Survey Article on Epistemic Value
I'm currently in the process of writing a survey of recent work on epistemic value, and now have a rather rough-and-ready draft to hand. I've posted this on the 'drafts' side-bar below, and you can also download it here. All comments gratefully received!
posted by Duncan Pritchard @ 2:26 PM
5 Comments:
At 11:30 AM,
Duncan Pritchard said…
Thanks for this Albert. You're right that resisting the barn case is a possibility, though it's not one that I find appealing (Hetherington takes this line in his PQ paper 'Actually Knowing' as I recall, though he's suspicious of all Gettier cases of this sort I gather, and doesn't have the same anti-luck intuitions about knowledge that I do). It's interesting that your students are unsure about this one though (mine tend not to be, though maybe that's because of my influence!).
More generally, I agree with you that the 'because of' relation in the virtue-theoretic account of knowledge is problematic--it's certainly something that has concerned me since it's hard to spell it out in an uncontentious fashion. Greco makes the best stab to my mind by appealing to explanatory salience--this might well deal with some of the cases that you mention, but I don't doubt that it will leave others undecided. Jennifer Lackey has some nice discussions of these issues in her forthcoming Synthese paper on knowledge and credit, which is, I beleive, posted on her webpage.
Incidentally, let me take this opportunity to thank all those who have send me feedback on the paper by e-mail: Erik Olsson, Andrew Moon, Mike DePaul, and Don Fallis (I hope I haven't left anyone out!). An updated version will be posted soon, but in the meantime any thoughts readers have would be gratefully received, whether by e-mail or through the blog.
At 1:41 PM,
Anonymous said…
Hi Duncan and Albert,
I've been worrying about the 'because of' notion as well, and it seems to me that there is an additional problem. Greco explicitely models his virtue epistemology along the lines of epistemological contextualism (indeed, he calls his theory 'virtue contextualism'). But a well-known challenge for all contextualist accounts of 'knows' is that the contextualist should propose some sort of linguistic precedent for 'knows'; the contextuality of 'knows' shouldn't be a unique contextuality that is only associated with 'knows'. It seems pretty hard, however, to think of a linguistic precedent for a virtue contextualist treatment of 'knows'. That is, I'm not sure if there are any other verbs that are context dependent along the lines of 'explanatory salience'.
At 1:29 PM,
Anonymous said…
Hi Albert,
It seems to me that the task Greco faces is the same as the task DeRose and Cohen face. I do not think, however, that the task of DeRose and Cohen is limited to finding gradable adjectives / indexicals that can serve as a model for 'knows'. Presumably, DeRose and Cohen could, in principle, appeal to a wider range of context-dependent phenomena. There do seem to be at least two constraints for what can serve as the strongest type of precedent for 'knows', or so it seems to me.
1-The model should be a verb, just like 'knows' is.
2-The model should be factive, just like 'knows' is.
And 1 and 2 thus would also constrain what Greco can appeal to.
As to your own (intriguing!) proposal, linking 'knows' to demonstratives would be out from the start, at least if we accept 1 and 2.
What do you think?
At 2:33 PM,
Duncan Pritchard said…
Hi Albert and Martijn,
Thanks again for your input to this discussion. As a postscript to this issue of how best to understand the 'because of' relation on virtue-theoretic accounts, I briefly discuss this issue in my paper, 'Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Luck, Revisted'. The latest version of this can be found on the 'drafts' side-bar, and can also be downloaded here.
At 2:36 PM,
Duncan Pritchard said…
That link didn't work, so let's try it again:
link.
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