A Virtue Reliabilist Error-Theory of Defeat

Knowledge defeat occurs when a subject knows that p, gains a defeater for her belief, and thereby loses her knowledge without necessarily losing her belief. It’s far from obvious that externalists can accommodate putative cases of knowledge defeat since a belief that satisfies the externalist conditions for knowledge can satisfy those conditions even if the subject later gains a defeater for her belief. I’ll argue that virtue reliabilists can accommodate defeat intuitions via a new kind of error theory. I argue that in cases where the subject holds dogmatically onto her belief in the face of an apparent defeater, her belief never qualified as knowledge, since the belief was not gained via an exercise of her epistemic virtues. In cases where the subject suspends her judgment upon receiving the putative defeater her original belief might have qualified as knowledge, but crucially, in such cases knowledge is lost due to loss of belief, rather than due to the epistemic force of the defeater. Therefore, knowledge defeat isn’t a genuine phenomenon even though there are no cases where a subject knows what she originally believed after receiving the putative defeater.

On the pragmatic and epistemic virtues of inference to the best explanation

In a series of papers over the past twenty years, and in a new book, Igor Douven (sometimes in collaboration with Sylvia Wenmackers) has argued that Bayesians are too quick to reject versions of inference to the best explanation that cannot be accommodated within their framework. In this paper, I survey their worries and attempt to answer them using a series of pragmatic and purely epistemic arguments that I take to show that Bayes’ Rule really is the only rational way to respond to your evidence.

Virtues of History: Exercises, Seminars, and the Emergence of the German Historical Discipline, 1830–1900

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, historians across the world often started the history of the modern historical discipline with Leopold Ranke’s teaching at the University of Berlin during the 1830s. Ranke, they argued, here introduced a new style of training exercises, which afterwards defined the discipline. Some connected this history to a story of increasing standardization and institutionalization of education and research, culminating with the methodological textbooks, uniform training exercises, and large research institutes of the period. Many historians also associated Ranke’s exercises with certain epistemic virtues, such as carefulness, accurateness, and love of truth. These epistemic virtues, some argued, were products of the close relationship between teachers and students. The virtues, this chapter argues, also helped nineteenth-century historians assess the scribes, chroniclers, and historians of the past. The chapter illustrates this emphasis upon epistemic virtues through the example of Georg Waitz, who participated in Ranke’s famous exercises during the 1830s and whom nineteenth-century historians often described as his most prominent and loyal student. It especially focuses upon how Waitz conveyed the virtues of the Ranke school to his doctoral students in Göttingen and how this training influenced the students’ practices of interpretation and source criticism. Finally, the chapter discusses the tension between the educational ideas of the Ranke school and the standardization and institutionalization of education and research during the second half of the nineteenth century. The tension, it argues, illustrates that the emergence of the modern historical discipline cannot be explained solely with reference to the process of institutionalization.

The Virtue of Epistemic Trustworthiness and Re-Posting on Social Media

Re-posting fake news on social media exposes others to epistemic risks that include not only false belief but also misguided trust in the source of the fake news. The risk of misguided trust comes from the fact that re-posting is a kind of credentialing; as a new kind of speech-act, re-posting does not yet have established norms and so runs an additional risk of “bent credentialing.” This chapter proposes that other-regarding epistemic virtues can help us mitigate the epistemic risks that come with re-posting—specifically the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness. It further considers how an epistemically trustworthy person should regulate her re-posting behavior in light of the psychological evidence that retracting false beliefs is far more difficult than might be supposed. Behaving in an epistemically trustworthy way requires being responsive to the real risks that our actions expose others to, as well as recognizing the real ways that others depend on us.

Professional competence and business ethics

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine if the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to persecute Madoff is, in fact, an ethical failure. The authors turn to the extension of Aristotelian theory of moral values, virtue epistemology, to identify specific failures. The authors generalize this study’s conclusions to an overall responsibility of regulatory agencies to exercise epistemic virtues in their decision-making process. The authors explore how behavioral biases confound the execution of epistemic duty, and how awareness of behavioral biases can alleviate epistemic failures. The authors conclude this study with recommendations to prevent future frauds of Madoff proportions. Design/methodology/approach The authors rely on recent advances in virtue epistemology and behavioral finance. The authors combine these two theoretical approaches to better understand the duty of competence inherent in being a finance professional, and even more so in being a regulator entrusted with overseeing financial industry, and psychological biases that may prevent finance professionals and regulators from performing this duty. Findings The paper concludes that the SEC employees failed to exercise epistemic virtues in their handling of the complaints implicating Madoff’s firm of fraud. This failure reveals a consistent pattern of behavioral biases in decision-making. The authors posit that knowledge of ethical theory, specifically virtue epistemology, as well as awareness of behavioral biases, which inhibit epistemically virtuous cognitive process, can improve the functioning of both finance industry and its overseers. The authors suggest that future finance professionals and regulators need to acquire this knowledge while pursuing their undergraduate education: it is the duty of business schools to facilitate this progress. Originality/value This paper combines the theory of virtue epistemology with the current knowledge of behavioral biases, which distort rational decision-making, to explain the failures of regulators to analyze fraud reports. The authors extend this finding to recommend the inclusion of the theory of virtue epistemology in business schools’ ethics curriculum.

The Internet and Epistemic Agency

In this chapter, Hanna Gunn and Michael Patrick Lynch examine the connection between epistemic agency and the internet. They identify two conditions that are true of responsible epistemic agency: first, responsible epistemic agents aim to develop epistemic virtues, merit, and capacities that help them to responsibly change their epistemic environment, as well as the capacities that enable them to recognize and respect these epistemic traits in others. Second, responsible epistemic agents treat other epistemic agents with a form of respect that demonstrates a willingness to learn from them. Gunn and Lynch then show that the ways in which the internet makes information more widely available can also undermine our ability to be responsible epistemic agents. For instance, the personalization of online spaces can unwittingly lead users into echo chambers and filter-bubbles and away from a diverse range of perspectives, and fake news and information pollution can make for a hostile online epistemic environment.

The Epistemic Dangers of Context Collapse Online

In this chapter, Karen Frost-Arnold provides a close analysis of the epistemological challenges posed by context collapse in online environments and argues that virtue epistemology provides a helpful normative framework for addressing some of these problems. “Context collapse” is the blurring or merging of multiple contexts or audiences into one. Frost-Arnold identifies at least three epistemic challenges posed by context collapse. First, context collapse facilitates online harassment, which causes epistemic harm by decreasing the diversity of epistemic communities. Second, context collapse threatens the integrity of marginalized epistemic communities in which some types of true beliefs flourish. Third, context collapse promotes misunderstanding, as understanding relies on background knowledge which, in turn, is often context sensitive. Frost-Arnold then argues that we can cultivate and promote the epistemic virtues of trustworthiness and discretion in order to address some of these problems.