This essay provides an account of “high-level” intellectual virtues that serve as thick evaluations of cognition. It is essential to recognize that agential capacities come in degrees—for any capacity a person can function across greater or smaller ranges of environments with different rates of success. Virtue terms identify properties of agents in virtue of which they resist a broad range of situational influences relatively reliably. We live in a variable world, thus it is valuable for us to be able to resist or counteract situational influences, allowing us to cognize effectively in a wider range of environments. Lepock argues that high-level virtues are not global, but are relatively broad intellectual traits, problem-solving skills and abilities that operate over a distinctively wider range of situations than is typically recognized. This view carries a degree of revisionism: the use of heuristics and other fast and frugal cognitive abilities will be important elements of virtues, and the degree of cross-situational stability will be worked out in non-traditional ways.
Intellectual virtue and ability are potentially wide-ranging explanatory constructs. A great deal of work has been done on the parallels between epistemic abilities and moral virtues, and epistemic evaluation and evaluations of success through ability in ordinary contexts. Less has been accomplished on the question of what is characteristic of intellectual virtues or abilities, and more specifically, what distinguishes intellectual virtues from other reliable cognitive processes. In this paper, I propose that what differentiates a virtue or ability from a merely reliable process is whether the subject has effective metacognitive control over it. Metacognition, as I will use the term, is the monitoring and control of object-level cognitive processes; not just thinking about thinking, but the regulation and management of thinking. The need for successful metacognitive control to satisfy our epistemic goals is nearly ubiquitous in ordinary human cognition. Moreover, the adaptability and accuracy that effective regulation provides are hallmarks of ability and of virtuous inquiry, making the identification of virtue with capacity for regulation even more plausible.
The intellectual virtues include two seemingly quite different types of traits: reliable faculties on the one hand and inquiry‐regulating traits of intellectual character like conscientiousness and openmindedness on the other. Extant virtue theories do not appear to have provided a single account that adequately covers both types of virtue. In this paper, I examine the different ways in which a trait or disposition can contribute to our cognitive goal of acquiring significant true beliefs. I propose that the two types of virtues can be understood as contributing in different ways to our cognitive goal, and develop a general framework for understanding their value.
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Reliabilist theories of knowledge face the “generality problem”; any token of a belief-forming processes instantiates types of different levels of generality, which can vary in reliability. I argue that we exploit this situation in epistemic evaluation; we appraise beliefs in different ways by adverting to reliability at different levels of generality. We can detect at least two distinct uses of reliability, which underlie different sorts of appraisals of beliefs and believers.
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Ernest Sosa’s virtue perspectivism goes beyond standard reliabilism by requiring that agents with justified beliefs not only derive their beliefs from virtuous cognitive faculties but have an epistemic perspective that explains the origin of the beliefs and makes their belief-set coherent. I argue that Sosa’s account of the epistemic perspective does not ensure that the perspective will confer justification. An adequate epistemic perspective must establish a non-accidental connection between an agent’s use of a faculty in certain circumstances and its reliability in those circumstances. An agent who is capable of judging the reliability of her faculties in different situations will have a perspective that meets this requirement. Revising virtue perspectivism in this way also permits a stronger response to doxastic ascent arguments against the theory.
We develop a tableau procedure for finding theorems and consequence relations of RPL△ (i.e., Lא extended with constants and a determinacy operator). RPL△ includes a large number of proposed truthfunctions for fuzzy logic. Our procedure simplifies tableaux for infinitevalued systems by incorporating an insight of Frege’s. We take formulas of the language to be names for their truth-values, which permits them to be manipulated in the tableaux as if they were algebraic variables. Hence, we call our system FAT, for Fregean Algebraic Tableaux. We have additionally developed an automated procedure for proving theorems using FAT, which we will briefly describe.
Epistemic Justification: Internalism vs. Externalism, Foundations vs. VirtuesLaurence Bonjour and Ernest Sosa Great Debates in Philosophy Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003, 240 pp., $26.95 paper - Volume 44 Issue 4
