## 1. Introduction



At least two central tendencies are evident in VE taken as a
whole.



One central tendency is to view epistemology as a normative
discipline. This implies at least two things. First, it signals
opposition to Quine's radical suggestion in "Epistemology
Naturalized" that philosophers should abandon questions about
what's reasonable to believe, and should restrict themselves to
questions about cognitive psychology instead. Virtue epistemologists
reject this proposal (McDowell 1994: 133; Sosa 1991: 100-105;
Zagzebski 1996: 334-8). Nevertheless, they are generally
receptive to empirical data from psychology, history, and other fields
(e.g., Greco 2001; Roberts & Wood 2007: Part II; Sosa 1991:
105-6; Zagzebski 1996: 336-7). Second, it implies that
epistemologists should focus their efforts on understanding epistemic
norms, value, and evaluation. This is a defining feature of the field.
Accordingly, VE features centrally in the recent "value
turn" in epistemology (Riggs 2006; Pritchard 2007).



For some practitioners, however, the idea that epistemology is a
normative discipline means more than this. For example, some think
that epistemological terms (or concepts) like 'knowledge',
'evidence', 'justification',
'duty' and 'virtue' cannot be adequately
defined or fully explained in purely non-normative vocabulary (e.g.,
Axtell & Carter 2008; McDowell 1994; Roberts & Wood 2007; and
Zagzebski 1996, 2009), although others disagree (e.g., Goldman 1992;
Greco 1999, 2009; Sosa 2007).



Others think that epistemology should aim to promote intellectual well
being. Perhaps an epistemological theory should be "practically
useful" in helping us recognize when we do or don't know
something (Zagzebski 1996: 267), or help us overcome
"anxieties" due to defective presuppositions about
knowledge (McDowell 1994: xi; Pritchard 2016a). Perhaps epistemology
should help us appreciate and respond to forms of "epistemic
injustice" (Fricker 2007). Perhaps epistemology should inspire
us with portraits of intellectual virtues, thereby promoting cultural
reformation and intellectual flourishing (Roberts & Wood 2007).
Perhaps epistemology should examine intellectual vices and other
defects to tell cautionary tales of what not to do and how not to be
(Alfano 2015, Battaly 2014, Cassam 2016). Or perhaps practitioners
should help redesign educational institutions to help students
cultivate intellectual virtues (e.g., the Intellectual Virtues
Academy--see Other Internet Resources).



The other central tendency is to view intellectual agents and
communities as the primary source of epistemic value and the primary
focus of epistemic evaluation. This focus includes not only
individuals and groups, but also the traits constitutive of their
cognitive character.



This second commitment of VE is often accompanied by a
"direction of analysis" characteristic of virtue theories
in both ethics and epistemology. Virtue ethics explains an
action's moral properties in terms of the agent's
properties, such as whether it results from kindness or spite. VE
explains a cognitive performance's normative properties in terms
of the cognizer's properties, such as whether a belief results
from hastiness or excellent eyesight, or whether an inquiry manifests
carelessness or discrimination. For virtue ethics the relevant
properties are moral traits, and for VE intellectual traits.



Beyond those basic central tendencies, we find great diversity in the
field. Four main issues divide practitioners. The first concerns the
nature and scope of intellectual virtues (section 3). The second
concerns what questions to address (section 4). The third concerns
what methods to use (sections 4 and 9). The fourth concerns the
relations among epistemic virtue, knowledge, and epistemic credit
(sections 5, 6, and 7).


## 2. Precursors and Contemporary Origins



Practitioners draw inspiration from many important historical
philosophers, including Plato (Zagzebski 1996: 139), Aristotle (Greco
2002: 311; Sosa 2009: 187; Zagzebski 1996, passim), Aquinas (Roberts
& Wood 2007: 69-70; Zagzebski 1996, passim), Descartes (Sosa
2007: ch. 6), Kierkegaard (Roberts & Wood 2007: 29-30),
Nietzsche (Alfano 2013a), and Peirce (Hookway 2000). Hints of VE can
also be found in Hume (1748), Reid (1785), Russell (1948), and Sellars
(1956). Islamic philosophy offers precursors to contemporary virtue
epistemology, such as discussions of the epistemic value of
imagination in al-Kindi and al-Farabi (Adamson
2015) and Avicenna's sophisticated social epistemology of
reliable and unreliable testimony (Black 2013).



Contemporary virtue epistemology, conceived as such and as a
distinctive movement within epistemology, began with Ernest
Sosa's work in the early 1980s (see the papers collected in Sosa
1991). Sosa applied his "virtue perspectivism" to
adjudicate disputes in contemporary epistemology, such as the disputes
between foundationalists and coherentists, and between internalists
and externalists (for a review, see Turri 2013). Other important early
contributions were by Lorraine Code (1987), James Montmarquet (1993),
Jonathan Kvanvig (1992), and Linda Zagzebski (1996), who argued that
Sosa's approach, while promising, did not go far enough in
identifying the central role of virtues, such as responsibility or
conscientiousness, the social and developmental bases of virtues, or
important relationships between intellectual and ethical virtues.
Other approaches attempt to blend features of Sosa's initial
approach and these alternatives (e.g., Greco 1993). It has also been
argued that early versions of reliabilism are best interpreted as a
form of VE (Kvanvig 1992).


## 3. The Nature of Intellectual Virtues



Start with an uncontroversial, but still informative, characterization
of intellectual virtues: intellectual virtues are characteristics that
promote intellectual flourishing, or which make for an excellent
cognizer.



VE is standardly divided up into virtue responsibilists and virtue
reliabilists (e.g., Axtell 1997). According to this taxonomy, the two
camps differ over how to characterize intellectual virtue. Virtue
reliabilists (e.g., Goldman, Greco, and Sosa) understand intellectual
virtues to include faculties such as perception, intuition, and
memory; call these 'faculty-virtues'. Their view is best
understood as a descendant from earlier externalist epistemologies
such as simple process reliabilism. Virtue responsibilists (e.g.,
Battaly, Code, Hookway, Montmarquet, and Zagzebski) understand
intellectual virtues to include cultivated character traits such as
conscientiousness and open-mindedness; call these
'trait-virtues'. Their approach is broadly aligned with
internalist sympathies in epistemology and deeply concerned with
cognition's ethical dimensions and implications.



This reliabilist/responsibilist taxonomy has attracted criticism
(Fleisher 2017). First, it is not clear why practitioners need to
choose between faculty-virtues and trait-virtues. At first glance,
excellent perception, good memory, open-mindedness, and intellectual
humility all seem equally good candidates to manifest excellence or
promote flourishing. Arguments over which are the
"real" virtues can seem pointless and counterproductive,
since many are the ways of excelling and flourishing intellectually
(Battaly 2015). Second, and closely related, it is plausible that a
complete epistemology must feature both faculty-virtues and
trait-virtues. Faculty-virtues seem indispensable in accounting for
knowledge of the past and the world around us. Trait-virtues could be
required to account for the full range of richer intellectual
achievements, such as understanding and wisdom, which might presuppose
knowledge but which arguably also exceed it (compare Zagzebski 2001:
248-9). Baehr (2006b) argues that virtue reliabilists should not
neglect trait-virtues, because these are necessary to explain some
cases of knowledge. For instance, intellectual courage and
perseverance, not just good memory and perception, might figure
centrally in an explanation of how a knower arrived at the truth.



Battaly (2008: 7) provides a helpful list of questions to guide
inquiry into the nature of intellectual virtue:



> 
> 
> There are five primary questions that analyses of the intellectual
> virtues should address. First, are the virtues natural or acquired?
> Second, does virtue possession require the agent to possess acquired
> intellectually virtuous motivations or dispositions to perform
> intellectually virtuous actions? Third, are the virtues distinct from
> skills? Fourth, are the virtues reliable? Finally, fifth, what makes
> the virtues valuable? Are they instrumentally, constitutively, or
> intrinsically valuable?
> 
> 
> 



Jason Kawall (2002) calls attention to a set of virtues neglected by
virtue epistemologists of all stripes. Virtue ethicists have long
recognized a difference between self-regarding moral virtues, such as
prudence and courage, and other-regarding virtues, such as benevolence
and compassion. And they have recognized the importance of both sorts.
But virtue epistemologists have overlooked a similar distinction among
intellectual virtues. They focus on self-regarding intellectual
virtues, such as perceptual acuity or intellectual courage, which
promote the individual's own intellectual flourishing. They
neglect other-regarding intellectual virtues, such as honesty and
integrity, which promote other people's acquisition of knowledge
and intellectual flourishing. More complex other-regarding virtues
would involve a willingness and ability to articulately communicate
one's reasons to others, or the creativity to discover knowledge
new to a community. "An epistemic agent who focuses exclusively
on self-regarding epistemic virtues", Kawall (2002: 260) writes,
"could be a deficient epistemic agent to the extent that she is
a member of a community". Such attention to the cognitive
agent's epistemic community also informs research on epistemic
justice and injustice (Fricker 2007, Sherman 2016) and recent
explorations of embedded, scaffolded, and extended intellectual
character (Alfano 2013b; Alfano & Skorburg 2017, 2018), topics to
which we return in section 9.


## 4. Conventional and Alternative



Disagreements about the nature of virtue are closely connected to
another pair of disagreements. These disagreements concern which
questions and methods should feature in epistemology.



Many practitioners deploy VE's resources to address standard
questions in standard ways. (Here 'standard' means
'standard for contemporary Anglophone epistemology'.) They
offer analyses or definitions of knowledge and justification. They try
to solve puzzles and problems, such as the Gettier problem and the
lottery problem. They construct counterexamples. They confront the
skeptic. This is conventional VE.



Other practitioners address alternative questions or use alternative
methods. They shun definitions and tidy analyses. They focus on topics
other than knowledge and justification, such as deliberation, inquiry,
understanding, wisdom, profiles of individual virtues and vices,
examinations of the relations among distinct virtues and vices, and
the social, ethical, and political dimensions of cognition involved in
misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and so on. They ignore the
radical skeptic. They mine literature and drama for inspiration and
examples. This is alternative VE.



An example of conventional VE is Ernest Sosa's (1991: section
IV) attempt to define knowledge as true belief held "out of
intellectual virtue", or to settle the dispute among
internalists and externalists about epistemic justification (Sosa
2003: ch. 9), providing detailed definitions and carefully trying to
disarm counterexamples. Another prime example of conventional VE is
Linda Zagzebski's (1996: part III) definition of knowledge and
attempted resolution of the Gettier problem.



An example of alternative VE is Robert Roberts and Jay Wood's
(2007) view that conventional questions and methods have eviscerated
epistemology, and that we should instead aim to reform intellectual
culture by sketching subtle and nuanced pictures ("maps")
of the intellectual virtues, drawing freely on literature, history,
and scripture. Another example is Jonathan Kvanvig's (1992)
argument that VE will flourish only by relinquishing the Cartesian
epistemological project and instead focusing on the role that virtues
play in training and education. Others have argued that the kernel of
truth in VE is best developed in an interdisciplinary context drawing
on the methods and findings of the cognitive, social, and life
sciences (Turri 2015a).



The foregoing does not imply that VE is a house divided against
itself. On the contrary, we find a spectrum of conventional and
alternative approaches rather than a simple dichotomy, and among
various practitioners we often see a "live and let live"
attitude. Thus while some practitioners of alternative VE counsel a
radical, wholesale break from conventional questions or methods, most
either blend conventional and alternative elements (e.g., Zagzebski,
Riggs, Battaly), or see value in conventional VE (e.g., Baehr 2011).
Conventional practitioners likewise recognize that
"alternative" questions are not only important but as old
as philosophy itself, such as questions about wisdom and the social
transmission of knowledge. The same goes for the
"alternative" methods of consulting literature, as Plato
looked to Homer, approaching philosophical questions with scientific
tools, as Aristotle inquired into the biological and social bases of
cognition, and referring to scripture, as the Islamic philosophical
tradition did in relation to the norms of testimony.


## 5. Knowledge



Many virtue epistemologists agree that, in very general terms,
knowledge is non-accidentally true belief. Different theories spell
out "non-accidentally" differently, but among many
practitioners a common understanding of that key term seems to have
emerged. Simply put, to know is to believe the truth because of your
intellectual virtue (e.g., Sosa 1991: 277; Zagzebski 1996:
271-2, Riggs 2002: 93-4; Lehrer 2000: 223; Greco 2003:
111; Turri 2011). In recent years, some practitioners influenced by
the knowledge-first approach have suggested reversing the direction of
analysis by starting with competences to know and then understanding
belief as potentially-defective knowledge (Miracchi 2015, Kelp 2017).
Either way, practitioners hold that there is a tight connection
between knowledge, on the one hand, and the exercise of intellectual
virtue or competence, on the other hand.



One benefit claimed for this basic approach is that it provides an
intuitive account of why knowledge is inconsistent with luck of a
certain sort. For instance, some begin with the intuitive thought that
you don't know something if it is "largely a matter of
luck" that you believe it (Riggs 2007). But why does knowledge
preclude luck in this way? In the first detailed attempt to answer
this question, Wayne Riggs says that the opposition between knowledge
and luck is best explained by the hypothesis that knowledge is
"an achievement for which the knower deserves credit"
(Riggs 2009: 341). And knowers deserve credit because they believe the
truth because of their virtue (Greco 2003). In response, some have
argued that luck and virtue are orthogonal dimensions of epistemic
evaluation (Pritchard 2012), and that knowledge must be due to virtue
*more* than luck, as opposed to virtue *rather* than
luck (Carter 2014).



A related benefit of the basic approach is that, in the eyes of many
practitioners, it solves the Gettier problem. Gettier cases follow a
recipe. Start with a belief sufficiently justified to meet the
justification condition for knowledge. Then add an element of bad luck
that would normally prevent the justified belief from being true.
Lastly add a dose of good luck that "cancels out the bad",
so the belief ends up true anyhow. It has proven difficult to explain
why this "double luck" prevents knowledge (Zagzebski
1996).



Here is a Gettier case (adapted from Zagzebski 1996: 285-6).
Mary enters the house and looks into the living room. A familiar
appearance greets her from her husband's chair. She thinks,
"My husband is sitting in the living room", and then walks
into the den. But Mary misidentified the man in the chair. It is not
her husband, but his brother, whom she had no reason to believe was
even in the country. However, her husband was seated along the
opposite wall of the living room, out of Mary's sight, dozing in
a different chair.



The VE solution to the Gettier problem is that knowledge requires you
to believe the truth "because of" your intellectual
virtues, but Gettier subjects do not believe the truth because of
their virtues, so they do not know (Zagzebski 1996: 285 ff; Greco
2003; Sosa 2007: ch. 5; Turri 2011). Some critics complain that this
view is uninformative because we lack an adequate understanding of
what it is to believe "because of" or "out of"
virtue (e.g., Roberts & Wood 2007). Other critics argue that the
basic approach still suffers from counterexamples (e.g., Baehr 2006a;
Church 2013).



Recently, leading practitioners have touted the fact that VE places
knowledge in a familiar pattern. On this approach, epistemic
evaluation is just another example of the basic way in which we
evaluate all behavior, performances, and attempts. The most widely
discussed articulation of this view is Ernest Sosa's
AAA-model of performance assessment (Sosa 2007: 22-3; for
related but subtly different approaches, see Greco 2003 & 2010 and
Morton 2013). On this approach, we can assess performances for
accuracy, adroitness, and aptness. Accurate performances achieve their
aim, adroit performances manifest competence, and apt performances are
accurate because adroit. This AAA-model applies to all conduct and
performances with an aim, whether intentional (as in ballet) or
unintentional (as with a heartbeat). 



Here's how the model applies in epistemology. (A more
complicated model has lately been proposed, which takes into account
the agent's own risk-assessment and decisions about when and how
to perform; see Sosa 2015.) Belief-formation is a psychological
performance with an aim. For beliefs, accuracy is identified with
truth, adroitness with manifesting intellectual competence, and
aptness with being "true because competent". Apt belief,
then, is belief that is true because competent. A competence, in
turn,



> 
> 
> is a disposition, one with a basis resident in the competent agent,
> one that would in appropriately normal conditions ensure (or make
> highly likely) the success of any relevant performance issued by it.
> (Sosa 2007: 29)
> 
> 
> 



Knowledge is then identified with apt belief, which is just "a
special case" of "creditable, apt performance", a
status common across the gamut of human activities.



Consider the performance of an archer who hits a bullseye because she
shoots competently. Her shot is apt, and her bullseye an achievement.
It's possible that she might easily have missed. She might have
luckily avoided being drugged before the competition, which would have
impaired her competence. Or a strong gust of wind, which would have
ruined her shot, might have just been avoided by a rare confluence of
local meteorological conditions. In any of these ways, her performance
might have been apt even though there are nearby possible worlds in
which she does not hit the bullseye. Sosa (2007: 31) says that
knowledge is also like this: in some cases you might believe aptly,
and thus know, even though you might easily have been wrong. More
recently, Sosa (2020) has also argued that suspension of judgment can
be analyzed in a similar way: when someone sets out on an inquiry as
to whether *p*, she might conclude that the evidence is
inconclusive, leading her to suspend judgment as to
whether *p*. Such suspension is itself a manifestation of
the competence to recognize that one is not in a position to know
whether *p*.



Some have argued that Sosa's AAA-model is open to
counterexamples. For example, Duncan Pritchard (2009a), echoing
Jennifer Lackey's (2007) broader criticism of credit views of
knowledge, argues that Sosa's view gives the wrong verdict in
the fake-barn thought experiment (originally due to Carl Ginet; see
Goldman 1976: 772-3). In this thought experiment, Henry and his
son are driving through the country. Henry pulls over to stretch his
legs, and while doing so regales his son with a list of currently
visible roadside items. "That's a tractor. That's a
combine. That's a horse. That's a silo. And that's a
fine barn", he adds, pointing to the nearby roadside barn. But
unbeknownst to them, the locals recently secretly replaced nearly
every barn in the country with fake barns (they're in
"Fake Barn Country"). Henry happens to see the one real
barn in the whole county. Had he instead set eyes on any of the
numerous nearby fakes, he would have falsely believed it was a barn.
Henry has a true belief because of his perceptual acuity, Pritchard
says, so it counts as apt and Sosa's view entails that Henry
knows. But, Pritchard claims, it's obvious that Henry
doesn't know. Pritchard (2008a: 445) raises an exactly similar
objection to Greco's theory of knowledge.



Criticism on this point has come on two fronts. On the one hand, some
epistemologists have argued that (contra Pritchard) fake-barn-style
cases, which feature environmental luck, are not cases of apt belief
or cognitive achievement (e.g., Jarvis 2013; Littlejohn 2014). On the
other hand, some reject the claim that the agent doesn't know in
this case or structurally similar ones (e.g., Lycan 2006; Turri 2011).
Moreover, recent experimental work has shown that non-philosophers
overwhelmingly view fake-barn cases, and structurally similar ones, as
instances of knowledge (Colaco, Buckwalter, Stich & Machery
2014; Turri, Buckwalter, & Blouw 2014; Turri 2016c).


## 6. Epistemic Value



What is the nature of epistemic value and how is knowledge
distinctively epistemically valuable? In particular, why is knowledge
more valuable than mere true belief, especially if true belief serves
just as well for guiding action? Such questions have occupied center
stage in recent epistemology and date back at least to Plato's
*Meno* (see Pritchard & Turri 2014 for an overview). Many
virtue epistemologists think that their approach is uniquely suited to
provide satisfying answers to these questions.



Zagzebski (2003) argues that an adequate account of knowledge must
explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. This is
known as "the value problem". VE is well positioned to
solve it, she argues, because the correct solution must help us see
how knowledge possesses value independently of anything
"external" to its production. A good cup of coffee is not
better simply because it was made by a good, reliable coffee machine.
Likewise a true belief is not made better simply because it was formed
by a reliable method. The added value must come from something
"internal" to it. The solution is to view knowledge as a
credit-worthy state of the agent, produced or sustained by her
virtuous agency.



Greco (2009, 2012) and Sosa (2003, 2007, 2020) contend that knowledge
is a kind of achievement--intellectual success through ability,
for which the knower is creditable. And in general, success through
virtue is more valuable than mere success, especially accidental
success. So knowledge is more valuable than true belief. Riggs (2009:
342; see also Riggs 1998 & 2002) puts the point succinctly:



> 
> 
> The reason that credit-worthiness views of knowledge can solve the
> value problem is that they introduce a new vector of value:
> credit.... If knowing that *p* always entails that one
> deserves credit for having achieved a true belief, then this
> introduces something besides true belief that is valuable
> 
> 
> 



Carter, Jarvis and Rubin (2015) propose a taxonomy of varieties of
cognitive achievement based on the relative weights given to achieving
success versus avoiding failure; for example, having a suspicion that
*p* is a cognitive attempt that puts more weight on achieving
success, whereas Cartesian certainty that *p* is a cognitive
attempt to puts almost exclusive weight on avoiding failure.



Aristotle made a related distinction between achieving some end by
luck or accident, and achieving it through the exercise of one's
abilities or virtues. It is only the latter kind of action, he argues,
that is both intrinsically valuable and constitutive of human
flourishing. "Human good", he writes, "turns out to
be activity of soul exhibiting excellence" (*Nicomachean
Ethics* 1098a15-16; translation by W. D. Ross 1984, p. 1735). The
successful exercise of one's intellectual virtues is both
intrinsically good and constitutive of human flourishing. This
pertains to moral and intellectual virtue. Assuming the basic VE line
on knowledge is correct, we get a straightforward solution to the
value problem.


## 7. Credit



As we reviewed in the sections on knowledge and epistemic value, a
very popular thesis in VE is that knowledge is a credit-worthy state
of the agent. You know only if you deserve credit for believing the
truth. Call this "the credit thesis". The credit thesis
helps explain knowledge's value. It also features prominently in
attempts to resolve the Gettier problem and explain epistemic
luck.



Jennifer Lackey (2007) argues that we do not deserve credit for
everything we know, so (a) standard VE definitions of knowledge are
false, and (b) VE is not ideally suited to explain knowledge's
value. She presents counterexamples involving testimonial and innate
knowledge. On Lackey's understanding, to earn credit for a true
belief, your "reliable cognitive faculties" must be
"the most salient part" of the explanation for why you
believe the truth (Lackey 2007: 351; see also Greco 2003: 130).
Cognitive faculties cannot be merely necessary or important parts of
the explanation, she argues, because then Gettier problems would
immediately arise (Lackey 2007: 347-8).



Here is a close variant of one of Lackey's cases (Lackey 2007:
352), which she later (2009) calls "Chicago Visitor":
Morris just arrived at the Chicago train station and wants directions
to the Sears Tower. He approaches the first adult passerby he sees
("Passerby") and asks for directions. Passerby knows the
city extraordinarily well and articulately offers impeccable
directions: the tower is two blocks east of the station. On that basis
Morris unhesitatingly forms the corresponding true belief.



Lackey reasons as follows. Morris clearly gains knowledge of the
tower's location. But Passerby's contribution is most
salient in explaining why Morris learned the truth. Morris's
contribution to the process is minimal. Morris's reliable
cognitive faculties are not the most salient part of the explanation
for why he believes the truth. So he doesn't deserve credit. But
he knows nonetheless. So the credit thesis is false.



Lackey also asks us to consider "the possibility of natural
innate knowledge" (Lackey 2007: 358). Surely such knowledge is
possible, so an adequate theory of knowledge must accommodate the
possibility. But "it seems highly unlikely that a subject would
deserve credit for such knowledge". For the belief's
origin, "such as natural selection or some other evolutionary
mechanism", would be the most salient part of the explanation
for why you had the true belief. So the credit thesis is false.



Sosa (2007: 95) responds that Morris still deserves "partial
credit", even though his success in believing the truth is
primarily attributable to a "socially seated competence"
embodied in the people involved in the testimonial chain. This
suffices for his belief to be apt, and thus count as knowledge.
Partial credit grounded in apt performance is a perfectly general
phenomenon, as common in team sport as in testimony.



> 
> 
> The quarterback's pass derives from his competence, but its
> great success, its being a *touchdown pass* manifests more
> fully the team's competence.
> 
> 
> 



Riggs (2009: 209) responds that it isn't clear that Morris does
know where the tower is. We aren't compelled to count as
knowledge every "casual, unreflective acceptance of
testimony" (Riggs 2009: 214). And notice that if we continue the
story by having someone soon afterward ask Morris where the tower is,
he'd be out of line to simply assert, "It's two
blocks that way", which suggests that he doesn't really
know after all (Riggs 2009: 210-11). Beyond that, Riggs
distinguishes two senses of credit: praiseworthiness and
attributability. Knowledge requires that your true belief be
attributable to you as an agent, but not that you be praiseworthy for
it. Riggs claims that Lackey's objections wrongly suppose that
defenders of the credit thesis think that knowledge requires
praiseworthiness, are too closely tied to Greco's particular
account of credit (with its emphasis on explanatory salience), and
also overlook the possibility of "group effort" in
achievements.



Greco (2007) responds that Morris still deserves credit for learning
the truth. Credit for cooperative success can accrue to multiple
individuals, even ones who contribute less than others. It generally
requires only that your "efforts and abilities" be
"appropriately involved" in the success (Greco 2007:
65). Further
developing this idea, Greco points out that
intellectual virtues are often social virtues, exercised in social
environments. For example, various social-cognitive abilities
are involved in assessments of speaker competence and sincerity, and
so important for the reception of testimony. A different kind of
response proposes that knowledge-producing virtues are often seated
not in the individual knower, but in the broader intellectual
community. On such occasion, knowledge continues to be understood
as "produced from virtue," but the virtues in questions
are now community virtues rather than those of an individual
knower. By far, the most common analogy for such approaches is
teamwork in sports (Green 2017). Let
us distinguish between a) several individuals constituting a group
agent, which agent is in turn the locus of group intentions and
actions, and b) several individual agents doing something
together. The latter kind of cooperation is often referred to as
"shared" or "joint" agency, as distinguished
from group agency. Greco (2020) uses a joint agency framework to
understand testimonial knowledge. The guiding idea is that the
transmission of knowledge from speaker to hearer involves the kind of
cooperation that constitutes joint agency. On this view, the
resulting testimonial knowledge is not attributable to the
competent individual agency of the hearer, but rather to the competent
joint agency of speaker and hearer acting together. In that
sense, transmitted knowledge is understood as a joint achievement
rather than an individual achievement. 


 Greco's account of knowledge transmission accommodates a
strong notion of social epistemic dependence. This is because joint
agency in general involves dependence among the cooperating actors to
"do their part" in the cooperative activity. Moreover, as
in other cases of joint action, the hearer has no guarantee that the
speaker will prove dependable, no guarantee that the speaker will play
their part well. Finally, we may note that much of the forgoing
discussion about knowledge transmission can be extended to knowledge
generation as well. That is, the production of knowledge can sometimes
involve the kind of intentional cooperation that characterizes joint
activity. For example, we can conceive of a research team that
cooperates in an investigation that is too complicated for any one
person to undertake alone. If that cooperation is structured in the
right way, and if the knowledge so produced is attributable to that
cooperation, we will have cases in which the production of knowledge
is a joint achievement.



Lackey (2009) replies to Greco, Riggs, and Sosa. Her response is
subtle and multidimensional, but its centerpiece is a dilemma for
VE's credit thesis. Either VE's notion of creditworthiness
is substantial enough to rule out credit for Gettier subjects or it
isn't. If it is substantial enough, then it rules out too much
testimonial knowledge, in which case it fails. If it isn't
substantial enough, then it suffers refutation by Gettier cases, in
which case it still fails. Either way, it fails. (Compare Kvanvig
2003; Pritchard 2008b.)


## 8. Contextualism



According to a widely debated view in recent epistemology,
contextualism, the truth conditions for knowledge attributions such as
"S knows that P" are context-sensitive, due to the
context-sensitivity of the cognitive verb "know" (for a
review, see Rysiew 2016). Contextualists disagree over how to model
the alleged context-sensitivity. Some say "know" is an
indexical possessing a context-invariant character that is a function
from contexts to contents (Cohen 2013). Others claim that
"knows" is a vague predicate in need of contextual
supplementation to predicate a determinate property (Heller 1999).
Critics argue that leading contextualist proposals are ad hoc or
unmotivated because we lack independent evidence that
"knows" is context-sensitive in these ways (Stanley 2005),
or because behavioral experiments demonstrate that people do not
evaluate knowledge attributions in the way that leading contextualists
have assumed or predicted (Turri 2016b).



Greco (2004, 2008) defends a version of contextualism, what he calls
"virtue contextualism". Virtue contextualism emerges from
the basic idea, mentioned above, that to know is to believe the truth
because of your intellectual virtue or ability. When we say
"because of your intellectual virtue or ability", how are
we to understand "because"? In general, explanatory talk
is context-sensitive. It is context-sensitive in two primary ways.
First, abnormal features tend to be explanatorily salient.
There's a panic in a Manhattan apartment building, which happens
very soon after a tiger wanders into the lobby. We have no trouble
identifying the panic's cause: the tiger. That's true even
though the tiger's presence isn't individually sufficient
to cause a panic--people must also fear tigers, but they normally
do. Second, our interests and purposes single out certain features as
especially relevant. We tend to focus on things we can control. If a
student asks a teacher why he failed the exam, the teacher might point
out that he rarely came to class and didn't pick up a study
guide until the morning of the exam.



If explanatory talk is generally context-sensitive, and knowledge-talk
is just a species of explanatory-talk, then perhaps
knowledge-attributions are too. By changing what seems normal or by
changing our interests and purpose, we might go from a context where
saying "S believes the truth because of her virtue"
expresses a truth, to a context where uttering the same words
expresses a falsehood. And since saying "S knows" is
tantamount to saying "S believes the truth because of her
virtue", it follows that knowledge-attributions are likewise
context-sensitive. By deriving its account of context-sensitivity from
the general character of explanatory-talk, virtue contextualism might
avoid the charge that it is unmotivated and ad hoc. However, further
work is required to test whether the theory fits with people's
actual linguistic behavior.


## 9. Epistemic Situationism



As mentioned above, practitioners of all stripes tend to recognize the
importance of empirical findings about cognition and inquiry. There
are multiple reasons for this sensitivity beyond a predilection for
naturalism. First, even though VE is a normative discipline as
discussed above, some practitioners accept a version of the *ought
implies can* principle. To the extent that empirical research in
psychology, cognitive science, and other fields delineates the limits
of human cognition, such research constrains the inquiries,
dispositions, and states that can be epistemically demanded of people.
More ambitiously, one might think that extremely demanding epistemic
norms are sometimes inappropriate even if, strictly speaking, they can
be satisfied. Second, even if one rejects *ought implies can*,
an alleged strength of VE is its ability to respond successfully to
skepticism. However, if the dispositions practitioners assume to exist
are never or rarely embodied by humans, then skepticism looms. Note
that this argument goes through even if people could acquire and
manifest epistemic virtues, just so long as they in fact don't.
Third, empirical research may help to solve the *generality
problem*. Any episode of acquiring a belief can be classed under
an indefinite number of headings; some such classifications
individuate highly reliable dispositions, while others individuate
less reliable dispositions. When I infer from the fact that every
emerald I've examined is green that every emerald (whether
examined or not) is green, should my inference be described as
*inductive generalization* or *inductive generalization
employing projectable predicates*? Though the generality problem
was first articulated as a hurdle for process reliabilism (Pollock
1984), Goldman (1986: 50) and Zagzebski (1996: 300) recognize that VE
faces its own version of the problem. Should epistemic virtues be
coarsely individuated, so that *open-mindedness* makes the cut,
or should they be finely individuated, so that *open-mindedness
towards friends while in a good mood* makes the cut? Zagzebski
(1996: 309) argues that this question should be answered empirically,
with a preference for coarse individuation. Finally, practitioners who
favor an ameliorative or educative approach to VE have an additional
reason to attend to empirical findings, because these may reveal
common cognitive defects that could potentially be set right, as well
as suggesting more promising prospects for cognitive and epistemic
training and development than those employed in contemporary
pedagogy.



These considerations notwithstanding, the cognitive sciences might
pose a threat to VE. After all, to the extent that people's
cognitive dispositions do not qualify as virtues (because they are
unreliable or irresponsible, for example), the true beliefs they
produce will not count as knowledge (Alfano 2012). Recall that
practitioners are largely in agreement that knowledge is true belief
that manifests virtue. If empirical studies suggest that
people's beliefs usually manifest cognitive defects or
incompetence, then VE would be led to the conclusion that most of our
true beliefs don't count as knowledge. This challenge to VE is
analogous to the "situationist challenge" to virtue ethics
(Doris 1998, 2002; Flanagan 1991; Harman 1999; for a recent
articulation, see Merritt, Doris, and Harman 2010).



Mark Alfano (2012: 234) first framed the problem as an inconsistent
triad: *anti-skepticism*, according to which almost all humans
have quite a bit of knowledge, *epistemic situationism*,
according to which most people's intellectual dispositions are
not virtues because they are highly sensitive to seemingly trivial and
epistemically irrelevant situational factors, and VE. Regarding the
reliability of people's inferential dispositions, Alfano (2014,
2013b: chapter 6) pointed to a robust series of findings related to
the unreliability of heuristics such as the availability heuristic,
the representativeness heuristic, and the recognition heuristic.
Regarding responsibilist VE, Alfano (2012, 2013b: chapter 5)
emphasized findings on the substantial influence of seemingly trivial
but epistemically irrelevant factors on belief-formation. These
factors include mood elevators, mood depressors, and social cues of
unanimous versus non-unanimous agreement. Subsequently, while a few
philosophers have twisted the empirical knife further (e.g., Olin and
Doris 2014; Blumenthal-Barby 2015), at least four lines of response
have emerged.



The first main response to epistemic situationism is to deny that
there is a problem, referring to more heartening empirical evidence.
For example, Fairweather and Montemayor (2014) argue that
heuristics--instead of being unreliable mental
shortcuts--are more reliable than traditional inferential
patterns that people tend to misuse. In a similar vein, Samuelson and
Church (2015) argue that heuristics, when properly monitored and
interrupted by top-down effortful cognition, can be reliable, and that
effective exercise of such top-down control constitutes a version of
the responsibilist virtue of intellectual humility. And King (2014a)
defends responsibilism by pointing out that, at least on
Zagzebski's (1996) version of VE, knowledge needn't
manifest virtue but instead needs only to arise from the sort of
motivated inquiry that a virtuous person would engage in.



The second main response is more conciliatory, suggesting that VE
should focus less on achieving virtue and more on avoiding vice.
Roberts and West (2015) contend that research on heuristics and
related cognitive biases shows that humans are best understood as
manifesting various natural epistemic defects. The work of becoming a
good-enough cognizer is then a matter of cultivating ways of avoiding
or overcoming these defects. They suggest that self-vigilance and
increased intellectual vitality are two key ways to handle these
defects, making their view somewhat similar to that of Samuelson and
Church (2015). Cassam (2016) argues that the extensive literature on
conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking shows that people are
prone to various intellectual vices, understood as character traits
that impede effective and responsible inquiry. Understanding human
inquiry and how it is liable to go wrong thus requires a study of
intellectual vices.



This suggestion is in line with the third main response to epistemic
situationism, which is to somehow offload some of the cognitive agency
traditionally required of the individual onto the material, social, or
political environment. For instance, Pritchard (2014) argues for a
more modest version of VE that countenances the essential role of the
environment in the acquisition of knowledge. Someone who is luckily
placed in their material, social, and political environment will end
up with more knowledge despite less exercise of cognitive agency than
someone who is unluckily placed, even if the latter exercises heroic
levels of cognitive agency. Epistemic situationism is thus
reinterpreted as evidence for our inescapable epistemic dependence on
circumstance. Alfano (2013b, 2016a) and Alfano and Skorburg (2017,
2018) connect the challenge of epistemic situationism with the
literature in the philosophy of mind on embedded, scaffolded, and
extended cognition inspired by Clark and Chalmers (1998; see also
Sterelny 2010). The basic idea here is that when a cognitive agent is
suitably integrated with natural objects, artifacts, and other agents
in their material, social, and political environment, those externalia
may be partially constitutive of the agent's cognitive
dispositions. Embedded cognition occurs in a mostly-stable natural
environment; scaffolded cognition occurs in a mostly-stable artificial
environment; outright extended cognition occurs in a
dynamically-reactive environment. Within this taxonomy, Alfano and
Skorburg (2018) argue that it is possible to improve the reliability
of the recognition heuristic not by developing further internal
cognitive resources (as Samuelson & Church 2015 and Roberts &
West 2015 would have it) but by better structuring the informational
ecosystem in which people find themselves--a suggestion that
harmonizes with recent work on the epistemology of information and
communication technologies such as the Internet (Bozdag & van den
Hoven 2015; Lynch 2016) and library sciences (Fallis & Whitcomb
2009). Alfano (2016a) and Alfano and Skorburg (2017) argue that, in
some cases, pairs of agents mutually constitute each other's
character by engaging in dynamic interactions with interlocking
virtues. The literature on embedded, scaffolded, and extended
epistemic virtues is a natural development of VE's emphasis on
intellectual agents and communities.



A fourth response is that there is no evidence that knowledge requires
the sort of dispositions that epistemic situationism challenges and,
moreover, that there is theoretical and empirical evidence that
knowledge does not require such dispositions (Turri 2017). More
specifically, according to this line of criticism, no serious argument
has ever been provided that knowledge requires reliability; instead,
philosophers have relied on weak explanatory arguments or, more
commonly, simply assumed that knowledge requires reliability (Turri
2016a). Moreover, if knowledge is an achievement, then we should
expect it to not require reliability, because no other achievement
requires reliability (Turri 2015c). Additionally, recent empirical
studies have shown that the ordinary concept of knowledge--which
is the concept practitioners have claimed to be interested
in--does not make reliability a necessary condition of knowledge
(Turri 2016a). For instance, in cases of perceptual and memorial
beliefs, people attribute knowledge at similarly high rates (~80%)
regardless of whether the agent gets it right ten-percent of the time
or ninety-percent of the time. Along with this line of criticism,
researchers have offered an alternative theory of knowledge that
allows for knowledge produced by even highly unreliable cognitive
abilities or powers (Turri 2016a,c).


## 10. Expanding Horizons



In this closing section, we survey four directions in which VE has
developed. These directions are natural extensions of the ongoing
research programs canvassed above, but they promise to bring new
insights into VE and epistemology more generally. These include
virtues in epistemic communities, profiles of specific virtues and
vices, philosophizing about epistemic statuses other than knowledge,
and explorations of the relations between intellectual virtues and
epistemic emotions.


### 10.1 Intellectual Virtues in Epistemic Communities



Jonathan Kvanvig (1992) argues for an alternative vision of the place
of virtues in epistemology. Modern epistemology has a narrow Cartesian
focus on (time-slices of) individuals and particular beliefs. VE,
Kvanvig says, should not follow suit. It is better suited to focus on
social and historical factors. The virtues are important, on
Kvanvig's view, because of their indispensable role in training
people to seek, acquire, and transmit truths--a distinctly social
activity (see also Morton 2013).



Traditional epistemology, Kvanvig says, is dominated by an
"individualistic" and "synchronic" conception
of knowledge. It takes its most important job to be specifying the
conditions under which an individual knows a particular proposition at
a particular time. Kvanvig abandons this in favor of a genetic
epistemology focused on the cognitive life of the mind as it develops
within a social context. Questions about the group supplant questions
about the individual. Questions about cognitive development and
learning supplant questions about what an individual knows at a given
time. This approach jibes well with both the educative streak already
noted in VE and the embedded, scaffolded, and extended virtue approach
described in section 9.



Kvanvig sees at least two ways this new approach would feature the
virtues. First, virtues are essential to understanding the cognitive
life of the mind, particularly development and learning, which happens
over time through various processes, such as imitating virtuous agents
and taking to heart cautionary tales of vice. Second, virtues are
essential in characterizing cognitive ideals. For example, one way of
organizing information is better than another, Kvanvig argues, because
in appropriate circumstances that's how an intellectually
virtuous person would organize it.


### 10.2 Specific Virtues and Vices



Another "growth area" for VE is profiles of individual
virtues and vices. Work in this area has progressed in fits and
starts, with a great deal of work on some intellectual virtues and
vices but less on others. Traits that have received significant
attention include intellectual courage, intellectual humility,
epistemic justice, as well as the vices that oppose these virtues.



Roberts and Wood (2007: 219) characterize intellectual courage and
caution as the virtues that dispose us to respond appropriately to
perceived threats in our intellectual lives--courage disposing us
to not be unduly intimidated, caution disposing us to not take
inappropriate risks in achieving intellectual goods. For them, then,
intellectual courage is analogous to Aristotelian moral courage, in
that it disposes its bearer to respond well to threats, being neither
too rash nor too fearful. Baehr (2011, chap. 9) likewise argues that
intellectual courage is best construed as a disposition to respond
well to threats to one's epistemic well-being; he focuses in
particular on the courage to inquire rather than the courage to
believe or doubt. Drawing on Nietzsche, Alfano (2013a, 2019) explores
a related kind of intellectual courage to inquire into the forbidden.
He argues that such Nietzschean courage is needed to understand the
most disheartening and shameful aspects of human nature, which people
tend to whitewash or gloss over. On a different note, Alfano (2013b)
emphasizes the importance of intellectual courage in publicly
announcing what one knows or believes in the face of social and
institutional pressure to conform or be silent. Such courage relates
to the transmission of knowledge and the destruction of ignorance and
error in one's community rather than the seeking of knowledge
for the inquirer's sake. Having such a sense of when and how to
speak one's mind is a primary constituent of the virtue of being
an effective whistleblower, an underappreciated exemplar of the
current era (DesAutels 2009). Medina (2013) offers an account of
subjects with exceptional intellectual courage, such as Sor Juana Ines
de la Cruz in seventeenth century Mexico. Such heroes defy cognitive
obstacles in contexts of epistemic oppression through inventiveness
and imagination.



Contributors to the profile of intellectual humility include Carter
and Pritchard (2016), Hazlett (2012), Roberts and Wood (2007),
Samuelson and Church (2015), Whitcomb et al. (2015), and Christen et
al. (2014). Hazlett (2012: 220) claims that intellectual humility is
the



> 
> 
> disposition not to adopt epistemically improper higher order epistemic
> attitudes, and to adopt (in the right way, in the right situations)
> epistemically proper higher order epistemic attitudes.
> 
> 
> 



This conception of intellectual humility is most pertinent in the
realm of disagreement. The view of Roberts and Wood is similar,
holding that intellectual humility is "a striking or unusual
unconcern for social importance, and thus a kind of emotional
*insensitivity* to the issues of status" (2007: 239).
Their definition, like Hazlett's, emphasizes the social nature
of intellectual humility. Unlike Hazlett, Roberts and Wood put more
weight on the intellectually humble person's concerns and
emotions, and less on her doxastic states.



Samuelson and Church (2015), by contrast, characterize intellectual
humility in the dual-process language popular in contemporary
psychology. Samuelson and Church think that intellectual humility can
be implemented as a motivating trait, but they are inclined to
construe it in the dual-system framework, where it harmonizes
automatic intuitive processes (heuristics, affective judgments, etc.)
with slow, controlled, effortful, attentive thought and deliberation.
On this view, someone who tends to jump to conclusions based on
intuitions ("System 1") fails to be intellectually humble,
especially if he is not open to revising his beliefs in the face of
new evidence. By contrast, someone who forces himself to slow down and
think carefully ("System 2") in situations where intuitive
responses are liable to mislead would be a paragon of intellectual
humility.



Whitcomb et al. (2015; see also Medina 2013) propose a conception of
intellectual humility as appropriately attending to and owning
one's cognitive limitations. Such attentiveness can be
conscious, but it is grounded in an implicit sensitivity to
one's own dispositions. Attending to one's limitations is
in turn meant to lead to intellectually humble cognitive, behavioral,
motivational, and affective responses. This trait leads the
intellectually humble person to revise her beliefs in light of her
recognition of her limitations, to try to overcome or quarantine the
bad effects of her limitations, to desire to embody fewer and less
severe limitations, and to display fitting emotions (e.g., regret
rather than amusement) towards her limitations.



Finally, Christen, Alfano, and Robinson (2014) give a descriptive
rather than a normative account of intellectual humility. Like the
views canvassed above, they think that intellectual humility can be
understood as a multifaceted disposition that opposes other
dispositions. Rather than consulting their own intuitions about what
the facets of intellectual humility and its opposing vices are,
however, they employ a thesaurus-based psycholexical analysis, which
suggests that intellectual humility has three positive facets (the
sensitive self, the discreet self, and the inquisitive self) and three
opposing vices (the underrated other, the underrated self, and the
overrated self). The sensitive self is characterized by comprehension,
responsiveness, and mindfulness--all ways of demonstrating
openness to new ideas and information. The inquisitive self is
characterized by curiosity, exploration, and learning--all ways
of seeking new ideas and information. The discreet self is
characterized by demureness and unpretentiousness--ways of
relating to other people, especially those one might disagree
with.



Miranda Fricker (2003, 2007) provides a detailed case study of the
virtue of epistemic justice and the opposing vice of "epistemic
injustice" suffered by the marginalized and less powerful.
Epistemic injustice harms someone in their capacity as a (potential)
knower and comes in several varieties. One species is
*hermeneutical injustice*, which occurs when people are denied
the conceptual and linguistic resources to make sense of and
communicate their experience. A prime example is sexual harassment, a
concept forged 1970s America. The other main species of epistemic
injustice that has received by far the most attention, though, is
*testimonial injustice*, which occurs when someone's
assertions are accorded less (or more) credence than they deserve
because of prejudice of some kind, such as bias regarding identities
like gender, race, ethnicity, or age. The vice of testimonial
injustice is a disposition to commit such acts of epistemic injustice.
The virtue of corrective testimonial justice is a disposition to
remain aware of and compensate for your prejudices by interfering with
your estimation of the value of someone's testimony. This
corrective virtue, Fricker (2003: 161) argues, is cultivated through
social training.



Medina (2011, 2012, 2013) has developed a social-contextualist account
of the virtue of epistemic justice and the corresponding vice of
epistemic injustice. Medina (2011) argues that testimonial justice
requires the development of epistemic sensibility that detects and
corrects both undeserved credibility deficits and undeserved
credibility excesses. He also argues that hermeneutical injustices are
often addressed best in dialogical communities that come to a mutual
understanding of their predicament, rather than by individuals.



Sherman (2016) agrees with Fricker about the harm caused by
testimonial injustice but questions the efficacy of trying to
cultivate a virtue to correct it. The essential problem is that people
tend to think that their own opinions and trust in the testimony of
others are reasonable. If you thought that you'd given
someone's word too little weight, you would already have revised
your opinion. In light of this, Sherman suggests that efforts to
cultivate corrective testimonial justice are likely to fail or even
backfire.



Following Sherman, Alfano (2015; see also Alfano & Skorburg 2018)
suggests communalizing the pursuit of testimonial justice by, for
example, recruiting your friends to confront you when they think
you've committed an act of injustice and going out of your way
to do the same when you witness injustice. Also in response to
Sherman, Davidson and Kelly (2015) argue that while it may be
difficult or impossible to adjust one's credence in the moment,
taking distal ecological control (Clark 2007) over one's
material, social, and political environment can help to tamp down or
eradicate the biases that lead to testimonial injustice. Likewise,
Washington (2016: 11) argues that because isolated individuals lack a
"Bad Judgment Alarm", the response to testimonial
injustice should not be to reflexively cultivate one's own
character but to promote a "social and moral ecology that
facilitates the expression of our values". These approaches
harmonize with the embedded, scaffolded, and extended virtue model
described above, as well as Kvanvig's (1992) celebration of the
role of the epistemic community.



Other intellectual virtues have received less attention to date,
though not for lack of philosophical merit. These include intellectual
generosity (Roberts & Wood 2007: 293), epistemic temperance
(Battaly 2010), open-mindedness (Adler 2004; Baehr 2011; Carter &
Gordon 2014b), intellectual perseverance (King 2014b), inquisitiveness
(L. Watson 2015), and curiosity (Alfano 2013a; Whitcomb 2010). In a
recent book, Cassam (2019) catalogues a range of epistemic vices.
Some, such as closed-mindedness, are character traits. Others, such as
wishful thinking, are better conceptualized as ways of thinking. Still
others, such as epistemic malevolence and epistemic insouciance, are
best understood as attitudes. Cassam characterizes the attitude of
malevolence as a *stance*, which is a voluntarily-adopted
policy to engage in certain types of conduct; by contrast, he
characterizes the attitude of epistemic insouciance as
a *posture*, which is affective and involuntary (in this
case, a reckless and flippant disregard for truth, evidence, and
expertise). These theoretical reflections have recently been bolstered
by empirical work by Meyer, Alfano, & de Bruin (2021), who who
show that possession of the epistemic vices of indifference to
truth (related to epistemic insouciance) and intellectual rigidity
(related to closed-mindedness) predicts acceptance of fake news,
conspiracy theories, and misinformation about COVID-19.


### 10.3 Statuses Other Than Knowledge



As explained in section 6, practitioners have engaged in a lively
discussion of what the distinctive value of knowledge is. The main
question here has been what makes knowledge more valuable than true
belief? Further such value questions might be asked. For instance,
what if anything makes understanding more valuable than knowledge? Or,
if understanding is a species of knowledge, what if anything makes it
more valuable than knowledge that does not qualify as understanding?
And what makes wisdom especially epistemically valuable?



Answers to these questions tend to home in on properties either of the
content or of the cognizer. For example, there is a long tradition in
the philosophy of science on the nature of scientific explanation. In
this tradition, explanations provide understanding by communicating
knowledge of causes (Lipton 1991; Salmon 1984; Khalifa & Gadomski
2013; Turri 2015b). By contrast, epistemologists, especially virtue
epistemologists, have tended to argue that understanding is a special
status that arises from acts of intellectual virtue. For instance,
Pritchard (2016b) argues that understanding arises from "seeing
it for oneself", which manifests the virtue of intellectual
autonomy. Stephen Grimm (2006) argues that understanding is a special
kind of knowledge that arises from "grasping", a
distinctive psychological act that manifests intellectual virtue.
Carter and Gordon (2014a,b) argue that objectual understanding, in
particular, has a special value knowledge lacks, and further that this
kind of understanding is needed in order to explain why certain
traits, such as open-mindedness, are intellectual virtues. And on
Zagzebski's view, understanding is closely tied to mastery of an
art or skill, does not pertain to discrete propositions but to
patterns or systems, and consequently takes a nonpropositional object.
Understanding does not result from mere acquisition of information, as
can propositional knowledge. She thinks of understanding as "the
state of comprehension of nonpropositional structures of
reality" (Zagzebski 2001: 242). She also conjectures that we can
define understanding analogously to how she defined knowledge. The
main difference would be in the relevant virtues that produce the
different states. Whereas knowledge derives from virtues that aim at
truth, understanding derives at least partly from different virtues,
special ones hitherto "unanalyzed, even unrecognized"
(Zagzebski 2001: 248).



Looking beyond even understanding, Zagzebski further hopes that one
day epistemologists will turn their attention to wisdom. Further, she
claims, VE makes it easier to "recover" interest in and
analyze understanding and wisdom. For more on wisdom and its potential
connection to the virtue of epistemic humility, see Ryan (2014).


### 10.4 Epistemic Emotions



It's uncontroversial to say that many virtues are emotional
dispositions, even if they involve behavior in addition to emotion. As
mentioned above, intellectual courage disposes its bearer to
appropriate fear and confidence in matters epistemic. Alfano (2016b:
chapter 4) suggests that, because we are able to individuate emotions
more clearly than virtues, it might be helpful to index virtues to the
emotions they govern. If this is on the right track, then intellectual
virtues could be distinguished and structured by cataloguing what
Morton (2010; see also Morton 2014, Stocker 2010, and Kashdan &
Silvia 2011) calls *epistemic emotions*. These include such
states as curiosity, fascination, intrigue, hope, trust, distrust,
mistrust, surprise, doubt, skepticism, boredom, puzzlement, confusion,
wonder, awe, faith, and epistemic angst. Note that some of these
emotions are referred to by words that are also used to refer to their
controlling virtues. As Morton says, "the words often do triple
duty. Character links to virtue links to emotion" (2010).



VE can benefit from theorizing about epistemic emotions in at least
three ways. One benefit of theorizing intellectual virtues via
epistemic emotions is that doing so furnishes practitioners with a
sort of "to do list": many of the virtues related to the
emotions mentioned in the previous paragraph are unexplored or
underexplored. These virtues are ripe for the picking. Another benefit
of the lens of epistemic emotion is that it helps to make sense of
intellectual virtues as dispositions to motivated inquiry rather than
just static belief. Emotions are, after all, motivational states, and
epistemic emotions in particular direct us to seek confirmation,
disconfirmation, and so on. This point is related to but more specific
than Michael Brady's (2013: 92) idea that emotions in general
motivate inquiry because they "capture and consume"
attention, thereby motivating inquiry into their own eliciting
conditions. For instance, fear captures and consumes the attention of
the fearful person, directing him to find and understand the
(potential) threat or danger.



Finally, epistemic emotions help to make sense of the motivations and
practices of scientists. For example, Thagard (2002) mined James
Watson's (1969) autobiographical account of the discovery of the
structure of DNA for emotion terms; the most common related to
interest and the joy of discovery, followed by fear, hope, anger,
distress, aesthetic appreciation, and surprise. In addition, the
literature on the demarcation between science and pseudo-science,
along with the literature on scientific revolutions, is peppered with
the language of emotion--especially epistemic emotion. Popper
(1962) talks of scientists' attitudes to their hypotheses as one
of "hope" rather than belief. He distinguishes science
from pseudoscience by sneering at the "faith"
characteristic of the latter and praising the "doubt" and
openness to testing of the former. He argues that the "special
problem under investigation" and the scientist's
"theoretical interests" determine her point of view.
Lakatos (1978) contrasts scientific knowledge with theological
certainty that "must be beyond doubt". Kuhn (1962) says
that the attitude scientists have towards their paradigms is one of
not only belief but also "trust". He claims that
scientists received the discovery of x-rays "not only with
surprise but with shock", going on to say that "though
they could not doubt the evidence, [they] were clearly staggered by
it".



In times of crisis, says Kuhn, scientists are plagued by
"malaise". Such malaise has recently become most evident
in social psychology's replication crisis. For example, two
pre-registered replications of the so-called "ego-depletion
effect" recently found that, despite decades of positive studies
and successful meta-analyses, there appears to be no such effect
(Hagger et al. 2016; Lurquin et al. 2016). A science journalist
writing for *Slate* magazine described these findings as
"not just worrying" but "terrifying", because
they suggest that an entire field of research is
"suspicious" (Engber 2016, see
 Other Internet Resources).
 The article quotes Evan Carter, one of the young scientists in the
thick of the crisis, saying,



> 
> 
> All of a sudden it felt like everything was crumbling. I basically
> lost my compass. Normally I could say, all right there have been 100
> published studies on this, so I can feel good about it, I can feel
> confident. And then that just went away.
> 
> 
> 



On his blog, social psychologist Michael Inzlicht (2016, see
 Other Internet Resources)
 writes that despite being



> 
> 
> in love with social psychology [...] I have so many feelings
> about the situation we're in, and sometimes the weight of it
> breaks my heart. [...] it is only when we feel badly, when we
> acknowledge and, yes, grieve for yesterday, that we can allow for a
> better tomorrow.
> 
> 
> 



He goes on to say, "This is flat-out scary", and,
"I'm in a dark place. I feel like the ground is moving
from underneath me and I no longer know what is real and what is
not". Practitioners of VE may be in a position to offer aid and
comfort to afflicted scientists, or at least an accurate description
of what ails them.