluding sections (4-7) defend an
account of frugal virtues that adequately responds to epistemic situationism on
empirical grounds. This account will be a reliabilist virtue epistemology with
support from Gerd Gigerenzer’s research in the theory of bounded rationality,
alternative interpretations of psychological findings from Daniel Kahneman and
research on knowledge of syntax. We consider this a form of naturalized virtue
epistemology and argue that it can withstand the challenge from situationism. To
begin, we consider some connections between normative epistemology and
empirical epistemology of the sort Alfano presses to frame an argument against the
account of epistemic success needed for his argument that is independent of any
commitment to virtue epistemology.
2. The empirical turn, epistemic success, and normative adequacy
Recent epistemology has witnessed an explosion in value driven epistemology,
leading some philosophers to declare a ‘value turn’ in the last decade of epistemic
theory (Riggs 2003). The considerable literature on the value problem has improved
epistemic axiology and value driven epistemology has been a catalyst for work on
epistemically valuable states other than knowledge, such as understanding and
wisdom6. For this very reason, it may be that virtue epistemology calls for a
compensating empirical turn7. With continuing developments in psychology and
Flanagan (2007) responds to situationism in virtue ethics by arguing that the
demonstrated correlation coefficient for traits is generally .3 to .4, which is actually
quite high compared to chance and that behavioral predictions based on traits will
substantially increase accuracy.
6 For recent work on epistemic value see Pritchard (2007) and Haddock et. al.
(2009)
7 see Henderson and Horgan’s The Epistemological Spectrum for a fine example of
empirically driven epistemology, as well as Beebe (2010)
5
other relevant empirical work, epistemologists will regularly have to re-consider the
empirical adequacy of their currently favored normative theories. Responding to
epistemic situationism will require virtue epistemologists to do just this in light of
the recent value turn, and we support Alfano’s project to this extent. However, the
concerns of normative epistemology cannot be ignored in the process. We argue
that Alfano’s position falls prey to an inconsistent quadrad , with the result that his
position is normatively inadequate and his account of epistemic success must be
rejected. Alfano does not overtly endorse any specific principle of epistemic success,
but his argument clearly relies on norms of rationality from research programs in
social psychology and behavioral economics. This use of rationality theory to set
norms for epistemic success will be problematic for Alfano, irrespective of any
further commitments to virtue theory in subsequent sections of this essay. We begin
with some considerations on epistemic normativity that apply to any attempt at an
empirically adequate virtue epistemology and then present an inconsistent quadrad
for Alfano.
Suppose we have an epistemic theory that meets Alfano’s demand for empirical
adequacy in hand. This empirical epistemology will still face normativity challenges
and these have traditionally been troubling for naturalistic theories. The classic
challenge to naturalism in ethics took shape around GE Moore’s Open Question
Argument (1903). Moore demanded that a naturalistic account of moral properties
satisfy a stringent test for an adequate meaning analysis of the target normative
properties such that for any natural property manifested by an agent or action, if it
remains intelligible to ask whether the agent or act is nonetheless good or right, the
account is normatively inadequate. Failing to meet Moore’s semantic demand is a
worry because the prospects for constructing an adequate normative theory are dim
without the necessary semantics for normative judgements. While developments in
philosophy of language since Moore show some mistakes in his formulation of the
argument, the general demand that a naturalistic theory must show itself to be
normatively adequate continues to be significant in meta-ethics and the moral
realism debate8.
In “Natural Facts and Epistemic Norms,” Carrie Jenkins examines how Moorean
open question arguments extend to naturalistic accounts of epistemic norms. Any
epistemic theory must account for a range of intuitively true normative claims such
as “we ought to fit our beliefs to our evidence, justified beliefs are in good standing,
blind trust in unreliable informants is wrong, it is irrational to believe an explicit
contradiction, and so on.” (Jenkins, 2007) A naturalized epistemology will have to
provide natural properties that allow for the derivation of these or related
normative standings. Any theory that fails here cannot be said to provide a theory
For example, Brink’s (2001) ‘synthetic moral realism’ makes use of contingent a
priori propositions to semantically ground normative properties in natural
properties. See also Zagzebski’s (2010) use of natural kinds semantics in her recent
‘exemplarist’ virtue theory.
8
of knowledge. The Moorean worry in epistemology is that no set of natural
properties can semantically ground the normative judgements essential to
epistemic appraisal.
Jenkins rightly weakens Moore’s demand for conceptual reduction, but argues that,
while neither a biconditional proposal nor a supervenience proposal will provide
sufficient natural grounds, sameness of truth makers will. For Jenkins, if the fact
that makes a normative epistemic claim true is the same fact as that which makes a
natural claim true, an epistemologist has met Moore’s worry. In epistemology, she
argues that natural facts about ‘probabilifying’ relations and facts such that
contradictions are not true will be the very facts that make true many normative
epistemic claims about what we ought to believe, when a belief is irrational or when
a belief is in good standing. There appears to be a range of natural facts that provide
some hope for meeting open question arguments in epistemology and thus
grounding some form of realism about epistemic norms9.
While there are questions raised by Jenkins’ list of natural facts and her claim that
identity of truth makers suffices to meet the Moorean worry, her proposal may
constitute the beginning of a normatively adequate naturalistic epistemology.
However, the kinds of natural facts she identifies do not appear to ground the full
range of normative standings necessary for a theory of knowledge. Specifically, she
discusses no natural fact to account for the credit an agent receives for an epistemic
success that is properly from ability. This would be required for meeting Epistemic
Open Question Arguments in the present context, and thus Jenkins’ proposal will not
enable the derivation of all necessary normative epistemic standings. Even meeting
her broad demand for sameness of fact, an epistemic theory will also need to
distribute a wide range of normative standings to a wide range of cognitive activities
and will require a more complete semantic structure for deriving normative
standings from natural facts. There is hope that further inquiry into the empirical
underpinnings of cognitive abilities and epistemic success will provide further
insight into the natural facts that make attributions of credit for epistemic success
come out true, though Alfano will presumably take a less optimistic view of these
prospects10.
Another instructive example of a normativity challenge to an empirical
epistemology is found in Kim’s (1998) objection to Quine’s naturalized
epistemology. In his famous paper “Epistemology Naturalized,” Quine rejected
Cuneo argues for epistemic realism and that this implies a form of moral realism in
his “parity argument” in The Normative Web. Heathwood (2009) argues against
Cuneo, but still accepts epistemic realism.
10 Normative standings for agent credit might be grounded in natural facts about
proper functioning or desire satisfaction This sets up an interesting challenge the
situationist might make that cannot be pursued in detail here, namely whether
situationism blocks any adequate resolution to answering epistemic open question
arguments vis-à-vis facts about normal functioning.
9
epistemology grounded in conceptual analysis, and exhorted epistemologists to
provide a robust, ground-level role for empirical psychology in framing and
answering issues in epistemology. One influential criticism of Quine’s account comes
from Jagewon Kim’s (1988) well known objection that Quine’s epistemology is nonnormative. Since epistemology is essentially a normative discipline, Kim argues that
Quine has changed the subject by going empirical. Kim’s objection is of a piece with
Moore’s worry about the possibility of a normatively adequate naturalism in ethics.
According to Kim, Quine’s naturalistic epistemology would be woefully inadequate
because it does not enable one to derive any normative epistemic standings.
Kim might ultimately be right that Quinian naturalized epistemology is normatively
inadequate, but his argument has an answer from Quine. Quine’s full naturalized
epistemology will be constituted by his favored empirical psychology and a
semantics for epistemic norms. “Epistemology Naturalized” did not develop a
theory of epistemic norms, but his subsequent work did, perhaps largely due to
Kim’s objection. It is now clear that epistemic normativity for Quine is seen as the
“technology of truth seeking”11. His view is that an empirical explanation of
cognition achieves positive epistemic standing if it is “good technology” for the
pursuit of truth and other epistemic endeavors. The norms of epistemology then
become the norms of a certain kind of engineering, and this becomes an empirical
inquiry through psychology, statistics and “heuristics generally”. While this account
has been criticized and leaves much to be explained, it shows how the derivation of
normative standings from empirical conditions can respond to Kim’s objection and
aspire to normative adequacy. More would have to be shown to demonstrate
normative adequacy for Quine’s account, but it is one way to pursue an
epistemology that is both empirical and normative.
Heeding both Anscombe’s exhortation and Moore’s worry, an adequate virtue
epistemology will have to be empirically adequate (for Anscombe) and normatively
adequate (for Moore). The constraints for a theory meeting (b) in Alfano’s triad will
thus include maintaining the three constititutive commitements of virtue
epistemology and the demands for both empirical and normative adequacy.
Meeting the full set of demands will require an empirically adequate psychology that
also allows for an adequate derivation of normative epistemic standings12. The
normative standings derived must also cohere with uncontroversial epistemic
judgements such as the non-skepticism principle in Alfano’s triad, and must
perform well enough in answering a range of ‘standard cases’ in epistemology. A
complete account of normative adequacy is beyond the scope of the present paper,
but this will not be necessary for the arguments made here. This semantic demand
does not, of course, require that normative standings can be derived from empirical
See Kornblith (1993), Hylton (2007), Houkes (2002), Fairweather (2011) for
discussion of Quine’s “technology of truth seeking” norm.
12 By ‘deriving’ we mean only that some semantic function will assign normative
standings to empirically adequate descriptions of the cognitive states assessed in an
epistemic theory.
11
explanations alone. That is most likely an impossible task, and for roughly the kinds
of reasons given by Moore. But, it is also the wrong kind of demand. An empirical
psychology requires a semantics to determine normative standings for a broad
range of cognitive activities in order to do any epistemic work13.
We argue that the commitments needed for Alfano’s argument fall prey to a form
normative inadequacy. While Alfano does not explicitly define or commit to a
normative epistemic semantics, he clearly assumes that models of ideal rationality
are the semantic devices that allow for the derivation of normative standings from
empirical conditions. He then argues that the distribution of positive epistemic
standings in virtue epistemology violate the non-skepticism principle because our
actual cognitive endeavors will all too rarely meet virtue theoretic standards of
success. Since non-skepticism is off the table, virtue epistemology must be rejected.
However, it is Alfano that falls victim to this line of argument. Conjoining ideal
rationality semantics and situationist empirical psychology entails that no epistemic
theory can adequately assign positive normative status to actual human cognition.
Reliable inference is necessary for human knowledge in evidentialist, internalist,
coherentist, foundationalist, and standard reliabilist accounts of knowledge, as well
as virtue epistemology. But this means that the following quadrad is inconsistent:
(a) situationist psychology (b) ideal rationality semantics (c) ANY theory of
knowledge and (d) non-skepticism. Since Alfano appears to accept (a-d), he must
work his way out of this to have a coherent argument against virtue epistemology.
But this will be a challenging attempt. If he abandons (c), he is no longer doing
epistemology. If he abandons (a), he presumably no longer has an empirically
adequate epistemic psychology and the situationist is defeated. We agree with
Alfano that (d) is off the table. Thus, (b) appears to be the clear choice for
elimination, Alfano’s epistemic semantics must be rejected. The problem arises
primarily from his understanding of epistemic success. We defend an improved
account of epistemic success in sections 4-6 that will solidify the success condition
for virtue epistemology on empirical grounds.
3. The ability condition, environmental luck and situationism
Defending the success condition will not be enough to save virtue epistemology
from situationism. A defining commitment of virtue epistemology is that cognitive
success must be explained by a cognitive ability in the knower. This will require
that agents possess abilities, and these will be some form of stable disposition to
The concern for normative adequacy can be seen in the debate over Goldman’s
“value T-monism” and challenges from Pritchard, Kvanvig and others who argue for
some form of epistemic value pluralism. An empirical virtue epistemology faces
these questions in a unique way because the axiology will be constrained by a
commitment to a specific empirical psychology.
13
reliably bring about a certain outcome when the agent endeavors to. This is an issue
in the metaphysics of dispositions, epistemic taxonomy as well as empirical
psychology. A second requirement is that abilities must be sufficiently explanatory
in an agent’s epistemic success. This is primarily an issue in the theory of epistemic
agency and action. Bringing all of this to the table, the ability condition will be a
nuanced and perhaps fragile commitment for virtue epistemology. It is also a high
value target because, in conjunction with an etiological condition, it is responsible
for carrying much of virtue epistemology’s success in responding to Gettier cases
and other instances of epistemic luck, as well as providing an attractive solution to
the value problem (Greco 2009).
Any situationist seeking to undermine virtue epistemology should certainly take aim
at the ability condition. Alfano hints at how this might be done, but we expand this
argument for the situationist below. The situationist might claim (a) that there are
no cognitive abilities as conceived by virtue epistemology, or (b) cognitive abilities
do not sufficiently explain cognitive success. John Doris (2003) has argued that
agents only possess very narrow abilities, traits and dispositions – work place
honesty, or honesty with family, rather than honesty simpliciter. This seems to
undermine the attributability of broad abilities across wide ranging circumstances.
If the abilities relevant to virtue epistemology only come in this very broad sort,
then virtue epistemology may run into trouble in the reification of abilities.
However, while virtue ethics inherits a historical commitment to a canonical set of
classic traits, virtue epistemology is not so constrained. Epistemic virtues can be
defined with a greater latitude than moral virtues, despite being tightly constrained
by the value of truth and giving a prominent role to dispositions of the agent. Since
virtues are most plausibly seen as clusters of abilities and dispositions by virtue
epistemologists, there is no reason why an epistemic virtue cannot be defined as a
set or cluster of narrowly defined Doris-abilities. The challenge to an ontology of
abilities in virtue epistemology does not appear as strong as the challenge to
classically defined character traits in ethics. Furthermore, the recent work on the
metaphysics of abilities will continue to provide semantic and empirical support for
a theory of cognitive ability that meets the needs of epistemologists.
However, the claim that abilities are non-explanatory may be harder to dismiss.
Alfano notes that when agents are successful outside of perception and other basic
cognitive processes, it appears that success is often due to epistemically irrelevant
but fortunate environmental conditions such as finding a quarter, truth maximizing
ambient noise or receiving a compliment. While these results in social psychology
initially applied to pro-social traits like helpfulness, Alfano can extend these worries
to epistemology by challenging the etiological condition of virtue epistemology. If
similar environmental factors make the difference between true and false belief, the
agent’s abilities do not appear to be sufficiently explanatory of their success. If
Alfano can use empirical psychology to show that too many cases of virtuous
outcomes are due to luck rather than the agent, virtue epistemology will not be able
to connect an agent to their epistemic success as needed to satisfy the etiological
condition.
This move has certain advantages for the situationist because they do not need to
show wide ranging epistemic failure to undermine virtue epistemology. If
situationism shows that cognitive success is all too often due to environmental
factors rather than ability, these successes will not be knowledge. Neither will these
successes be creditable to the agent, and the solution to the value problem has been
lost as well. Even if we succeed in defending the success condition here, this
challenge to the explanatory salience of cognitive abilities will be an additional
burden on our argument.
As a first line of defense, virtue epistemologists can draw upon the well-developed
literature on epistemic luck (See Pritchard (2011), Sosa (2007), Axtell (2001). Since
virtue epistemology arose around concerns to give the agent a stronger role in
making knowledge attributions true, one would expect that existing work on
epistemic luck has anticipated or will at any rate suffice to respond to the
situationist challenge on this score. The situationist might here appeal to
Pritchard’s arguments that virtue epistemology cannot adequately address cases of
epistemic luck. A situationist can exploit Pritchard’s general strategy but rely on
empirical research rather than thought experiments. This objection would then
claim that empirical findings about the influence of epistemically irrelevant features
of a situation create a form of knowledge undermining environmental luck. We
present just the crux of Pritchard’s argument below and consider how an analogous
argument based on Alfano’s research could be constructed to challenge the
etiological condition14.
One crucial case for virtue epistemology is the familiar Barney case. Barney is in a
field of masterfully crafted barn facades , with but one real barn. By chance, Barney
looks directly at the one real barn and acquires a true belief about it. Most intuitions
are that Barney’s belief is not knowledge because his belief so easily could have
been false. Pritchard argues that we would nonetheless attribute a success from
ability to Barney15. Because virtue epistemology will fall prey to this kind of
knowledge undermining bad luck too often, he argues that a separate safety
condition must be conjoined with the ability condition, A different case for the
situationist is TrueTemp, who always gets the right answer because of
environmental help. Again in this case intuitions are that Temp’s true beliefs are not
sufficiently from ability because the environment is guaranteeing his success. In
this case too much environmental good luck seems to undermine knowledge
attribution. In both cases it appears that influence of good or bad luck in the
environment an agent happens to be in will undermine their achievement of either a
success from ability (True Temp) or knowledge (Barney).
An interesting question for Pritchard is whether the situationist would also
challenge his safety condition for knowledge.
15 Sosa argues that we should attribute success from ability and knowledge in such
cases as the agent’s abilities are the direct causal explanation of the success.
14
Alfano can point to the actual psychological findings of Khaneman and Tversky and
many others to raise actual world luck objections to the safety of epistemic success
(as per Barney cases) and the explanatory sufficiency of ability in success (as per
True Temp cases). In the empirical research the environment rather than the agent
plays a substantial explanatory role and this militates against attributing a success
that is properly from ability. Many modal requirements on knowledge require actual
world indexing to satisfy safety and normal functioning conditions. The situationist
can argue that any such indexing must account for the fact that the actual world is
beset by problematic forms of epistemic luck, but this can be incorporated into the
antecedent and consequent conditions of the relevant dispositions or theories of
proper functioning. Sosa argues that the actual world is a fortuitious place for
faculties of perception and memory as well as basic inferential capacities but this
accounts for the fragility of success and stability in a virtue. This is a disagreement
about how lucky actual world cognitive success is and in what ways.
If empirical psychology shows that our actual cognitive lives are regularly
susceptible to either kind of luck in unforeseen ways, this would seem to force at
least a revision of the etiological condition in a number of virtue theoretic accounts
of knowledge. This would also support Pritchard’s contention that cases of
epistemic luck show the need for a requirement on knowledge outside of virtue
epistemology. With the right account of real world luck in hand, an epistemic
situationist might then claim victory over virtue epistemology without needing to
provide the additional principle necessary for knowledge.
We discuss this challenge further in the final section of this essay, but an initial
response is that the issue is really about the stability of an ability in the agent and
this is the burden of the ability condition. This would require further work from
virtue epistemologists on the nature of abilities and dispositions to show sufficient
stability in the agent. The etiological condition has been a difficult area for virtue
epistemology and situationism puts a new pressure on this commitment.
4. Bounded Rationality and epistemic virtue
In this section we defend an empirically adequate virtue epistemology for (b) in
Alfano’s triad. Normative adequacy will be addressed in section 5. In section 2 we
argued that Alfano relies on norms of ideal rationality in ways that appear to lead to
skepticism. Here we raise a different objection to this commitment. Classical
models of decision making in economics and behavioral sciences assume that
rational agents follow or conform to formal models of decision making such as
expected utility theory or Bayesian probability theorems. These approaches to
rationality assume that agents have highly idealized cognitive capacities. Utility
maximization models require that agents know the prior and conditional
probabilities of all relevant propositions, have preferences for all outcomes and
update probabilities with changes in their evidence. Call this the assumption of full
rationality or unbounded rationality.
The research of Gerd Gigerenzer and others shows that consistent failure to
manifest optimizing outcomes does not entail irrationality because real human
decisions exhibit ‘bounded rationality.’ Real rational agents are limited in all sorts
of ways which make optimizing rationality impossible because optimizing strategies
are computationally intractable for bounded cognitive agents16. Gigerenzer argues
that we are often more successful cognitive agents when we use fast and frugal
heuristics than computational methods of reasoning. While bounded rational
strategies are fast and frugal, they also include background information and
contexts are taken into account in decision-making in ways that manifest epistemic
virtues, rather than by allowing irrelevant information to impede successful
reasoning. Frugal strategies of reasoning are also informationally rich in this way.
Gigerenzer (2008) argues that human beings have an adaptive toolbox for specific
kinds of inferential tasks that include fast and frugal heuristics, evolutionarily
designed to cope with a variety of epistemic challenges.
Evidence analyzed by Gigerenzer (which includes his own research and covers a
range of experiments that goes back to the influential work of Piaget) reveals a rich
variety of ways in which, for example, explicitly using the language of set inclusion,
rather than probability, yields the rational response. He claims that the mistake was
on the part of the theorists, not the subjects. Humans are rational. The problem is
that psychologists, using the highly abstract and idealized scenarios that yielded
probability theory (e.g., Dutch book arguments, abstract rules on conditionalization
and total evidence, etc.) thought that these scenarios fully captured human
rationality. The worry was that if human beings do not follow the rules of logic and
probability, they would contradict themselves and systematically choose the wrong
answer. It is now uncontroversial that human beings do not obey these rules
systematically and yet manage to be fairly successful epistemically. Since the norms
of ideal rationality are neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving the vast array
of epistemic endeavors that should qualify as forms of human knowledge, virtue
epistemologists can agree with Alfano that epistemic success is rarely due to that
kind of ability
The research on bounded rationality is important for any theory of knowledge to
consider. This is not just a question of whether to take a skeptical or optimistic
stance toward the research. Human rationality is sophisticated, varied, and cannot
be explained solely through the general and highly abstract constraints of logic and
probability. Crucially, human beings depend on concrete epistemic environments,
and have specific epistemic goals that require a range of cognitive abilities. Coping
with uncertainty was never, in the evolution of the human species, an abstract
exercise in logic and probability. This is the core idea behind bounded rationality.
Adam Morton develops this approach to epistemic virtue in Bounded Thinking
(forthcoming, OUP)
16
Taking on a theory of bounded rationality might be a controversial move for a
theory of epistemic virtue because of the frugality of the virtues. While heuristics
are less demanding on an agent’s overall cognitive resources and are often more
effective than the costlier Bayesian calculations in achieving the agent’s epistemic
and practical aims, they also appear to be slothful and less than conscientious. The
degree of sloth will of course vary depending on the kind of heuristic involved, and
some epistemic virtues like conscientiousness might yet turn out to be cognitively
diligent endeavors even on a frugal account of the virtues. However, this is really a
worry for responisiblist accounts of epistemic virtue rather than the reliabilist
account we defend here. We appeal to the bounded rationality research to meet the
empirical adequacy demand on virtue epistemology and this will be accomplished
here with a reliablist theory of frugal virtues.
One clear implication of Gigerenzer’s research is that unbounded rationality and
epistemic success are two different things. Alfano appears to use unbounded
epistemic norms in claiming that virtue epistemology cannot satisfy the nonskepticism principle in his triad. We understand epistemic virtues in terms of
epistemic success rather than (full) rationality. Once this distinction is made, there is
no easy move from the evidence counting against ideal rationality to any conclusion
about failures of epistemic virtue. This is a promising response for an empirically
adequate virtue-reliabilism.
Further support comes from Gigerenzer’s interpretation of the ‘Linda the Bank
Teller’ case. Infamously, when asked whether, given a character description of
Linda, it is more probable that she is (a) a bank teller or (b) a bank teller and active
in the feminist movement, 85% of the subjects answered (b), clearly committing the
“conjunction fallacy” and violating basic theorems of probability calculus.
Gigerenzer notes that subjects are required to use syntactic, content blind rules of
reasoning where the values of the variables are not relevant to getting the answer
right, and we typically do poorly in content blind reasoning. When the question is
reformulated, we get very different results. If one asks ‘how many’ instead of ‘how
probable’, research shows better, more rational results. When asked, out of 100
people that satisfy Linda’s description, how many would be bank tellers and how
many would be bank tellers and active in the feminist movement, subjects’
performance significantly improves, producing the right answer. This shows that
different framing of logically equivalent information will get very different results in
assessments of rationality, and the framing is thus playing a big role here. Relative
to certain frames, people answer quite rationally. The failures of rationality in the
psychological research are thus very local and do not support the claim of
widespread failure that situationists use to push virtue epistemologists to
skepticism.
The philosophical implications of bounded rationality research for our argument
can be made in two ways. Bounded rationality research might show the need for a
revised and improved understanding of human rationality, but we can still use
rationality as a central norm for epistemology. This reading insists that rationality
should be defined as bounded rather than full or optimizing. We suggest a different
way of expressing essentially the same point, put in terms of epistemic success
rather than rationality. Grant Alfano that rationality will mean full rationality, but
insist that epistemic virtue theory can grant epistemic success even when agents
regularly fail to manifest (full) rationality. Satisfying norms for epistemic success
simply does not require satisfying norms of (full) rationality, and Gigerenzer’s
research shows exactly why.
We defend frugal rather than optimizing virtues as the norm for knowledge. This is
a turn away from epistemic rules in each of two senses: explanation and
regulation17. Cognitive activity that manifests epistemic virtues does not have to be
guided by, based on or explained by formal rules of rationality. We take this to be
fairly uncontroversial as any such requirement will be subject to psychological
plausibility worries and will have trouble accounting for ordinary cases of
knowledge from perception or testimony. Or, one might grant that optimizing rules
do not describe the process through which success is actually achieved, but still
insist that they are normative because they prescribe the standards for measuring
epistemic success. We argued above that optimizing rationality does not set right
standards for measuring epistemic success.
5. Knowledge of syntax and frugal virtues
An important example of a frugal virtue can be taken from research on knowledge of
syntax. This is a paradigm of formally constrained knowledge, which is considered
to be one of the clearest cases of exclusively human epistemic capacities.
Knowledge of syntax requires the manipulation of information according to strictly
formal rules. Children have epistemic skills that allow them to learn any language
based on these rules. The modal robustness of these skills is extraordinary. A vast
amount of research in psychology, neuroscience and linguistics aims at explaining
this robustness.18 Specifically, scientists have tried to understand how it is possible
for infants to learn a language given the incredibly diverse contexts they are in, the
impoverished stimuli they are exposed to, etc.
The abilities that produce knowledge of syntax are, like perceptual skills involved in
perceptual knowledge, remarkably stable dispositions. Although knowledge of
syntax is highly formal (in the same sense in which Bayesian rationality is formal,
e.g., it depends on formal rules that specify correct and incorrect linguistic
structures), humans manifest such knowledge at a very early age, and they do so
See Greco (2009) for an extensive discussion of rule following. An extreme case of
non-rule governed perceptual knowledge is imagined by Reid, who considers a
being that moves right from sensory stimulation to perceptual belief without any
intervening sense data or sensory representation.
18 See Jackendoff (2003), Chomsky (1986 and 1987) and Hornstein (1984).
17
reliably and without conscious effort or monitoring. Infants do not need classes of
universal grammar and the rules of syntax in order to distinguish the syntactic
components of (in many cases poorly constructed) utterances of a language. They
are certainly not introspecting on these rules, or accessing evidence that could
justify them to parse an utterance in terms of subject and predicate. What the infant
is doing is highly complex and the whole discipline of linguistics is devoted to
uncover the intricate rules that underlie the structure of language. But the infant
performs this incredible epistemic task in a perception-like fashion.
This is a case of a formal, uniquely human capacity that our account can
accommodate perfectly well. The epistemic abilities involved in knowledge of syntax
are as good an example of our view as are perceptual skills. Infants use fast, reliable,
modally robust epistemic skills to achieve knowledge of syntax, and succeed in
learning any language. These skills are not susceptible to introspection, but this may
actually explain their modal robustness across a vast amount of epistemic scenarios,
and should not be used as an objection against their status as stable epistemic
dispositions.
The situationist may insist that even the most robust epistemic dispositions can be
easily disturbed by very easy manipulations of the stimuli, and this might threaten
the anti-luck and safety intuitions needed for virtue epistemology. In response, we
would like to provide an illustration of why although information processing may
always be disturbed under laboratory settings, this by no means threatens the
stability of epistemic dispositions.
For instance, some information interferes with the speed and accuracy of behavioral
responses, but this by itself does not entail that the abilities involved are unreliable.
In the Stroop task, the interference between inclinations (the automatic inclination
to read a word vs. identifying a color) does not entail that the capacities involved are
unreliable because of alleged context sensitivity. The capacities to read and detect
color are incredibly reliable across subjects in many conditions. Interference only
shows that having two inclinations affects processing. As mentioned, any virtue
conceived as a stable disposition will be disturbed or “masked” under some
conditions. But being disturbed in non-standard situations is just part and parcel of
being a disposition.
This point is crucial to understand why virtue epistemology is unscathed by the
situationist challenge. The situationist generally grants that perceptual knowledge is
unchallenged by their evidence (thus their challenge has a limited scope, and affects
only inferential reasoning). We are construing virtues as perception-like
dispositions to form true belief. This, we claim, is not an ad hoc way of
characterizing dispositions tailored specifically to respond the situationist objection.
Rather, this characterization is the most natural way of understanding epistemic
dispositions in the light of the most recent evidence in psychology.
Knowledge of syntax is not, therefore, an isolated case that happens to comply with
our characterization of virtues as stable epistemic dispositions. All forms of
inferential and formal reasoning can be so characterized. Consider knowledge of
logic. We have the capacity to reason according to modus ponens and this capacity is
part of a set of stable dispositions to draw deductive inferences that are truthpreserving. One may actually say that these dispositions constitute what we mean
by deductive inference.19 If this is the case, then one could not know the meaning of
what a deductive inference is without having such stable epistemic dispositions. It is
a truism that basic deductive reasoning (for example an application of modus
ponens) can be achieved without explicit understanding of such rule and that these
dispositions, like those underlying knowledge of syntax, are remarkably stable.
Demanding an explicit understanding of the rules for deductive reasoning increases
cognitive demands, and although we can be trained to have such explicit
understanding, this is not a necessary condition to have the stable dispositions that
are implicit in our capacity to identify these rules. More importantly, requiring such
explicit understanding is open to traditional objections against accessibilism and
deontological accounts. Thus, it seems that the best strategy is to characterize these
fundamental rules for deductive reasoning in accordance with our perception-like
model.20
The situationist seems to face a new dilemma. Either we posses stable epistemic
dispositions that allow us to identify valid rules for deductive inference or we don’t.
If we do, then situationism is false. If we don’t, it is not clear how we are able to
understand what we mean when we talk about, for instance, modus ponens. For it is
not clear that highly unstable and easily disturbed capacities would help us succeed
in specifying what we mean in every situation by the fundamental rules (modus
ponens, modus tollens, etc.). Thus, it would not be entirely clear that we mean the
same fundamental rules when we characterize a piece of deductive reasoning as
modus ponens or something else. The situationist needs to explain why the
psychological evidence would have such a dramatic result and this strongly suggests
that situationism is in trouble. Obviously, the easy way out of this dilemma is to
affirm that situationism is false, which is what we propose.21
Regardless of this dilemma, the foregoing discussion shows that stable dispositions
are the right conceptual tool to characterize epistemic virtues, and once this
characterization is in place, one can demonstrate that the empirical evidence is not
only fully compatible with virtue epistemology, but actually supports it. Just as
every human being has the capacity to achieve knowledge of syntax and her success
See Boghossian, 2000.
Notice that this is quite different from having a conscious-intellectual “seeming,”
which is one way of defining intuitions.
21 This is a concrete way of making a point suggested to us by Lauren Olin in
conversation, which is that relativism is much more troubling in the epistemic case,
as compared to the moral case. If we are right, situationism is also a lot more
implausible in the epistemic case.
19
20
depends on stable epistemic dispositions (which are attributable to her), knowledge
of logic is also achievable for any human being, independently of the explicit
understanding of the rules of basic logic. The empirical evidence confirms the
stability of these capacities, and the skeptical interpretation of the evidence
concerns cases that show exclusively how one can manipulate them.
So what happens when we go wrong in the Linda case? As was suggested, these are
cases of cognitive interference, like the interference in the Stroop effect. The result
of the interference in cases like the Linda experiment, however, is not decreased
cognitive speed, but the rapid choice of one interpretation (which is pragmatically
informed) over another (a strictly logical and abstract one). As mentioned, this
interference does not entail lack of stable epistemic dispositions for inferential
reasoning, because such interference can easily be understood as a case of masking.
The reminder of the paper argues for the empirical plausibility of our proposal.
6. Reinterpreting the findings by Kahneman and Tversky?
Meeting Moorean worries about normative adequacy will require our theory to
adequately derive normative epistemic standings from our empirical commitments.
In this section, we examine different interpretations of relevant empirical research
to further secure normative adequacy.
The standard interpretation of evidence from Khaneman and Tversky would
seriously challenge virtue epistemology by showing that human rationality is highly
unstable and remarkably unreliable. On this interpretation, human rationality
produces false belief in a vast amount of circumstances and is inordinately
susceptible to the presence of irrelevant stimuli. The only plausible way to
demonstrate that the standard interpretation is compatible with virtue
epistemology is by showing that the standard interpretation still has room for stable
forms of reliably produced belief, and that these are based on abilities that are
impervious to trivial and irrelevant stimuli. One can actually find remarks
encouraging this project by Kahneman himself (2011). At the beginning of his
recent book, Kahneman (2011) argues that there are two systems for reasoning.
More accurately, he says that these two systems (systems 1 and 2) are useful
fictions that capture two broadly similar ways in which the brain engages with
problem-solving and truth-evaluation in a variety of situations. Kahneman describes
experiments suggesting the existence of a fast, flexible and unreliable system that in
many cases trumps a slow, consciously demanding and reliable system. The fast
system evolved to respond quickly to either urgent or typical situations, and is
responsible for much of our success as a species. The slow system is more cautious
and, instead of responding quickly, considers evidence and examines the nature of
problems slowly and carefully.
Kahneman says it is a mistake to associate human rationality with system 2 alone.
The truth is that system 1 calls the shots very frequently, and this is perfectly
compatible with properly functioning cognitive systems. This suggests the account
of epistemic virtues defended above. The use of fast and frugal belief forming
processes, including heuristics, is perfectly compatible with epistemic virtue read as
proper cognitive functioning rather than ideal reasoning. Situations where
normatively irrelevant stimuli trigger fast and unreliable responses appear to
impugn the stability of system 2. While manifesting virtues, as traditionally
understood, requires situational stability, it appears that system 2 cognitive
processes all too easily fall prey to system shifting stimuli. However, this does not
show that system 2 is unreliable. This must be determined by cases where system 2
is put to use, but Khaneman explains our persistent errors as the result of shifting
systems.
The situationist may yet claim that system 2 is not stable in the agent because of the
prevalence of shifting. If system 2 is not stable in the agent, the worry for the virtue
epistemologist will be that the agent might not be reliable overall and they will not
have sufficiently stable dispositions to meet the etiological conditions and the
situationist’s worry about luck and safety. But, no serious account of virtues claims
that they must be so stable that they will manifest irrespective of circumstance,
manifesting virtues always requires a certain level of cooperation from the
environment. System 2 can still be read as stable when the conditions for its proper
functioning obtain, and in such cases it will also be reliable. The prevalence of
shifting in extra-normal conditions does not threaten the relevant stability or
reliability of system 2. These relevantly stable system 2 abilities could then be used
to ground a range of important normative standings in virtue epistemology.
However, the findings on the relationship between systems 1 and 2 speak against
this defense of epistemic virtue for the following reasons. System 2 is extremely
energy consuming and, actually, lazy. These two aspects of system 2 are captured in
a variety of experiments in which the quick and erroneous epistemic deliverances of
system 1 prevail over the more stable epistemic processing of system 2. This
overpowering of system 2 by system 1 is certainly not one that can be overcome by
virtuous training (the evidence seems to overwhelmingly suggest this is just how we
are “wired”). Kahneman himself acknowledges that we cannot overcome some of
the troubling biases that guide our decisions and actions. The prevalence of system
1 is, therefore, a crucial claim of the standard interpretation. What occurs when
people make decisions and judgments based on system 1, when they should respond
based on system 2, is not a “battle among equals” between good and bad epistemic
reasoning. Rather, it is a rigged game in which system 2 is almost always willing to
give up. This may be good for a lot of practical reasons, but it is bad for epistemic
virtue. So this response to situationism is inadequate. The only option is to reject the
standard interpretation, because it entails situationism. Instead, we seek to clarify
how the findings on systems 1 and 2 are no threat to virtue epistemology by
appealing to an alternative interpretation.
Since system 1 overpowers system 2 in many situations (situations that are not
really atypical), one must show that the frugality and seeming unreliability of system
1 does not preclude the existence and development of epistemic virtues. Is system 1
really so bad? As mentioned, Gigerenzer thinks not. If he is right, then a virtue
epistemology based on frugal responses is certainly possible. One needs to keep in
mind that Kahneman uses the word ‘system’ as a useful fiction. There are a variety
of epistemic processes that satisfy different epistemic goals, according to bounded
rationality. For example, the Linda case is one in which virtues that work perfectly
well when information is given in clearly numerical expressions (such as set
inclusion) do not work well under circumstances where the language invokes
likelihood.
This can be explained by the fact that likelihood invokes pragmatic considerations.
Suppose that the frugal process interprets the information about the Linda case as
follows: Linda is a bank teller, but given that she participated in the feminist
movement, it is more likely that she is a bank teller that is active in the feminist
movement, rather than one who is not at all involved in the feminist movement. This
frugal response is not irrational. One would be missing very important information
about Linda if one ignored that she may be currently involved in the feminist
movement. The frugal response insists on not missing this crucial information about
Linda.
The abstract system for mathematical calculations and probability works well when
no loss of information is guaranteed. But here it seems that one may loose
something important by giving the “right answer.” The right answer is actually too
unsophisticated to deal with the full range of epistemic interests Linda has given her
complex set of practical interests. The “right” answer may not be the epistemically
virtuous answer in such cases.
The contexts in which epistemic goals are satisfied always include standards for
evaluating the appropriate response. It is very likely that, given the type of epistemic
environments one generally encounters, practical interests will frame not only the
standards for satisfactory response (see Greco 2009)) but also the criteria for
adequate knowledge attribution (see Stanley 2005). In any case, it seems that a
virtue epistemology built on frugal (as well as “slower”) epistemic virtues,
understood in this way, fits nicely with recent theories of epistemic virtue and
knowledge attribution, even if not with formal accounts of full rationality. Moreover,
one can provide a conceptual characterization of these virtues in terms of stable and
successful dispositions, thereby satisfying the basic theoretical and empirical
considerations for a theory of epistemic virtue.
7. Epistemic virtue, stability and frugality
We have argued for virtue-theoretic accounts of epistemic success, empirical
adequacy, and the ability condition. This leaves the etiological condition and
normative adequacy. It is necessary for our account to meet the etiological
condition in order to constitute a virtue epistemology and to achieve full normative
adequacy. If we can defend the etiological condition here, we have an empirically
and normatively adequate virtue epistemology that is consistent with nonskepticism and situationism. The challenge to the etiological condition from
environmental luck was discussed in section 3. Here we extend that discussion to
secure the etiological condition and full normative adequacy. Pritchard’s case
against robust virtue epistemology requires showing that Barney’s true belief from
ability is neither safe nor sufficiently from ability. In order for Alfano to have an
analogous argument, he will have to show that situationism demonstrates that
virtue-theoretic epistemic success can still be unsafe or not sufficiently from ability.
We argue below that situationism undermines neither.
Suppose we have an agent (Alice) that happens to be in an ideal epistemic
environment. Suppose that Alice is in a room that has been constructed to be
epistemically ideal, she is alone in her room thinking about bank tellers and
feminists, and her environment lacks all of the ‘epistemically irrelevant features’
Alfano notes that lead us astray – no mood depressors, problematic ambient noise,
information framed in misleading ways, etc. Let’s say that when Alice sits down to
think about bank tellers she correctly applies basic principles of Bayesian
probability calculus, correctly applies modus tollendo ponens, etc. Moreover,
assume that when Alice is in ideal epistemic environments, these inferential
methods are reliable for her. Suppose that lurking outside of Alice’s room are all
and only environments replete with just the problematic ‘epistemically irrelevant’
variables that lead to false beliefs - mood depressors, pay phones without dimes, no
one that will compliment her, etc. If Alice were to go outside her room to do the
same thinking she would arrive at false beliefs because of these environmental
variables. Assume that Alice randomly decided to go think in her room rather than
outside, but all too easily could have decided to go outside to do her thinking.
When Alice arrives at true beliefs in her room, the virtue reliabilist will be inclined
to attribute the manifestation of an intellectual virtue to Alice, and, given that she
gets it right, to attribute knowledge. Alfano can say that Alice’s success in her room
is due to environmental good luck rather than her reliable abilities, and her true
belief also appears to be unsafe. The worries about Alice’s true belief will be twofold. We might attribute her success to good environmental luck (as in True Temp
cases), or we might say her success is unsafe (as in Barney cases). In either case,
Alfano can argue that virtue epitemology fails to satisfy intuitive requirements for
knowledge.
This argument overlooks the role of ‘normal conditions’ for the manifestation of an
ability or competence in both cases. Sosa is careful to distinguish the role of normal
conditions for assessing any performance (2007, pg. 103) . Evaluations of the
success and explanatory salience of an ability are restricted to the conditions that
are normal or better for its manifestation. Sosa’s requirement for knowledge is that
an ”Acceptance of a deliverance constitutes knowledge only if the source is reliable,
and operates in its appropriate conditions, so that the deliverance is safe, while the
correctness of one’s acceptance is attributable to one’s epistemic competence.”
(ibid.) This leads him to say that the Kalediescope believer that is deceived by a
jokester in the wings is yet truly manifesting a success from ability when the
jokester does not to intervene. There is a direct causal connection between the
agent’s abilities and their true belief, even though the success was environmentally
lucky. For Sosa, the belief is still sufficiently from ability when the jokester does not
intervene. According to Sosa, the competence was operating in its normal
conditions, even though it might easily have been in non-normal conditions and
given an unsuccessful deliverance. The same commitment to normal conditions
leads Sosa to claim that the kaledieiscope believer’s belief is also safe, again parting
company with Pritchard. The reason is again that in normal conditions for the
exercise of the relevant competence, the belief would not too easily have been false.
The failure of an ability when not in conditions that are “normal or better” does not
count against the relevant reliability, stability or explanatory salience of the ability.
Sosa’s reading of the etiological condition would block Alfano’s attempt to exploit
Pritchard’s rejection of robust virtue epistemology. Situationist cases do not
undermine the explanatory saliency of abilities or the safety of epistemic successes
because they take cognitive agents outside of normal conditions for evaluating the
abilities in question. Kahneman shows that the stimulus in situationist cases
appears to shift the psychological states of the subjects in important ways, so we are
not testing the reliability or stability of the same rational methods or abilities when
we introduce situationist environmental variables. Utilizing Pritichard’s argument
against robust virtue epistemology thus comes further under fire because the
situationist cannot show that the same method would be in use inside the room and
outside the room, or that Alice’s psychological processes are held constant.
The situationist might respond by arguing that when the method (or relevant
psychological states) shift so easily, this shows that the method is not stable in the
agent, and that this is still enough to undermine knowledge attributions. If an ability
so easily becomes unavailable to an agent, this would appear to militate against
explaining reliable success in terms of such a fragile ability. The question of what to
count as ‘normal conditions’ for the exercise of Alice’s abilities is central here. If
‘Alice-outside-the-room’ is still Alice in normal conditions for the exercise of the
relevant abilities, the situationist may have shown that she could all too easily have
believed falsely. However, if we place ‘Alice-outside-the-room’ outside of normal
conditions, we are then inclined to see the experimental conditions in the
situationist literature as too distant to undermine safety or stability.
If an ability is not available to an agent in environments known to make that ability
unavailable (as in situationist cases), this does not count against the relevant
stability of the ability. Situationists may simply be illuminating characteristic masks
of our cognitive abilities. If ambient noise and the like lead to bad epistemic
outcomes as regularly as Alfano suggests, this may simply show that we need to
define ‘normal conditions’ for the exercise of an ability or trait in a way that
excludes their characteristic mask. All abilities and dispositions have characteristics
masks, and we typically see these failures to produce virtue relevant outcomes as
non-culpable failures. The situationist’s experimental conditions are then
analogous to cases like the tornado, or the lights going out, or being under water,
and we can still attribute overall proper functioning to the agent despite that kind of
failure. The situationist literature may indeed provide useful information about
normal conditions for cognitive abilities and characteristic masks, but virtue
epistemologists can build these results into the requirements for knowledge
without any fundamental change in their position.
References
Alfano, M. (2011). Expanding the situationist challenge to responsibilist virtue
epistemology. Philosophical Quarterly. Vol. 62 Issue 247. 223-249.
Alfano, M. (2012). Expanding the situationist challenge to reliabilist virtue
epistemology. Forthcoming.
Annas, J. (2005) "Virtue Ethics: What Kind of Naturalism?", in Stephen M. Gardiner
ed., Virtue Ethics, Old and New, Cornell UP, 2005.
Anscombe, GEM (1958). “Modern Moral Philosophy”, Philosophy 33, No. 124
Boghossian, P. (2000) “Knowledge of Logic” in P. Boghossian and C. Peacocke, New
Essays on the A Priori, Oxford University Press, pp. 229-254.
Brink, D. (2001). Realism, Naturalism, and Moral Semantics" Social Philosophy &
Policy 18. 154-176.
Cuneo, T. (2007). The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism, Oxford
University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1987) Generative Grammar: Its Basis, Development and Prospects,
Studies in English Literature and Linguistics, Kyoto University.
Chomsky, N. (1986) Knowledge of Language, Praeger.
Fallis, D. (2005). Epistemic value theory and judgement aggregation.
Episteme, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 39-55, 2005.
Gigerenzer, G. (2008) Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty,
Oxford University Pres.
Graham, P. (2011) ‘Epistemic Entitlement’ Nous, online January 2011.
Greco, J. (2010) Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account, Cambridge
University Press.
Greco, J. (1992). Agent reliabilism. Nous, 13, 273-296.
Haddock, H., Millar, A., & Pritchard, D. (2009). Epistemic Value, (eds.), Oxford
University Press
Harman, G. (2000). The nonexistence of character traits. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, 100: 223-226.
Harman, G. (1999). Moral philosophy meets social psychology: Virtue ethics and the
fundamental attribution error. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series
119, 316-331.
Heathwood, C. (2009) Moral and epistemic open question arguments. Philosophical
Books 50 (2009): 83-98.
Henderson and Horgan (2011) The Epistemological Spectrum. Oxford University
Press.
Hornstein, N. (1984) Logic as Grammar, MIT Press.
Houkes, E. (2002) "Normativity In Quine's Naturalism: The Technology Of Truth
Seeking". Journal For General Philosophy Of Science 33.
Hylton, P. (2007). Quine. Routledge 2007.
Jackendoff, R. (2003) Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution,
Oxford Univesity Press
Jenkins, CI (2007). Epistemic Norms and Natural Facts. American Philosophical
Quarterly.
Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological
Review, 80, 237-251.
Kamtekar, R. (2004). Situationism and virtue ethics on the content of our character.
Ethics, 114, 458-491.
Kelp, Christoff (2009). Pritchard on Knowledge, Safety and Cognitive Achievements.
Journal of Philosophical Research 34, 51-53
Kim, J. (1988) "What is Naturalized Epistemology?" Philosophical Perspectives 2:
381-406.
Kornblith, H. (1993). Epistemic Normativity. Synthese.
Miller, C. (2003). Social psychology and virtue ethics. The Journal of Ethics, 7:4, 365392.
Moore, GE (1903). Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903
Pritchard, Duncan (2007). The Nature and Value of Knowledge.
Pritchard, D. (2007). Recent work on epistemic value. Mind. Volume 44, Number 2,
Quine, W. (1969). Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Riggs, W. ( 2006). The value turn in epistemology. in New Waves in Epistemology,
(eds.) V. Hendricks & D. H. Pritchard (Ashgate)
Roberts, R. & Wood, J. (2007). Intellectual Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, E. (2011). Knowing Full Well. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sosa, E. (2007). A Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Snow, N. (2008). Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New
York:Routledge.
Sreenivasan, G. (2002). Errors about errors: Virtue theory and trait attribution.
Mind, 111, 47-68.
Stanley, J. (2005) Knowledge and Practical Interests (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press).
Zagzebski, L. (2010). Exemplarist virtue theory. In Battaly (ed.), Virtue And Vice:
Moral and Epistemic, pp. 39-55. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.