Are knowledgeable voters better voters?

It is widely believed that democracies require knowledgeable citizens to function well. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals tend to be the most partisan and the strength of partisan identity tends to corrupt political thinking. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, an informed citizenry is allegedly necessary for a democracy to flourish. On the other hand, the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways. What to do? This paper examines this tension and draws out several lessons. First, it is not obvious that more knowledgeable voters will make better political decisions. Second, attempts to remedy voter ignorance are problematic because partisans tend to become more polarized when they acquire more information. Third, solutions to citizen incompetence must focus on the intellectual virtue of objectivity. Fourth, some forms of epistocracy are troubling, in part, because they would increase the political power of the most dogmatic and biased individuals. Fifth, a highly restrictive form of epistocracy may escape the problem of political dogmatism, but epistocrats may face a steeper tradeoff between inclusivity and epistemic virtue than they would like.

Intellectual Virtue and the Epistemological Nature of Medical Evidence

This article examines the problem of defining the epistemological nature of evidence in modern medicine through its two interrelated aspects — bias in the collection of data in randomized controlled trials and personal bias of the physician — which form part of the general bias problem in various professional fields. This problem is widely discussed today in the medical community, in which there is no unanimity in understanding what grounds for making the correct clinical decision are considered decisive — randomized controlled trials or the doctor's own clinical experience. In this article, it is interpreted from the point of view of the modern epistemology of virtues, which makes it possible to raise the question of the doctor's responsibility not from the position of professional deontological morality, but from the point of view of intellectual virtue. The virtuous nature of the medical profession lies in the ability of the subject to make responsible clinical decisions in the course of the cognitive process and to find the optimal balance between standardized protocols for diagnosis, prevention and treatment and their own clinical experience, which makes an individualized approach to each individual medical history possible. A standardized approach requires the “grafting” of the hermeneutic experience expressed in a general theory of understanding and interpretation. Against the background of a decrease in the level of social trust in the medical community, the substantiation of individualizing standardization as a methodologically productive way of integrating various cognitive practices is intended to help overcome the limiting abstraction of the epistemological subject in the classical epistemology of medicine and to recognize the productive-heuristic role of the doctor as a subject of cognition.

The Curious Case of the Excellent Gossiper

My main aim in this paper is to examine whether gossip should be categorized as an epistemically valuable character trait. Gossip satisfies the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for an acquired character trait to be classified as an intellectual virtue under the responsibilist understanding of the concept of virtue. The excellent gossiper is (i) motivated to acquire epistemic goods through gossiping, (ii) reliably successful in acquiring epistemic goods through gossiping, (iii) competent at the activity of gossiping and (iv) good at judging when, with whom and what to gossip. Nonetheless, I show that the excellent gossiper inflicts (knower-initiated) epistemic wrong on others. The excellent gossiper comes to intentionally acquire another person’s private information (e.g., their sexual preferences) without their consent. This leaves virtue responsibilists with three options: (a) resist my argument that gossip qualifies as a responsibilist virtue and/or that excellent gossiping inflicts epistemic wrong, (b) bite the bullet and argue that the intellectually virtuous agent sometimes inflicts epistemic wrong on other agents intentionally, (c) develop a no-wrong principle that disqualifies gossip from being categorized as an intellectual virtue.

Gotta know why! Preliminary evidence supporting a theory of virtue learning as applied to intellectual curiosity

Virtue education is gaining popularity in institutions of higher education. Given this growing interest, several theoretical accounts explaining the process of virtue learning have emerged. However, there is scant empirical evidence supporting their applicability for intellectual virtue. In this study, we apply a theory of virtue learning to the development of intellectual curiosity among undergraduates. We find that learning why virtue is relevant and important to one’s education is consistently and moderately correlated with increases in intellectual curiosity across time points and analytic approaches. A weaker yet still positive association is found with increases in knowledge of intellectual curiosity. The implications of these results connect with pedagogical recommendations stressed across intellectual and moral virtue education.

Practical and Theoretical Wisdom in Management Scholarship: Re-assesing the Use and Appropriations of Aristotle’s Philosophy

Within contemporary discussions on organizational wisdom, management scholars frequently turn to Aristotle’s work to conceptualize wisdom as phronesis, or practical wisdom. Contrary to the prevailing view, this paper argues that Aristotle did not propose an exclusively practical or particularistic conception of wisdom but, instead acknowledged that wisdom broadly conceived consists of two types of intellectual virtue: theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom. Aristotle’s ultimate position regarding the relations between sophia and phronesis has remained, however, ambiguous, giving rise to different interpretations, and, more substantively, to the major appropriations of Aquinas, Heidegger and Gadamer. An analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of exemplary contributions to management wisdom suggests that research has predominantly applied Heideggerian and Gadamerian understandings of Aristotelian wisdom, while an Aquinian interpretation is largely absent in contemporary elaborations. Interpreting the Aristotelian notion of wisdom as dedicated purely to practical phronesis narrows the discussion on the nature of (organizational) wisdom within an Aristotelian framework in ways that do not give full credit to the breadth and complexity of Aristotle’s thought.

Why Hope Cannot Be an Intellectual Virtue: Rationality of Hope Considered from an Analytic Perspective

There are two aims of the paper. The first is to critically analyse the claim that hope can be regarded as an intellectual virtue, as proposed by Nancy E. Snow (2013) in her recent account of hope set within the project of regulative epistemology. The second aim is to explore the problem of rationality of hope. Section one of the paper explains two different interpretations of the key notion of hope and discusses certain features to be found in hope-that and hope-in. Section two addresses the question of whether hope could be interpreted as an intellectual virtue. To develop an argument against that view, a brief account of the notion of epistemic virtue is provided. Section three analyses the problem of rationality of hope and the parallels between rational belief and rational hope; the section focuses on what exactly makes a particular hope-that a rational and justified hope. Belief that p is possible/probable is part of the meaning of hope that p; therefore, it is assumed that rationality of hope cannot be considered in isolation from rationality of belief. It is argued that the “standard account” of the reasonableness of hope, which is found in the analytic literature, does not meet the standards of epistemic responsibility and needs rectifying.

INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY – A MORAL CONSTRUCT, AN INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE

: The present literature review brings together conceptualizations and study results obtained from extensive work that has been done on the virtue of Intellectual Humility (IH) for the pasts 9 years. While philosophers don’t settle yet to a single point of view on intellectual humility, psychologists take a pragmatic stance on the construct and evaluate possible implications IH can have on personal, social, and professional levels. The term is being extended to organizations, teams and organizational culture and studied in the intricate relationships established in the corporate culture. Studies in leadership also provide an insight of how organizations can benefit from the vision and culture a humble leader promotes.