Virtue epistemology

Virtue epistemology is a contemporary philosophical approach to epistemology that stresses the importance of intellectual (epistemic) virtues. A distinguishing factor of virtue theories is that they use for the evaluation of knowledge the properties of the persons who hold beliefs in addition to or instead of the properties of propositions and beliefs. Some advocates of virtue epistemology claim to more closely follow what they see as important about virtue ethics, while others see only a looser analogy between virtue in ethics and virtue in epistemology.

Intellectual virtue has been a subject of philosophy since the work of Aristotle, but virtue epistemology is a development in the contemporary analytic tradition. It is characterized by efforts to solve problems of special concern to modern epistemology, such as justification and reliabilism, by directing attention on the knower as agent in a manner similar to the way virtue ethics focuses on moral agents rather than moral acts.

The development of virtue epistemology was partly inspired by a recent renewal of interest in virtue concepts among moral philosophers, and partly as a response to the intractability of competing analyses of knowledge in response to Edmund Gettier. Ernest Sosa introduced the notion of an intellectual virtue into contemporary epistemological discussion in a 1980 paper called "The Raft and the Pyramid". Sosa argued that an appeal to intellectual virtue could resolve the conflict between foundationalists and coherentists over the structure of epistemic justification. Sosa sought to bridge the gap and create a unity between these two different epistemological theories.

Foundationalism holds that beliefs are founded or based on other beliefs in a hierarchy, similar to the bricks in the structure of a pyramid. Coherentism, on the other hand, uses the metaphor of a raft in which all beliefs are not tied down by foundations but instead are interconnected due to the logical relationships between each belief. Sosa found a flaw in each of these schools of epistemology.

Coherentism only allows for justification based on logical relations between all the beliefs within a system of beliefs. However, because perceptual beliefs may not have many logical ties with other beliefs in the system, the coherentist account of knowledge can be said to be inadequate to accommodate the importance normally attributed to perceptual information. On the other hand, Sosa also found problems in the foundationalist approach to epistemology. Foundationalism arguably encounters a problem when attempting to describe how foundational beliefs relate to the sensory experiences that support them.

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