Virtue epistemology, anyone? - Figs in Winter - Medium (original) (raw)

[image: knowledge Venn diagram, Wikimedia]

For years now I’ve been interested in virtue ethics, not just from a theoretical standpoint, but also in terms of everyday practice. But did you know that there is an approach to epistemology that is also based on the concept of virtue? I find this to be particularly interesting because it unifies my two major interests: practical philosophy and scientific skepticism.

To dig a bit deeper, let me summarize and make a few comments on John Greco’s and John Turri’s excellent and comprehensive entry on virtue epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As the authors state at the onset, virtue epistemology comes in a variety of flavors, but all such flavors share two commitments:

“First, epistemology is a normative discipline. Second, intellectual agents and communities are the primary source of epistemic value and the primary focus of epistemic evaluation.”

The first thing to notice, therefore, is that virtue epistemologists’ attitude is at odds with W.V.O. Quine’s famous suggestion that epistemology should become a branch of psychology: descriptive, not prescriptive. That said, however, virtue epistemologists are sensitive to input from the empirical sciences, first and foremost psychology, as any sensible philosophical school ought to be.