Abrol Fairweather

Knowledge, Dexterity and Attention: A Theory of Epistemic Agency

Contemporary cognitive science clearly tells us that attention is modulated for speech and action. While these forms of goal-directed attention are very well researched in psychology, they have not been sufficiently studied by epistemologists. In this book, Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor develop and defend a theory of epistemic achievements that requires the manifestation of cognitive agency. They examine empirical work on the psychology of attention and assertion, and use it to ground a normative theory of epistemic achievements and virtues. The resulting study is the first sustained naturalized virtue epistemology, and will be of interest to readers in epistemology, cognitive science, and beyond. on this title

Inferential Abilities and Common Epistemic Goods

While the situationist challenge has been prominent in philosophical literature in ethics for over a decade, only recently has it been extended to virtue epistemology (See also forthcoming work on this issue by Doris and Olin, Heather Battaly, Christian Miller in Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue. (Fairweather & Flanagan eds.)). Mark Alfano argues that virtue epistemology is shown to be empirically inadequate in light of a wide range of results in social psychology, essentially succumbing to the same argument as virtue ethics. We argue that this meeting of the twain between virtue epistemology and social psychology in no way signals the end of virtue epistemology, but is rather a boon to naturalized virtue epistemology. We use Gird Gigerenzer’s models for bounded rationality (2011) to present a persuasive line of defense for virtue epistemology, and consider prospects for a naturalized virtue epistemology that is supported by current research in psychology.

Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

The essays collected here seek to establish bridges between virtue epistemology and philosophy of science (broadly construed, including the history of science, the use of specific scientific results to construct naturalistic philosophical theories, formal epistemology, modeling, theory choice, etc.). Since Ernest Sosa’s ground breaking essay “The Raft and the Pyramid” (1980) and Linda Zagzebski’s Virtues of The Mind (1996), epistemologists have become increasingly interested in the normative aspects of knowledge, justification, understanding and other epistemic states. Virtue epistemologists seek to ground the epistemic norms used to evaluate human cognition in a general commitment to aretaic (or virtue theoretic), rather than deontological or consequentialist, forms of normativity. Two broad defining features of this movement are often seen through a commitment to the following principles: (a) Knowledge and other important epistemic concepts are essentially normative and (b) epistemically valuable states of agents confer epistemically valuable properties on their beliefs, not the other way around. Virtue epistemology thus borrows liberally from the rich tradition in virtue ethics for a range of normative resources that have proven quite useful for epistemologists interested in addressing traditional problems regarding epistemic luck and epistemic value. While much more will be said about virtue epistemology below, and there are indeed many species of virtue epistemology on offer in contemporary literature, what unifies this movement can fruitfully be seen through the unique way virtue epistemology foregrounds the normativity of knowledge and places the agent at the center of the analysis.