Daimon. Revista Internacional de Filosofía, 2018

It will be argued that personal agency, far from lacking epistemic value, contributes to knowledge in a substantial way. To this end, it will be claimed that what Sosa calls an epistemic perspective is necessary to solve the binding problem in epistemology at the three junctures at which it can occur: as the Pyrrhonian question of whether one can rationally endorse one's epistemic rationality; as the problem of the epistemic status of guessing; and as the enquiry into the contribution of the agential perspective for evading coincidental luck. Our aim has been that of elucidating and expanding Sosa's virtue perspectivism.

According to robust virtue epistemology, knowledge is a cognitive achievement, where this means that the agent’s cognitive success is because of her cognitive ability. One type of objection to robust virtue epistemology that has been put forward in the contemporary literature is that this view has problems dealing with certain kinds of testimonial knowledge, and thus that it is in tension with standard views in the epistemology of testimony. We build on this critique to argue that insofar as agents epistemically depend on third-party members of their epistemic community as many social epistemologists contend, then there will be cases where two agents differ epistemically despite being virtue-theoretic duplicates. This means that robust virtue epistemology, at least insofar as it is understood along standard lines such that it endorses epistemic individualism, is also in tension with a central commitment of contemporary social epistemology.

Journal of ethics & social philosophy, 2024

e say things like "Enron's greed led to catastrophe for many investors" and "the Eighty-Second Airborne was very brave." This language suggests that we believe that groups are capable of virtues and vices. It is hard to know what to make of this idea, however. Humans have virtues and vices due in part to our mental capacities, but attributing mental capacities to groups can sound absurd, like invoking vaguely Hegelian group spirits who work over and above their human members.1 Pressure to avoid such results can lead to summative views of virtues and vices: on such views, a group's virtue or vice is just a result of "summing up" the same trait in its members. (So perhaps the Eighty-Second Airborne was brave just because most of its members were.) Unfortunately, this safely reductive view suffers from counterexamples, such as Lahroodi's example of a church committee that is closed-minded due to social pressures despite being made up of open-minded individuals.2 If we want to understand how groups can have important traits such as greed, bravery, and open-mindedness, we need a credible view that avoids the implausibility of Hegelian group minds and the counterexamples to summativism. Or so we think, anyway; and even if some readers think those Scylla and Charybdis safer than we do, we hope they will agree that there is room to attempt a middle course. Here, we set out a view that does just that. "Imitationism" is a kind of nonreductive theory that explains how a virtue can be genuinely collective without requiring collective minds.3 We articulate and defend

We examine some of the ramifications of extended cognition for virtue epistemology by exploring the idea within extended cognition that it is possible to decentralize cognitive agency such that cognitive agency includes socio-cultural practices. In doing so, we first explore the (seemingly unquestioned) assumption in both virtue epistemology and extended cognition that cognitive agency is an individualistic phenomenon. A distributed notion of cognitive agency alters the landscape of knowledge attribution in virtue epistemology. We conclude by offering a pragmatic notion of cognitive agency, where the situation sets the benchmarks for whether cognitive agency is individualistic or socio-culturally distributed.

Philosophical Studies, 2008

This paper identifies and criticizes certain fundamental commitments of virtue theories in epistemology. A basic question for virtues approaches is whether they represent a 'third force'--a different source of normativity to internalism and externalism. Virtues approaches so-conceived are opposed. It is argued that virtues theories offer us nothing that can unify the internalist and externalist sub-components of their preferred success-state. Claims that character can unify a virtues-based axiology are overturned. Problems with the pluralism of virtues theories are identified--problems with pluralism and the nature of the self; and problems with pluralism and the goals of epistemology. Moral objections to virtue theory are identified--specifically, both the idea that there can be a radical axiological priority to character and the anti-enlightenment tendencies in virtues approaches. Finally, some strengths to virtue theory are conceded, while the role of epistemic luck is identified as an important topic for future work.

2014

The paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will combine with those of others. In some cases they are morally responsible for this failure, in others they are not. Moreover, the argument for collective epistemic agency is incoherent because reasons-for-groups are ipso facto reasons-for-individual(s). Instead of talking about reasons-for-groups, we should therefore distinguish between self-regarding reasons and group-regarding reasons. Both kinds of reasons are reasons-for-individuals. These conceptual considerations in favour of moderate individualism are strengthened by an analysis of our moral practice of responding to collective shortfalls of rationality and by the unpalatable moral implications of collectivism about epistemic agency. There is no need to change the subject. Groups can be rational or irrational, but they do not reason.

I argue that “group beliefs” are often best understood as commitments to the truth of a proposition, rather than as psychological states. At the heart of the matter is the fact that groups can know the same propositions that individuals can, but that, under the most plausible account of the mental content of groups, they could not possibly believe the same propositions as individuals. This is not to undermine the possibility of group knowledge. Arguably, what is epistemically important about the belief condition on knowledge is not that beliefs are psychological states, but that believing a proposition is one way of endorsing it, and so becoming answerable for its truth. Groups may not be capable of believing the same propositions as individuals, but they are capable of endorsing them.

2011

„We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” This collection of essays addresses a philosophical problem raised by the first clause of these famous words. Does each signatory of the Declaration of Independence hold these truths individually, do they share some kind of a common attitude, or is there a single subject over and above the heads of its individual members that possesses a belief? “Collective Epistemology” is a name for the view that cognitive attitudes can be attributed to groups in a non-summative sense. The aim of this volume is to examine this claim, and to place it in the wider context of recent epistemological debates about the role of sociality in knowledge acquisition, in virtue and social epistemology, and in philosophy and sociology of science.

In a number of recent papers Duncan Pritchard argues that virtue epistemology's central ability conditionone knows that p if and only if one has attained cognitive success (true belief) because of the exercise of intellectual ability-is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge. This paper discusses and dismisses a number of responses to Pritchard's objections and develops a new way of defending virtue epistemology against them.

Logos & Episteme, 2023

The essay deals with the issue of how a non-summativist account of collective epistemic traits can be properly justified. We trace the roots of this issue in virtue epistemology and collective epistemology and then critically examine certain views advanced to justify non-summativism. We focus on those considered by Fricker, including Gilbert's concept of plural subjects, which she endorses. We find her analysis of these views problematic for either going beyond the parameters of the summativism-nonsummativism debate or contradicting common intuitions about epistemic trait ascriptions. As an alternative, we advance the idea that collective epistemic traits are system properties; or that epistemic traits act as system properties when attributed to collectives taken in their own right. Working as a system, the individual members of a collective perform their designated roles or tasks in coordination and cooperation with each other to achieve their joint intentions. Being attributes exclusive to systems, collective epistemic traits cannot, therefore, be attributed in the same respect to the individuals comprising these systems, thereby blocking any summative account of these traits. This model also easily sidesteps the problems besetting Fricker's preferred one.