Abstract
Recently a number of philosophers have argued for a kind of encroachment of the practical into the epistemic. Fantl and McGrath, for example, argue that if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p (Fantl and McGrath, Phil Phenomenol Res LXXV(3):558–589 , 2007). In this paper I make a preliminary case for what we might call encroachment in, not knowledge or justification, but epistemic excellence, recent accounts of which include those of Roberts and Wood (Intellectual virtues: an essay in regulative epistemology, 2007), Bishop and Trout (Epistemology and the psychology of human judgment, 2005), and Baehr (The inquiring mind, 2011). I believe that practical considerations bear on whether a disposition is an epistemic excellence, and I propose a practical condition on epistemic excellence that is roughly analogous to the practical condition on knowledge proposed by Fantl and McGrath. Since the view is also an epistemic analogue to a kind of moral rationalism in ethics, we might also call it a variety of ‘epistemic rationalism’.
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Notes
From Fantl and McGrath (2007, p. 559). Alternative statements include the following: “If you know that p, then if the question of whether p is relevant to the question of what to do, then it is proper for you to act on p” (Fantl and McGrath 2009, p. 59); “If you know that p, then p is warranted enough to justify you in \(\upvarphi \)-ing, for any \(\upvarphi \)” (Fantl and McGrath 2009, p. 66). They offer an analogous practical condition on justification.
As Fantl and McGrath (2007, p. 559) say.
One might deny that the failures of the agents in the second cases are failures of epistemic excellence, claiming instead that they are only failures of all-things-considered excellence, or excellence vis-à-vis practical reason. I do not wish to engage in the debate over how to use the word “epistemic” (though I share the view that it is useful to acknowledge narrower and broader senses; see e.g. Alston 2005, pp. 2–5). The argument I will make in this paper is that there is strong reason for accounts such as these—accounts frequently (and, I think, fairly) described as epistemic—to be sensitive to certain practical considerations. I do not think anything hangs on whether the accounts are called epistemic, or whether we find some new term for them (e.g. ‘intellectual-ethical’—see Sosa 2007, p. 89). I follow the authors I discuss in describing their accounts of excellence as ‘epistemic’.
What I am calling ‘accounts of epistemic excellence’ have been called “autonomous” virtue epistemic approaches, whose focus is “the intellectual virtues and their role in the cognitive life considered in their own right” (Baehr 2008, p. 480). This is a fine way to distinguish this kind of virtue epistemology from more conservative approaches, which use virtue concepts in the service of solving more traditional epistemological problems. But this term is too narrow for my purposes, since (as we shall see below) accounts of epistemic excellence needn’t be virtue accounts.
The responsibilist/reliabilist distinction was introduced by Lorraine Code (1984, 1987) to distinguish accounts of epistemic virtues modeled on accounts of the ethical (character) traits from those that take epistemic virtues to be faculties. It is now widely accepted that responsibilist and reliabilist accounts needn’t be understood as offering competing accounts, but may be merely giving accounts of different kinds of epistemic excellence. Here I adapt the distinction to distinguish different kinds of epistemic excellence of which we might give accounts: on the one hand, the kind of epistemic excellence that is under our control (including, but not limited to, character-virtue accounts), and, on the other hand, their faculty counterparts.
I add ‘required’ because my claim is about traits that are required by epistemic excellence. I don’t make the claim about traits that are (what we might call) epistemically supererogatory. I won’t always add this qualification.
As noted above (footnote 4), I follow these authors in calling their accounts “epistemic”. For the reader who is disinclined to call these authors’ (and my) views “epistemic”, I don’t think anything will be lost by instead calling the views, and the ideals they describe, “broadly epistemic” or “intellectual-ethical”.
Compare Hursthouse’s (1999) suggestion that virtue is one’s ‘best bet’ for eudaimonia.
This is one of Baehr’s initial characterizations of open-mindedness, not his own account.
Baehr’s own final account of (intellectually virtuous) open-mindedness does not have a built-in sensitivity to practical conditions, but he does note that pragmatic stakes can affect whether it’s intellectually worthwhile or vicious to give an open-minded hearing to the case against a particular belief (2011, p. 160, footnote 26)
I will only argue the point for epistemic excellence here, but I will note that this is also how, it seems to me, Fantl &McGrath, and other pragmatic encroachment theorists, intend their views as well—and how they are most plausible. An alternative interpretation of these authors is suggested by Pace (2011).
On the other hand, if our moral duty were to come apart from what we have all-things-considered reasons to do, as in cases like those constructed by Susan Wolf (1992, p. 253), I’d say again that what makes a trait an epistemic excellence is that it is compatible with what we have reasons to do all-things-considered. If what morality requires comes apart from our all things considered reasons, I think it’s the latter what we could as an epistemic excellence. Consider Pace (2011), who defends a so-called ‘moral encroachment’ view of justification, such that moral considerations, as opposed to pragmatic or self-interested considerations, have a role to play in whether a belief is justified. I think that, insofar as Pace’s own view is plausible, it’s because (as he notes) he believes that MR is true and thus, on his view (as on mine) it is what we have all-things-considered reason to do that plays a role (for him, on whether we’re justified; for me, on whether a trait is an epistemic excellence). I think the most plausible encroachment thesis, is one according to which epistemic excellence (or knowledge and justification) is sensitive to all reasons, not those of just some narrow type. To the extent that Pace’s proposal is plausible to the reader, I suggest that this is because MR is plausible to the reader (because moral considerations are thought to be always or mostly overriding).
They write: “Whereas the founders of recent movement have used the concept of a virtue to answer the routine late twentieth-century questions about justification and warrant, we have made the virtue concepts themselves the focus of our study, digging down into their interior to see what we could find. Focusing on the nature of the traits that make a person an excellent epistemic agent, we have adopted a different teleology of epistemological reflection. We aim not to produce a theory of justification, warrant, knowledge, or rationality; nor are we trying to answer the skeptic. Instead, we have aimed to use the virtues as the focus of reflections to increase our practical understanding of the inner workings of the intellectual life. Like earlier epistemologists, we have analyzed concepts; but, unlike most of the recent ones, our purpose in this has been less to produce an epistemological theory than to generate understanding of the epistemic agent and thereby to guide practice” (Roberts and Wood 2007, p. 323).
What Roberts and Wood call ‘love of knowledge’ (their central intellectual virtue), is illustrative: “Love of knowledge is a disposition to take an interest in information, understanding, and direct epistemic contact with reality, to enjoy intellectual activities as such, to be excited by the prospect of learning, and so to engage in actions that aim at the acquisition, maintenance, transmission, and application of knowledge” (Roberts and Wood 2007, p. 73).
The epistemically excellent person will also care about the worthy knowledge in the right way. For example, the ideal of epistemic excellence may consider knowledge of how to make a soufflé to be merely instrumentally valuable, but she would fall short of epistemic excellence if she considered Nobel-prize-winning research as a mere means to the end of status or recognition.
Consider again the cases I described at the beginning of the paper. I believe these cases are less controversial than some of the ones offered by Roberts and Wood. The reader who denies that the particular considerations that Roberts and Wood mention should bear on our account of epistemic excellence doesn’t necessarily deny that this kind of consideration should bear on our account of epistemic excellence; her disagreement about the particular example might stem from the fact that she has a different conception of how people ought to live.
More specifically, “A subject S is intellectually good or better qua person to the extent that S is positively oriented toward or “loves” what is intellectually good and is negatively oriented toward or “hates” what is intellectually bad” (Baehr 2011, p. 101).
Baehr summarizes his account of an intellectual virtue as follows: “an intellectual virtue is a character trait that contributes to its possessor’s personal intellectual worth on account of its involving a positive psychological orientation toward epistemic goods” (Baehr 2011, p. 102).
See discussion Baehr (2011, pp. 79–83).
Baehr asks: “...when (or under what conditions or toward which views) is it appropriate to exhibit or exercise open-mindedness” or intellectual courage? (Baehr 2011, p. 157) More specifically: “under what circumstances it is intellectually...virtuous” (Baehr 2011, p. 158) or virtuous “from an epistemic standpoint” (Baehr 2011, p. 162) to exercise open-mindedness or intellectual courage.
This is to set aside the fact that it is probably practically impossible for S to come to have a genuine concern for Dr Evil for this reason. The point here is not that it may be practically impossible for S to have a genuine concern for Dr Evil because he will otherwise destroy the world; it is rather that, on any plausible view of practical reason, the fact that Dr Evil will otherwise destroy the world isn’t a proper reason for S’s coming to have a genuine concern for Dr Evil.
For support for the idea that practical reason cannot be such that each individual is ‘held hostage’ by the immoral projects of others, see Williams (1985, pp. 108–117).
If, by contrast, the reader finds it plausible to say that it really is in accordance with practical reason to abandon all one’s commitments in the face of threats of terrorism, then I don’t see why that same reader would deny that it is also true of proper intellectual honesty, charity, etc., that one is not expected to develop them in the face of threats of terrorism. If one admits that, when stakes are high enough, it’s not practically rational to improve oneself (morally, intellectually, etc.), why shouldn’t one also accept that, when stakes are high enough, it’s not epistemically excellent—not truly epistemically excellent—to develop the same traits that would be part of one’s epistemic excellence under other circumstances (or morally excellent to develop the same traits that would be part of one’s moral excellence under other circumstances, e.g. perfect truthfulness in an Orwellian dystopia versus in the actual world)?
This is a central motivation behind Roberts and Wood’s, and Bishop and Trout’s, work. According to Bishop and Trout, the aim of epistemology is “to provide useful, general advice about reasoning” (Bishop and Trout 2005, p. 94). Roberts and Wood, likewise, say they offer their account of the intellectual virtues in the spirit of “a useful map of intellectual life” (Roberts and Wood 2007, p. 30), whose aim is to guide.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to all those who commented on versions of this paper, and especially to Robert Audi, Jason Baehr, Kelly Becker, Allan Hazlett, Stan van Hooft, Terry Horgan, Daniel Immerman, Richard Kraut, David Merry, Wayne Riggs, Robert Roberts, Christine Swanton, J.D. Trout, Ted Warfield, and two anonymous referees.
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Baril, A. Pragmatic encroachment in accounts of epistemic excellence. Synthese 190, 3929–3952 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0234-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0234-4