The Ockham Society

Abstract: I argue that Virtue Epistemology conflates different kinds of intellectual excellence and consequently obscures their different relationships to knowledge. I begin by examining the ambiguity in the concept of intellectual virtue in the two leading Virtue Epistemology theories: Virtue Reliabilism and Virtue Responsibilism. By examining their respective treatments of curiosity as an intellectual virtue, I highlight how both theories’ failure to disambiguate moral intellectual virtues from epistemic intellectual virtues leads to tremendous conceptual confusion. I then conclude, arguing that bifurcating the intellectual virtues into epistemic and moral virtues allows us to better understand the role of intellectual character in evidence selection, justification, and knowledge acquisition writ large.

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Ockham Society Convenors: Max Festenstein, Leo Sonntag, Marta Szatkowska, and Joseph Karaganis | Ockham Society Webpage