Motivational Approaches to Intellectual Vice

Despite the now considerable literature on intellectual virtue, there remains relatively little philosophical discussion of intellectual vice. What discussion there is has been shaped by a powerful assumption—that, just as intellectual virtue requires that we are motivated by epistemic goods, intellectual vice requires that we aren't. In this paper, I demonstrate that this assumption is false: motivational approaches cannot explain a range of intuitive cases of intellectual vice. The popularity of the assumption is accounted for by its being a manifestation of a more general understanding of vice as an inversion or mirror image of virtue. I call this the inversion thesis, and argue that the failure of the motivational approach to vice exposes its limitations. I conclude by suggesting that recognizing these limitations can help to encourage philosophical interest in intellectual vice.     

Knowledge-How and Epistemic Value

A conspicuous oversight in recent debates about the vexed problem of the value of knowledge has been the value of knowledge-how. This would not be surprising if knowledge-how were, as Gilbert Ryle [1945, 1949 Ryle, Gilbert 1949. The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson's University Library.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] famously thought, fundamentally different from knowledge-that. However, reductive intellectualists [e.g. Stanley and Williamson 2001 Ryle, Gilbert 1949. The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson's University Library.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Brogaard 2008, 2009 Brogaard, Berit 2009. What Mary Did Yesterday: Reflections on Knowledge-Wh, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78/2: 439–67.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011 Brogaard, Berit 2011. Knowledge-How: A Unified Account, in Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, ed. John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett, New York: Oxford University Press: 136–60. [Google Scholar]; Stanley 2011a Stanley, Jason 2011a. Knowing (How), Noûs 45/2: 207–38.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2011b Stanley, Jason 2011b. Know How, Oxford: Oxford University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]] maintain that knowledge-how just is a kind of knowledge-that. Accordingly, reductive intellectualists must predict that the value problems facing propositional knowledge will equally apply to knowledge-how. We show, however, that this is not the case. Accordingly, we highlight a value-driven argument for thinking (contra reductive intellectualism) that knowledge-how and knowledge-that come apart.     

Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger's Protopractical Ontology 1923–25: The French Occupy the Ruhr

Abstract

¹ 1 I am grateful to audiences at the University of California, Riverside, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association at the University of East Anglia, and at Dalhousie University for helpful questions. Sincere thanks go to two anonymous referees and the editors of this Journal. For written comments, detailed discussion and encouragement, I am particularly grateful to Duncan MacIntosh, Susan Sherwin, Richmond Campbell, Lorraine Code, Steven Burns, Guy Longworth, Gary Watson, Margaret Chapman and Guy Blanchard. This paper makes a preliminary case for a central and radical claim. I begin with Bernard Williams’ seldom-faced argument that integrity cannot be a moral virtue because it lacks two key ingredients of moral virtues, namely a characteristic thought and motivation. Whereas, for example, generosity involves the thought that another could use assistance, and the motivation to actually give assistance, integrity lacks these two things essential to morally excellent responses. I show that several maneuvers aimed at avoiding Williams’ challenge fail and that others are likely to remain unpersuasive. The paper concludes by offering an argument to the best explanation: Williams’ important insight is best explained by the supposition that integrity is an epistemic virtue, and an epistemic virtue of a practical sort.     

INTRODUCTION: VIRTUE AND VICE

Abstract: This introduction to the collection Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic addresses three main questions: (1) What is a virtue theory in ethics or epistemology? (2) What is a virtue? and (3) What is a vice? (1) It suggests that a virtue theory takes the virtues and vices of agents to be more fundamental than evaluations of acts or beliefs, and defines right acts or justified beliefs in terms of the virtues. (2) It argues that there are two important but different concepts of virtue: virtues are qualities that attain good ends, and virtues are qualities that involve good motives. (3) Accordingly, vices are qualities that either fail to attain good ends or involve bad motives. Finally, the introduction summarizes the eleven essays in the collection, which are divided into four sections: the Structure of Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology; Virtue and Context; Virtue and Emotion; and Virtues and Vices.     

VIRTUE ETHICS AND VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to test the claim that epistemologists—virtue epistemologists in particular—have much to learn from virtue ethics. The essay begins with an outline of virtue ethics itself. This section concludes that a pure form of virtue ethics is likely to be unattractive, so the virtue epistemologist should examine the "impure" views of real philosophers. Aristotle is usually held up as the paradigm virtue ethicist. His doctrine of the mean is described, and it is explained how that doctrine can provide a framework for an account of epistemic virtue. The conclusion of the essay is that a virtue epistemology based on analogies with virtue ethics, though well worth developing and considering, will face several challenges in fulfilling the significant promises that have been made on its behalf.     

Chisholm's Epistemic Principles

Abstract: An exposition and discussion of Chisholm's “epistemic principles.” These are compared with relevant views of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Foley. A further comparison, with the approach favored by Descartes, is argued to throw light on the status of such principles.     

Epistemic Presuppositions and their Consequences

Traditional epistemology has, in the main, presupposed that the primary task is to give a complete account of the concept knowledge and to state under what conditions it is possible to have it. In so doing, most accounts have been hierarchical, and all assume an idealized knower. The assumption of an idealized knower is essential for the traditional goal of generating an unassailable account of knowledge acquisition. Yet we, as individuals, fail to reach the ideal. Perhaps more important, we have epistemic goals not addressed in the traditional approach – among them, the ability to reach understanding in areas we deem important for our lives. Understanding is an epistemic concept. But how we obtain it has not traditionally been a focus. Developing an epistemic account that starts from a set of assumptions that differ from the traditional starting points will allow a different sort of epistemic theory, one on which generating understanding is a central goal and the idealized knower is replaced with an inquirer who is not merely fallible but working from a particular context with particular goals. Insight into how an epistemic account can include the particular concerns of an embedded inquirer can be found by examining the parallels between ethics and epistemology and, in particular, by examining the structure and starting points of virtue accounts. Here I develop several interrelated issues that contrast the goals and evaluative concepts that form the structure of both standard, traditional epistemological and ethical theories and virtue–centered theories. In the end, I sketch a virtue–centered epistemology that accords with who we are and how we gain understanding.     

Epistemic Presuppositions and their Consequences

Traditional epistemology has, in the main, presupposed that the primary task is to give a complete account of the concept knowledge and to state under what conditions it is possible to have it. In so doing, most accounts have been hierarchical, and all assume an idealized knower. The assumption of an idealized knower is essential for the traditional goal of generating an unassailable account of knowledge acquisition. Yet we, as individuals, fail to reach the ideal. Perhaps more important, we have epistemic goals not addressed in the traditional approach – among them, the ability to reach understanding in areas we deem important for our lives. Understanding is an epistemic concept. But how we obtain it has not traditionally been a focus. Developing an epistemic account that starts from a set of assumptions that differ from the traditional starting points will allow a different sort of epistemic theory, one on which generating understanding is a central goal and the idealized knower is replaced with an inquirer who is not merely fallible but working from a particular context with particular goals. Insight into how an epistemic account can include the particular concerns of an embedded inquirer can be found by examining the parallels between ethics and epistemology and, in particular, by examining the structure and starting points of virtue accounts. Here I develop several interrelated issues that contrast the goals and evaluative concepts that form the structure of both standard, traditional epistemological and ethical theories and virtue–centered theories. In the end, I sketch a virtue–centered epistemology that accords with who we are and how we gain understanding.     

EPISTEMIC MALEVOLENCE

Abstract: Against the background of a great deal of structural symmetry between intellectual and moral virtue and vice, it is a surprising fact that what is arguably the central or paradigm moral vice—that is, moral malevolence or malevolence proper—has no obvious or well-known counterpart among the intellectual vices. The notion of "epistemic malevolence" makes no appearance on any standard list of intellectual vices; nor is it central to our ordinary ways of thinking about intellectual vice. In this essay, I argue that there is such a thing as epistemic malevolence and offer an account of its basic character and structure. Doing so requires a good deal of attention to malevolence simpliciter . In the final section of the essay, I offer an explanation of our relative unfamiliarity with this trait.     

OPEN-MINDEDNESS

Abstract: Open-mindedness is typically at the top of any list of the intellectual or "epistemic" virtues. Yet, providing an account that simultaneously explains why open-mindedness is an epistemically valuable trait to have and how such a trait is compatible with full-blooded belief turns out to be a challenge. Building on the work of William Hare and Jonathan Adler, I defend a view of open-mindedness that meets this challenge. On this view, open-mindedness is primarily an attitude toward oneself as a believer, rather than toward any particular belief. To be open-minded is to be aware of one's fallibility as a believer, and to acknowledge the possibility that anytime one believes something, one could be wrong. In order to see that such an attitude is epistemically valuable even to an already virtuous agent, some details of the skills and habits of the open-minded agent are elucidated.     

New Horizons for a Theory of Epistemic Modals

Recent debate over the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals has focused on intuitions about cross-contextual truth-value assessments. In this paper, we advocate a different approach to evaluating theories of epistemic modals. Our strategy focuses on judgments of the incompatibility of two different epistemic possibility claims, or two different truth value assessments of a single epistemic possibility claim. We subject the predictions of existing theories to empirical scrutiny, and argue that existing contextualist and relativist theories are unable to account for the full pattern of observed judgments. As a way of illustrating the theoretical upshot of these results, we conclude by developing a novel theory of epistemic modals that is able to predict the results.     

Epistemic Injustice The Third Way?

In response to Miranda Fricker's advocacy of a virtue of 'reflexive critical openness', I emphasise the importance of other virtues, such as loyalty, in evaluating an agent's response to testimony, and I query Fricker's claim that in certain circumstances agents can lack a means to correct their faulty evaluations of another's testimony     

Epistemic Injustice The Third Way?

In response to Miranda Fricker's advocacy of a virtue of 'reflexive critical openness', I emphasise the importance of other virtues, such as loyalty, in evaluating an agent's response to testimony, and I query Fricker's claim that in certain circumstances agents can lack a means to correct their faulty evaluations of another's testimony