Ethical & Epistemic Normativity: Lonergan & Virtue Epistemology. By Dalibor Renić. Pp. 268, Milwaukee, WI, Marquette University Press, 2012, $29.00.

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 904-905
Author(s):  
Christopher Friel
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Epistemic Normativity

Knowing Full Well

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Epistemic Circularity ◽  
Good Judgment ◽  
Epistemic Agency ◽  
First Order ◽  
Knowledge Norm ◽  
Epistemic Competence

This book explains the nature of knowledge through an approach originated by the author years ago, known as virtue epistemology. The book provides a comprehensive account of the author's views on epistemic normativity as a form of performance normativity on two levels. On a first level is found the normativity of the apt performance, whose success manifests the performer's competence. On a higher level is found the normativity of the meta-apt performance, which manifests not necessarily first-order skill or competence but rather the reflective good judgment required for proper risk assessment. The book develops this bi-level account in multiple ways, by applying it to issues much disputed in recent epistemology: epistemic agency, how knowledge is normatively related to action, the knowledge norm of assertion, and the Meno problem as to how knowledge exceeds merely true belief. A full chapter is devoted to how experience should be understood if it is to figure in the epistemic competence that must be manifest in the truth of any belief apt enough to constitute knowledge. Another takes up the epistemology of testimony from the performance–theoretic perspective. Two other chapters are dedicated to comparisons with ostensibly rival views, such as classical internalist foundationalism, a knowledge-first view, and attributor contextualism. The book concludes with a defense of the epistemic circularity inherent in meta-aptness and thereby in the full aptness of knowing full well.

scholarly journals Knowledge as Achievement, More or Less

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Program Performance ◽  
Gettier Problem ◽  
Epistemic Evaluation ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology ◽  
The Gettier Problem

This chapter enhances and extends a powerful and promising research program, performance-based epistemology, which stands at the crossroads of many important currents that one can identify in contemporary epistemology, including the value problem, epistemic normativity, virtue epistemology, and the nature of knowledge. Performance-based epistemology offers at least three outstanding benefits: it explains the distinctive value that knowledge has, it places epistemic evaluation into a familiar and ubiquitous pattern of evaluation, and it solves the Gettier problem. But extant versions of performance-based epistemology have been the object of serious criticism. This chapter shows how to meet the objections without sacrificing the aforementioned benefits.

On Veritism. Pritchard’s Defense

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-45
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Good Thing ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Rescue Mission ◽  
Specific Relation ◽  
Big Brother ◽  
Process Reliabilism ◽  
Process Framework

This time Pritchard is on a rescue mission. Veritism is besieged and he rises to defend it. I do agree with much in his Veritism, but I demur when he adds: “So, the goodness of all epistemic goods is understood instrumentally with regard to whether they promote truth”. If Big Brother brainwashes us to believe the full contents of The Encyclopedia Britannica, then even if we suppose those contents to be true without exception, that would not make what they do an unalloyed good thing, not even epistemically. But it does seem to promote truth. What might then diminish Big Brother’s action so much, so as to make it so deplorable epistemically after all, despite how powerfully it does instrumentally promote truth. At a minimum we need to say more about the relations between epistemic goods and truth, so as to better understand how it is that the epistemic good is made so good by what specific relation to the truth. I lay out a way to understand Veritism so that it can say more about the relations between epistemic goods and truth, thus enhancing our understanding of epistemic normativity. And in a second part I lay out a solution to Linda Zagzebski’s Swamping problem for reliabilism. I argue that it is a problem for process reliabilism, but not for a virtue epistemology that accepts a kind of reliabilism, but in an agential telic framework, and not in a process framework. So, I lay out one way to be a “veritist”, by defending explicitly its Axiological side, and by implication its Conceptual side as well. I have raised questions for Pritchard’s own defense and have offered in each case an alternative defense that I believe fits the words of his formulations, and is in their spirit as well.

scholarly journals Two Forms of Virtue Epistemology

Epistemology ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Intellectual Virtues ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Intellectual Courage ◽  
Virtue Reliabilism

This chapter explains how two quite distinct forms of virtue epistemology are generally recognized. One of these finds in epistemology important correlates of Aristotle's moral virtues. Such responsibilist character epistemology builds its account of epistemic normativity on the subject's responsible manifestation of epistemic character. Meanwhile, the other form of virtue epistemology adheres closer to Aristotelian intellectual virtues while recognizing a broader set of competences still restricted to basic faculties of perception, introspection, and the like. The chapter shows that because of its focus on traditional faculties such as perception, memory, and inference, such virtue reliabilism is said to overlook character traits such as open-mindedness and intellectual courage.

Why Only Evidential Considerations Can Justify Belief

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Nolfi
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Justify Belief ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Aim Of Belief ◽  
The Way

At least when we restrict our attention to the epistemic domain, it seems clear that only considerations which bear on whether p can render a subject’s belief that p epistemically justified, by constituting the reasons on the basis of which she believes that p. And we ought to expect any account of epistemic normativity to explain why this is so. Extant accounts generally appeal to the idea that belief aims at truth, in an effort to explain why there is a kind of evidential constraint on the sorts of considerations that can be epistemic reasons. However, there are grounds for doubting that belief, in fact, aims at truth in the way that these accounts propose. This chapter develops an alternative explanation of why it is that non-evidential considerations cannot be epistemic reasons by taking seriously the idea that the constitutive aim of belief is fundamentally action-oriented.

Extending Epistemic Virtue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Battaly
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Virtue Epistemology ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Epistemic Virtue ◽  
Virtue Responsibilism

What would happen if extended cognition (EC) and virtue-responsibilism (VR) were to meet? Are they compatible, or incompatible? Do they have projects in common? Would they, as it were, end their meeting early, or stick around but run out of things to say? Or, would they hit it off? This chapter suggests that VR and EC are not obviously incompatible, and that each might fruitfully contribute to the other. Although there has been an explosion of recent work at the intersection of virtue epistemology and EC, this work has focused almost exclusively on the reliabilist side of virtue epistemology. Little has been said about the intersection of VR and EC. This chapter takes initial steps toward filling that gap.

The Epistemic Norms of Action

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Gerken
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Epistemic Norm ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Epistemic Norms ◽  
Knowledge Norm ◽  
Knowledge Ascriptions ◽  
Epistemological Principle ◽  
Knowledge Norms

Chapter 6 concerns the normative relationship between action and knowledge ascriptions. Arguments are provided against a Knowledge Norm of Action (KNAC) and in favor of the Warrant-Action norm (WA). According to WA, S must be adequately warranted in believing that p relative to her deliberative context to meet the epistemic requirements for acting on p. WA is developed by specifying the deliberative context and by arguing that its explanatory power exceeds that of knowledge norms. A general conclusion is that the knowledge norm is an important example of a folk epistemological principle that does not pass muster as an epistemological principle. More generally, Chapter 6 introduces the debates about epistemic normativity and develops a specific epistemic norm of action.

Metaepistemology

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Systematic Investigation ◽  
Epistemic Normativity ◽  
Present Volume

Epistemology, like ethics, is normative. Just as ethics addresses questions about how we ought to act, so epistemology addresses questions about how we ought to believe and enquire. We can also ask metanormative questions, like: What does it mean to claim that someone ought to do or believe something? Do such claims express beliefs about independently existing facts, or only attitudes of approval and disapproval towards certain pieces of conduct? How do putative facts about what people ought to do or believe fit in to the natural world? In the case of ethics, such questions have been subject to extensive and systematic investigation, yielding the thriving subdiscipline of metaethics. Yet the corresponding questions have had far less attention in epistemology. The present volume focuses on these questions and thus aims to promote the subdiscipline of metaepistemology. It brings together a collection of new essays drawing on the sophisticated theories and frameworks that have been developed in metaethics concerning practical normativity, and examining whether they can be applied to epistemic normativity, and what this might tell us about both.

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