Ichthus77

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Concluding Scientific-Realist Postscript –

Section II.

After restating some things said in section I, Norris states that he has tried to represent opposing positions fairly, without caricature. The issue has been around so long, that everyone has a legitimate point to make, although not all of their points are legitimate—but the legitimate points make unlikely any philosophical knock-down argument (last section).

Next step: review all previous section summaries and see where I stand.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Concluding Scientific-Realist Postscript –

Section I.

First-off, I can’t help thinking of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” when reading the title of this chapter, but Norris never overtly names him.

Norris basically begins this chapter the way he began the book, noting that he did what he could in the space permitted.

He boils epistemology down to the various positions regarding “the basic issue between realism and skepticism concerning the existence of an ‘external’ (objective or mind-independent) world that is not just a construct out of our various sense-data, conceptual schemes, paradigms, language-games, discourses, cultural life-forms or whatever.”

He says there is no philosophical answer to the skeptic which would prove to them the existence of the external world—he dismisses G.E. Moore’s pointing at his other hand, and Wittgenstein’s claim that skeptical doubts can be “laid to rest merely by observing that they have no place in our communally sanctioned language-games or life-forms and must therefore be counted strictly unintelligible.” To the skeptic, realism and anti-realism alike are just habits of thought which cannot guarantee their own veridical status.

The realist will ask whether the skeptical conclusion has “more rational warrant than appeals to the self-evidence of progress in various tried and tested fields of everyday experiential and applied scientific knowledge.” Norris’ use of self-evidence here is eyebrow-raising, especially since he goes on to say that “our theories or working hypotheses are…by no means secure against any prospect of future revision or rejection.” I always took self-evident to mean something like ‘certain’ or ‘unquestionable’. If it is subject to future revision, how is it self-evident? Maybe he is not saying appeals to progress are appeals to self-evident progress—maybe he is saying they are not, but skeptics apparently expect folks to believe the sceptical position is self-evident? Anyway, Norris says the “burden of proof falls squarely on those who would reject the case for convergent realism, or for scientific method as our best guarantee that most of our theories or working hypotheses are on the right track, even though (as the realist will readily concede) by no means secure against any prospect of future revision or rejection.”

The sceptic will respond with the “argument from error”—that so many past-accepted theories have got it wrong, and so many of our current theories will eventually be shown to be wrong, and so therefore nothing can be trusted. But in order to make that argument, the sceptic must rely on a realist premise: “that we now have adequate scientific reason to count those earlier theories false” or inadequate.
Examples:
1. Phlogiston and the luminiferous ether are out for different reasons:
a. phlogiston never referred to anything, and was replaced by Lavoisier’s oxygen-based theory of combustion
b. the luminiferous ether referred to what is now more adequately called the electro-magnetic field
2. Aristotle’s concept of bodies falling to find their ‘natural place’ is replaced by gravity
3. Mass, molecule, atom and electron–all have undergone some rethinking.

–Paradigm relativists would say all the theories make equally good sense.
–Kuhn would say they are all (even theories like 1b and 3) talking about something completely different.
–Convergent realism (our hero) puts up “a strong case…for the partial conservation of certain theories that have not…relinquished any claim to describe or explain the physical phenomena concerned.” This is referring to theories 1b and 3, “where the range of descriptive or identifying criteria has likewise been subject to large-scale revision but where these terms can nonetheless be taken as referring to the self-same entities.”

Norris says this sort of engagement in concrete examples is “the best starting-point for discussion, rather than high-level abstract debates about the ‘problem of knowledge’ or the ‘existence of an external world’.” The sceptic may consider the whole engagement to be circular, but not without “renouncing any claim to provide an intelligible account of our everyday experience as well as our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge.”

Norris connects this whole discussion to the issue of how to change human existence for the better through applied scientific knowledge.
1. Wittgenstein view: “there is no appeal to values of truth, rationality or ethical and social justice beyond those that play a meaningful role in the language-game or life-form concerned.”
2. Dummett: “denies the existence of objective, recognition-transcendent truth-values for statements of the so-called ‘disputed class’, i.e., those for which we possess no means of ascertainment or decisive proof”—including “standards of objective moral good or natural justice”.
3. Rorty: “ideas about the good life…(are) a product of our various language-games, metaphors or preferred ‘final vocabularies’. … all that is required is a switch to some alternative ‘description’ whereby the problems can be made to disappear (or the solutions to emerge) through a kind of verbal alchemy.”
a. This is kind of like Kuhn’s paradigm-shift.
b. This is a reaction to “theological ways of thinking” which “make ‘Nature’ do duty for God” but Norris replies that redescribing reality is playing God, and offers false hope.
c. Christian fundamentalist, creationist, ‘pro-life’ (anti-abortion) and other such conservative fronts…can readily exploit the ‘strong’-descriptivist line.
Note: I’m a Christian, I believe in evolution, and I believe in a God-describing GR.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 5: Making for Truth: Some Problems with Virtue-Based Epistemology –

Section VI.

Grand finale for this chapter. One more chapter after this, with only two sections in it.

Marie McGinn notes there is an “intuitive disanalogy between ethics and epistemology”. I’ll say. How do you determine if you’ve got moral truth, if you insist that epistemology must follow the true moral rules/virtues? This is something my co-member in the philosophy club, Grant Crawford, caught when Jonathan Homrighausen was doing a presentation on virtue-based epistemology.

Norris quotes McGinn and says she is contesting Hookway’s requirement of a self-evidential ‘immediate’ experience. This does not critique at all my discussion of “the hunger” (or “the question”) for true meaning evident in every culture in history, because this hunger is not self-evidential proof that there is true meaning. “The question” does halt a vicious regress, since we don’t need rules for the application of rules (etc.), we just need the answer to the question, and a realization that the answer may not correspond to anything, despite all clues to the contrary. The hunger, the question, is in the context of discovery, and does not trespass into the context of justification, except to say that any theory which does not answer the question, cannot pass as moral truth.

It seems Hookway does not speak for all virtue theorists, but McGinn’s critique applies to them, as well. Although “distinctively virtue-based theories…involve no such dubious appeal to ‘immediate’ states of mind that by very definition cannot be assessed on cognitive or rational-evaluative terms … it could also be held … the virtues adduced, whatever their precise specification, are likewise construed as taking epistemic priority over any of the more traditional (objectivist) criteria for what constitutes veridical knowledge…” That sets virtue theory apart from more traditional approaches which allow for the motivating influence of certain traits so long as they are confined to the epistemological “context of discovery” and not the “context of justification”—into which virtue theory does trespass.

Although Norris doesn’t put it in these exact words, what I gleaned is that virtue-based epistemology replaces the vicious regress of “rules for the application of rules” with a vicious circle. Like I said earlier, How do you determine if you’ve got moral truth, if you insist that epistemology must follow the true moral rules/virtues? It is circular reasoning—to insist that you use moral truth to justify any endeavor into truth, including moral truth. So the virtues are left with no justificatory warrant.

Even if the virtue-realist specifies that the virtues are realist virtues (like “the disposition to believe that truth is independent of any disposition”), they are still placing emphasis on an attitude or disposition, and therefore contradict realist virtues, which may truly only apply to the context of discovery, not the context of justification.

So virtue theory does no better than RD theory in its attempt to resolve the dilemma between realism and anti-realism, since it clearly takes an anti-realist bias toward truth that is epistemically constrained (“best judgment”-dependent), rather than verification-transcendent.

It also fails to explain how virtuous thinkers could ever have managed to get things wrong. It fails to grasp that truth can come apart from “the standing consensus of best judgment at some given stage in the progress of inquiry to date. …the chief source of disagreement concerning virtue-based epistemologies is what some would regard as their overcommitment to a practice-based (Aristotelian) approach that pins its faith to those epistemic virtues which currently enjoy widespread acceptance, and which thus tends to preclude—or downplay—the possibility of holding them to critical account. Whence the danger…of a slide toward the kind of Wittgenstein-influenced communitarian thinking whereby it simply cannot make sense to question or criticize the values and beliefs embodied in some given practice, language-game or communal ‘form of life’.” Indeed, Lorraine Code has linked virtue-epistemology with a ‘socialized’ conception of knowledge as well as a feminist epistemology, a communalist way of thinking which is at conflict with her insistence on certain ground rules.

There is a “tendency for such arguments to oscillate between a basically Aristotelian conception of those virtues which defines them chiefly with reference to the various knowledge-conducive practices wherein they play a salient role and a more Kantian (deontological) approach that treats them as subject to certain ‘internal’ checks and constraints. This latter requirement is most often introduced—as for instance by Sosa and Greco—by way of strengthening the normative component of virtue-based theories and marking their difference from straightforward reliabilist (Goldman-type) accounts.”

Norris’ own view (of course) is that these problems arise when virtue-theory trespasses into the context of justification, rather than confining itself to the context of discovery. When it stays in the context of discovery, it is superior to the “cultural-relativist or ‘strong’-sociological view whereby the distinction between truth and falsehood amounts to no more than that between beliefs which enjoy a high measure of social or peer-group acceptability and beliefs which (by common assent) lack any such status.” However, when it trespasses into the context of justification, it is at risk of sliding back into just that communalist way of thinking. It will not concede to “the realist’s cardinal point that the objective truth-value of certain propositions may (now or forever) elude our best powers of epistemic discernment just as knowledge—by very definition—transcends any possible specification in terms of currently accepted best belief.”

To equate truth with best belief, again, merely replaces the vicious regress with the vicious circle. Best to restrict the virtues to the context of discovery, where they will not fall prey to “sceptical, relativist or anti-realist fortune.”

Well done, Norris. Well done.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 5: Making for Truth: Some Problems with Virtue-Based Epistemology –

Section V.

Ok, so, apparently “foundationalist” means coherentist, and “anti-foundationalist” means pragmatist. Sosa claims they are a dead-end dispute to how to solve the problems that came up after Quine beat down logical empiricism—but virtue theory clearly inherits the same old dilemmas.

The most crucial dilemma is “the problem as to just what an epistemic virtue should be taken to involve if not—at its most basic—the realist acceptance that truth might always elude our best, most reliable or virtuous means of ascertainment. It is here (as I argued in Chapter 4) that the advocates of response-dependence lean strongly in an anti-realist direction despite their overt professions of even-handedness, and here also that McDowell draws the line against any alethic (objectivist) theory of truth that would place it outside and beyond the realm of jointly operative human ‘receptivity’ and ‘spontaneity’.” Virtue theorists claim to shift the emphasis from “justificatory warrant” to “disposition”—but this puts them in the RD, or anti-realist, camp, since “it equates truth with the best opinion or optimized judgement among those presumptively qualified to know on account of just these imputed qualities.” Not only is virtue theory vulnerable to the counter-argument of the realist about epistemology—it is vulnerable to the counter-argument of the realist about ethics, who is a consequentialist.

The virtue theorist will reply that “caution, self criticism, acceptance of the non-finality of knowledge as we have it—…between them ensure an adequate respect for the standing possibility that truth might elude our present best truth-seeking endeavors. Yet these character traits, no matter how admirable, are still specified in such a way as to reverse the realist order of priority between truth…and truthfulness.”

Yes, virtue theory is better than outright communalist theories and Kripkensteineism, but it must resort to them in order to explain what counts “as an adequate definition of this or that epistemic virtue”—since they refuse to take one side of the dilemma between “a causal-reliabilist approach devoid of normative values, and a deontological approach devoid of credible epistemic warrant.” To avoid communalism and Kripkensteinism, the virtue theorist can:
1. Strengthen the internalist requirement (to responsibly apply standards like “rationality, consistency, intellectual caution and care to avoid erroneous results”).
2. Fall back on reliabilist position which makes room for virtue-talk to deal with lack of normativity.

Those two options (deontological or internalist, versus reliabilist externalist) cannot be reconciled and tend to pull in opposite directions. (However…my paper does reconcile doing and being…hmm…deontology says DO the standards and you will become them…virtue says BE the standards and you will do them…both are right. How are either of them any more/less general than the other? Norris seems to be saying they both suck compared to consequentialism…hmm…interesting.)

Anyway, the irreconcilability between externalist and internalist arguments is apparent “in Sosa’s early suggestion that the intellectual virtues could be held analogous to reliably knowledge-conducive perceptual faculties such as good eyesight, acute hearing or tactile sensitivity” because those things are mostly modular or encapsulated—they mostly run on automatic—and higher-level reasoning does not (Fodor and other modularists have scaled down their claims that higher-level reasoning is also modular or purely computational, being more global). Sosa’s claim does not account for the interpretive processing that is part of perception, making it different than passive sensory uptake…though Quine (and his successors) would naturalize the interpretive processing (the ‘torrential output’ of scientific theories and hypotheses). Wittgenstein and Kuhn also put in that we see through the lens of our background information—to the point that is impossible to distinguish between veridical and delusory appearances. All the motorists and passerby’s in Barn-Façade County have it right, by this account (though, here, Norris refers to an example by Norwood Hanson). So this screws up Sosa’s analogy. The alternative to the Quinean or Wittgensteinian path is the Fodorian path of the modularity of higher thinking, so that it is conducive to knowledge not subject to interpretation. So…what to make of interpretation? Hence, Fodor’s stepping away from massive modularity. Modularity does not account for abduction—or inference to the best explanation.

So—since the virtues of higher thinking cannot be held analogues to automatic processes, that “threatens to deprive those virtues of the normative (ethically oriented) character which they must be taken to possess if they are to count as such in any but a loose or misapplied sense of the term,” – not exactly sure why. So, Sosa has developed two requirements: reliable beliefs, and evaluating those beliefs and their acquirement for their virtue. This pushes him into internalist territory, when he is supposed to “cut out that false disjunction between causally reliable sources of knowledge and ethically responsible ways of construing the best evidence to hand.”

John Greco says he does this when he “argues that the normative deficit of Goldman-type reliabilist theories can best be got over by introducing the further requirement that, in order to possess ‘positive epistemic status’, a subject’s virtues must include their willingness to take responsibility for whatever they advance in the way of purportedly veridical statements.” This harkens back to McDowell’s “responsible freedom” and doesn’t resolve what should count as an epistemic virtue and why it should count. It is in a tug of war between “truth” and “truthfulness” (in short).

Truthfulness matters, but sometimes, despite being truthful, we can fail to get at the truth. Virtue theorists can make the virtues infallibly truth-tracking (realist), but therefore “trivially circular and devoid of substantive (perceptual-cognitive or epistemic) content.” Or—they can define what traits count as virtuous—restricting truth to human response.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 5: Making for Truth: Some Problems with Virtue-Based Epistemology –

Section IV.

Virtue-based epistemology “has partly grown out of, and partly emerged as a reaction against, the kinds of reliabilist argument put forward by philosophers and cognitive theorists like Alvin Goldman.” They feel the way around the old quandaries, including Gettier’s, “is to adopt a basically causal account whereby knowledge is taken to consist in beliefs arrived at through a process of cognitive enquiry which puts the knower reliably in touch with his or her information sources. This is clearly an externalist approach in so far as it aims to cut out any normative appeal to whatever is supposed to go on ‘in the minds’ of properly equipped, duly qualified or intellectually responsible seekers-after-truth. …in marked opposition to any version of the hitherto dominant theory, from Plato to Kant and beyond, that would supply epistemology with a normative dimension.” They just stand in a ‘direct causal relation to their various sources of evidence’.

Sosa’s argument therefore has the same problem, and so they are both on a seesaw.

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 5: Making for Truth: Some Problems with Virtue-Based Epistemology –

Section III.

Can a virtue-based epistemology, unlike McDowell’s efforts, “(1) make good the normativity-deficit, and (2) avoid all the usual forms of set-piece sceptical challenge?”

One such challenge is the Gettier-type counter-examples, mentioned briefly in the first section. He challenged Plato’s definition of knowledge as “justified true belief”. His (Gettier’s) point “is that people can hold beliefs which are indeed justified and true, but which for various reasons intuitively strike us as not meeting the requirements for genuine knowledge.” One critique of this is that Gettier skewed things by holding beliefs to be justified by the evidence, though the evidence is oblique, off the point, or actively misleading.

Another critique is a ‘reliabilist’ theory “which requires that knowledge be adequately grounded in some causal nexus or concatenated chain of sensory-perceptual (or strong testimonial) evidence that puts knowers reliably in touch with whatever they claim to know.” But, reliabilist theory is vulnerable to counter-instances as the motorist driving through Barn-Façade County.
1. The motorist knows the local hobby of painting images of barns and considers the current image to be one such image, when it is really a barn. The uninformed passerby would know more than he, with reliable information. Strike one against reliabilist theory.
2. The motorist doesn’t know the local hobby and assumes every image of a barn is really a barn. So, when he encounters the genuine image encountered by the first motorist, instead of saying it is a false barn, he says it is a real barn…but he is lacking the information of the original motorist, and got it wrong with every other image. He didn’t get it right based on his information’s reliability. Strike two against the reliabilist theory.
3. According to Brandom, if the hobby is peculiar to Barn-Façade County and practiced rarely in its state, then we would say the second motorist does know (“truly and justifiably believe on good, epistemically reliable or trustworthy grounds) that this is a real barn. I don’t know how this follows.
4. According to Brandom, if the hobby has a U.S.-wide following of which the motorist was unaware, then we wouldn’t consider his belief to be knowledge.

So…does that knock down Plato’s definition of knowledge as being justified true belief? Virtue-based epistemology attempts a better effort than reliabilist theory to maintain that definition.

Norris mentions this goes back to Kant bridging the gap between “sensuous intuitions and concepts of understanding…via ‘judgment’, to a supersensible faculty of pure reason that provides us with the practical ‘orientation’ in the absence of which our epistemic endeavors would lack any sense of directive or coordinating purpose.” A lot I don’t understand. Norris sees the problem here as being ‘kindred’ to “the problem that arises with Kantian ethics, that is, the problem of explaining just how the categorical imperative and maxims of practical reason may be thought to apply – or provide any guidance – in matters of complex, real-world, humanly situated ethical choice.” Norris says there is reason to doubt an epistemology which is ethics-first or virtue-based, because it courts the same objections.

Virtue-epistemology would counter that it avoids “the kinds of problem that result from adopting such an abstract, formal or deontological approach.” From what Norris goes on to say, it sounds like their main objection w/ Kantian ethics is that 1) the categorical imperative is too general, 2) it is removed from moral feeling or intuition, despite his talk of a “good will” or “virtuous disposition”.

But, according to communitarians, without that ‘rule’—we are left “within some received tradition or communal life-form”.

MacIntyre, says Norris, has swung from considering it “an ethico-political imperative to challenge the prevailing ‘self-images of the age’ to a conservative doctrine that equates virtue with conformity to this or that communal narrative whereby moral agents can make coherent and satisfying sense of their lives.”

‘Liberal’ communitarians (like Walzer), says Norris, “find more room for social criticism as an exercise of independent thought and moral judgment while denying that such criticism could have the least force if it didn’t appeal to a certain range of widely shared values and beliefs.”

There is a debate between those (like Williams) who think ethics can maintain a critical edge w/o Kantian moralism, and those (usually disciples of Wittgenstein) who “reject the very notion that judgement can be exercised from a standpoint outside the various language-games or life-forms that provide the criteria for any valid (communally warranted) belief.”

Communitarians and virtue-theorists are united on one point: “it makes no sense—in epistemological or ethical terms—to adopt a position whereby truth in such matters might sometimes be thought to elude even the best-placed, most fully informed or epistemically virtuous enquirers. Communitarians focus on shared (community-wide) belief, whereas virtue-theorists focus on “distinctive qualities—like attentiveness, caution, open-mindedness or the courage to resist peer-group pressure—that more aptly apply to individual thinkers in particular epistemic contexts.”

So, virtue-theorists claim to avoid the problems resulting from Kant and from communitarians, “by locating the norms of good epistemic practice in just those attributes that serve to mark out competent, good-faith, expert, perceptive and well-motivated enquirers.” But, Norris says, just like Wright’s or McDowell’s Kantian version of the response-dependence argument, virtue-theory “fails to explain how the quest for knowledge can take its bearings from the regulative notion of objective, verification-transcendent truth (and hence avoid a Dummett-type anti-realist upshot).” They all fail in “meeting the realist’s basic objection, i.e., that truth can always come apart from ‘best judgment’ since even the most virtuous, intellectually disciplined and truth-oriented forms of enquiry may still (for whatever reason) fall far short of their aim.”

Positive point of virtue-based approach: “Offers a useful corrective to full-fledged communitarian theories” (Kripkenstein). “It offers a means of blocking the Kripkensteinian regress by maintaining that reasoners can think for themselves and apply certain standards…which are not just those of ‘agreement in judgment’ among members of some given community.”

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 5: Making for Truth: Some Problems with Virtue-Based Epistemology –

Section II.
Note: physicalist is apparently synonymous with ‘thoroughly naturalized’.

This section is going to mainly focus on how McDowell’s revision of Kant attempts to replace the normativity lost by Hume, then Quine, ironically because of Kant. It’s very weird how Kant helped, involving discussion of judgement and imagination and how they work to bring sensuous intuitions under concepts of understanding. I remember reading about some of this when I was reading Schopenhauer, but that was years ago, and I don’t remember any talk of imagination (which is supposedly blind, something “of which we are scarcely ever conscious,” so must not be what I think of when I think of imagination…which is something I use on purpose…I ‘imagine’ on purpose…but…perhaps it is the part of the mind that runs on automatic when we’re dreaming? I dunno).

McDowell is supposed to resolve this by “setting empirical constraints on the exercise of spontaneity while nonetheless allowing the mind sufficient scope for its active role in the process of judgement.” This was covered in chapter four, section four, The empirical constraints of receptivity are “responsible” and the exercise of spontaneity (the active role in the process of judgment) is “freedom”. Put them together, and you’ve got “responsible freedom” because the spontaneous is anchored within the receptive (which “respects Kant’s demand that reason should acknowledge certain necessary constraints on its proper sphere of jurisdiction—i.e., that it should not encroach on the domain of cognitive understanding where intuitions are ‘brought under’ adequate concepts—since otherwise it would become nothing more than a kind of speculative free-for-all or ‘frictionless spinning in the void’.”
The “question of how to wrest a space for ‘responsible freedom’ in judgement—a space where reason can exercise its powers with due regard to empirical constraints—is one that has continued to vex philosophy in the mainstream analytic line of descent even where that tradition has expressly renounced any Kantian conception of knowledge as vested in certain a priori (transcendentally deducible) intuitions, concepts and categories.”
–ignored by logical empiricist claim “that enquiry could perfectly well proceed through the bringing of first-order empirical observations under higher-level (e.g., deductive-nomological) modes of reasoning whose validity was self-evident.
–Quine’s attack on the ‘two dogmas’ “of logical empiricism set out to demolish this residual Kantian dichotomy while leaving a third dogma in place, that is, the idea that epistemology could be ‘naturalized’”…
–Davidson pointed out “Quine’s adherence to yet another covert dogma, i.e., his notion of empirical data as open to as many divergent interpretations as there existed ontological schemes or frameworks under which those data might be subsumed.” So, the “old dualism” of scheme and world is still there. Davidson tries to give up the dualism in that he tries to “reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false,” – throwing out normativity.
–McDowell seeks to restore normativity by countering Quine’s thoroughly naturalized theory of knowledge.
–Rorty (with “presumptive Davidsonian warrant”) claimed “we can be as hard-headedly ‘realist’ as we like about (say) the causal impact of incoming photons on Galileo’s eyeball while still maintaining that all such physical events are under some optional description or other. In which case, according to Rorty, the issue is strictly undecidable as between Galileo’s ‘observing’ the moons of Jupiter and thereby ‘shattering the crystalline spheres once and for all’ and his opponents’ taking those ‘same’ observations as merely introducing a further complication in the old Ptolemaic-Aristotelian astronomy.” Interpretation effectively goes “all the way down”.

But apparently McDowell keeps trekking right along with his attempt to detranscendentalized Kant without losing the normativity. Apparently—a detranscendentalized Kant is not a thoroughly naturalized Kant. I’m having trouble with that one. However…go back up and read how McDowell attempted to do this. But, in his attempt, he fails to explain how our knowledge “can be responsive to certain ideas of reason which must themselves be taken to inform (or to orient) every act of cognitive judgment but whose sphere of jurisdiction lies altogether outside and beyond the cognitive domain.” He avoids any appeal to Kant’s noumenal realm which would elude our grasp. His approach “seems to fight shy of explicitly endorsing … that reality must be located inside the conceptual sphere.”

Can a virtue-based epistemology do any better? Read on…

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 5: Making for Truth: Some Problems with Virtue-Based Epistemology –

Section I.

So, basically, virtue epistemology goes beyond the fact that there are certain virtues which people can possess which are going to be more knowledge-conducive than other characteristics. A person who possess “honesty, integrity, caution, openness to criticism, willingness to give up cherished beliefs in the face of conflicting evidence” or “attentiveness, acuity, open-mindedness, respect for the evidence, consistency in reasoning, absence of dogmatic preconceptions” or “disciplined, rational, open-minded, evidentially constrained and well-motivated” (etc.) is more likely to arrive at truth than a person who believes with blind faith—in the absence of evidence, or in spite of counter-evidence. But, again, virtue epistemology does not stop here.

Virtue epistemology says a truth-claim can only be made by a person motivated by the above-mentioned virtues. To be motivated by those virtues is “a safeguard against sundry forms of epistemic error or fallacious reasoning”. Advocates often cite Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis, “the kind of cultivated practical wisdom that typically results in sound moral judgments and virtuous actions.” These thinkers hold that a formal or rule-based account cannot explain why formal or rule-based accounts are reliably knowledge-conducive, and that what really matters is “whether those rules or methods are applied in the right way”—not just applied, but decided upon, one would think.

Christopher Hookway makes the point that Quine showed that attempts to justify our attempts to justify “must be grounded in certain intuitive judgments concerning the best, most plausible or (although Quine would not have phrased it this way) epistemically virtuous means of squaring the empirical evidence with our standing ontological and theoretical commitment.”

Hookway and other virtue epistemologists’ task is to “spell out the various particular attributes and qualities that characterize such practices at their knowledge-conducive best.” This avoids the lack of normativity in Quine’s naturalization, while also avoiding the problem of vicious regress (rules to justify rules, etc.).

Still, any “feeling of conviction” (Quine’s words) “we might experience with regard to some given construal of the evidence must itself be the ‘blind resultant’ of various sensory promptings together with our likewise passive registration of the ‘strength’ they acquire from associative linkage with other such enchained stimuli.” If that is true, it leaves no room for normative criteria like “our vaunted sense of simplicity” or “quest for ‘likeliest explanation’” to be involved in “the idea that progress in knowledge might indeed be a matter of carefully reasoned, consciously pursued and rationally motivated theory-choice”. This is an “active” (transcendental) versus “passive” (naturalized) problem. Hookway thinks there must be more to this “feeling of conviction” than “a downright Quinean empiricist appeal to sensory promptings or the incoming ‘barrage’ of ambient physical stimuli.”

The problem goes back to Hume “and the absolute impossibility, as he thought, of ever establishing a rational connection between matters of factual or logical truth and matters of evaluative judgment.” Norris is referring to the is-ought fallacy, but virtue epistemology would actually commit the ought-is fallacy (both fallacies being a form of reification), hehe. (Also, character is being, conduct is doing, and whatever we should do is how we should be, so if we are being the way we should be, we are following the rules. But, since we are not perfect, the rules take justificatory priority, since we do not always follow them—but when we do, they shape our character. Did I just resolve some crazy epistemological dilemma? Note that I am not committing the is-ought fallacy, nor the ought-is fallacy…at least…I don’t in my paper. I need to think about this more.) Anyway, virtue epistemologists think they fill the normative gap between evidence and theory left by Hume and Quine.

However, there is a distinction between truth (objective warrant) and truthfulness (getting things right to the best of one’s ability). Truth transcends truthfulness. Virtue-epistemologists reply that the realist position has been weakened by those who claim this puts truth beyond reach:
–anti-realists like Michael Dummett (critiqued in chapter 1 and 2)
–paradigm-relativists like Thomas Kuhn
–“so-called ‘internal’ (or framework-relative) realists like the later Hilary Putnam”
–“inventors of Gettier-type counter-examples which purport to show how knowledge can always come apart from a specification of justified true belief”
–Kripkensteinian argument “that any rule for the conduct of correct reasoning in mathematics, logic or whatever field of enquiry will always be subject either to an infinite (vicious) regress or to the charge of trivial circularity.”
–recent writers who put forward the case that “skepticism gets a hold only through the realist’s misguided (because self-defeating) claim for the objectivity of truth, that is to say, its radically non-epistemic or ‘recognition-transcendent’ character.”

All of that has been addressed previously in the book. Also, Norris answered that Crispin Wright and other RD theorists in chapter four fall short “since they end up either by endorsing antirealism in a somewhat more nuanced form or by tautologically equating truth with the deliverance of optimized epistemic warrant or idealized ‘best judgement’.

Virtue epistemology “claims to shift the whole ground of debate” to what motivates the rule-following, rather than the rule-following itself. It calls into question the logical empiricist distinction between “context of justification” and “context of discovery” discussed in chapter 3.

*****

Jonathan Homrighausen replied:

I largely like virtue epistemology. I’m surprised you don’t; a lot of its major proponents are Christian philosophers (e.g., Linda Zagzebski) and it jives with a lot of Scriptural statements about how only those who are wise/have open hearts can see God.

“Norris is referring to the is-ought fallacy, but virtue epistemology would actually commit the ought-is fallacy”

This is a criticism of Aristotelian ethics in general. I don’t see the problem; of course we can see what works best in the world by looking at the world (“is”).

“Virtue epistemology says a truth-claim can only be made by a person motivated by the above-mentioned virtues.”

Which thinkers said that? My understanding of virtue epistemology is that it was describing “justified beliefs” which may not always be “true.” I think the questions can be separated. But yes, the context of justification, the actual events surrounding one’s holding of that opinion, is important. Many times I have spoken to someone and been convinced they were off, but not been able to explain why other than their being arrogant, not taking in all relevant information, etc.

Jonathan

Book Discussion of Christopher Norris’ “Epistemology: Key Concepts in Philosophy”

Chapter 4: Response-Dependence: What’s in it for the Realist? –

Sections V-VI.

The first two paragraphs are a review of RD’s shortcomings, and then we begin to discuss Crispin Wright’s “superassertibility”, briefly mentioned in the first section of the introduction.

So—we don’t have to accept Rorty’s “jamming together of a hard-line causal-determinist doctrine as applied to ‘unmediated’ sensory data with the ‘strong’-descriptivist notion that scientific ‘truths’ are as many and various as the culturally contingent theories, languages, metaphors or narratives in which they play a transient role.” RD is an inadequate (see discussion of Johnston’s ‘missing explanation’ in section three) response to this…when instead we could just ignore it as a false dilemma.

John McDowell (and other analytic revisionists) “recommend a return to certain Kantian insights, albeit through a highly selective (‘naturalized’ or ‘detranscendentalized’) reading of Kant.”

These ‘revaluations’ “still inherit something of the logical-empiricist prejudice against explaining both “structure” and “genesis” of knowledge, both “process of arrival” and standards for being able to say “we’ve arrived”. It was for want of these things that analytic philosophy “gave way” to “Quinean ‘ontological relativity’, Kuhnian paradigm-relativism, Richard Rorty’s far-out linguistic-constructivist creed, and the ‘strong’ programme in sociology of knowledge.”

Norris says we need to recognize “that these problems have arisen very largely in consequence of the artificial divide between developments in post-Kantian ‘continental’ and Anglophone ‘analytic’ thought.”

McDowell’s wrestlings with Kant show that these issues are important and real, and are not laid to rest in the RD theorists employment of the quantified biconditional (last section), an approach that is either tautological, or recognition-dependent, and which rejects that “truth must itself be construed as recognition-transcendent or epistemically unconstrained even though, as hardly needs saying, our knowledge of it must indeed by taken as subject to the kinds of limiting condition spelled out by epistemic theories.”