• Workshop overview
• Presentations

Workshop overview

This is an informal workshop on Virtue Epistemology that has been timed to co-incide with the visit of Professor Ernest Sosa (Rutgers) to give the 2009 Nature of Knowledge lecture. It will be held on Wednesday 22nd April in room G.06 of the Dugald Stewart Building (click here to see a campus map). Everyone is welcome and there is no registration fee. Any questions about this event should be directed to Duncan Pritchard (duncan.pritchard@ed.ac.uk). This event is hosted by the Epistemology research group at Edinburgh.

Provisional programme

• 10.00-11.15am Pavel Davydov (Rutgers), 'Approaches to the Problem of Easy Knowledge'

ABSTRACT: The so-called problem of easy knowledge has received a lot of attention in recent literature. What is typically called the KR Principle – a potential knowledge source K can yield knowledge for S, only if S knows that K is reliable – appears to trap us in a dilemma. If we accept it, vicious circularity and vicious regress threaten us. If we reject it, it becomes difficult to rule out prima facie inadmissible "easy knowledge" of one's own reliability, which KR appears to make available via bootstrapping. Several attempts to deal with the problem of easy knowledge, as well as the statement of the problem itself, suffer from insufficient clarity as to the nature and scope of the KR Principle. Until this problem is addressed we cannot deal with the problem of easy knowledge or, and this could be of even greater philosophical importance, understand how this problem relates to some other problems its neighborhood (most importantly, the paradox of analysis and various problems associated with justification of rules of inference). I explain and illustrate these claims via examination of the relevant arguments of Stewart Cohen, Peter Markie, Ernest Sosa, and Crispin Wright.

• 11.15-11.30am Tea/coffee and biscuits
• 11.30--1.00pm Mike Ridge (Edinburgh), ‘Getting Lost on the Road to Larissa’

ABSTRACT. In this paper I argue that the debate over the apparently distinctive epistemic value of knowledge and understanding, understood as posing a challenge for analyses of knowledge and understanding, rests on a conflation of different senses of ‘valuable’ and its cognates. In particular, Geach’s distinction between attributive and predicative uses is germane here. I also argue that there has been some confusion over the proper object of evaluation in these debates. Once these equivocations are avoided, the idea that knowledge or understanding are distinctively epistemically valuable in a sense that could provide a substantial constraint on analyses of knowledge and understanding looks much less plausible. The issue of whether knowledge or the understanding might nonetheless be distinctively valuable in a more robust sense is nonetheless an interesting one, and in the last part of my paper I explore this issue, and argue that the most plausible version of the idea will be a restricted version which does not include knowledge or understanding of so-called “pointless truths.”

• 1.00-1.30pm Lunch

• 1.30-2.45pm Julien Dutant (Geneva), 'Knowledge, Safety and Aptness'

ABSTRACT. Ernest Sosa has defended two ways of implementing the idea that knowledge requires non-accidental true belief: safety and aptness. In A Virtue Epistemology (2007), Ernest Sosa has argued that the safety requirement is too strong, and rejected it in favour of aptness alone. In the present talk, we examine how far the two notions can be reconciled. More precisely, we ask how far the virtue-based notion of aptness (which relies on a primitive “because” relation) can be accounted for in terms of safety (which is a modal notion, thus better understood but more subject to counterexamples). We distinguish two (types of) safety conditions on knowledge, safe-belief ones and safe-basis ones. We argue that: (1) the first is the one Sosa rejects, but is not as well motivated as the second, (2) the second is necessary for aptness, (3) it is open whether the safe-basis is sufficient for aptness. This goes a long way towards accounting for the “because” aspect of aptness in modal terms. However, we raise doubts for the idea that the “competence” or “virtue” aspect of aptness can be accounted for in modal terms like reliability. Along the way, we examine a range of cases which suggest that the “competences” to which an aptness account of knowledge appeals to should be individuated in a fairly fine-grained way: roughly, one per concept.

• 2.45-3.00pm Tea/coffee and biscuits
• 3.00-4.30pm Symposium on Ernest Sosa's new book, Reflective Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Symposiasts: Evan Butts (Edinburgh), Adam Carter (Edinburgh), Joseph Kuntz (Edinburgh) & Conor McHugh (Edinburgh).

• 5pm Ernest Sosa (Rutgers), 2009 Nature of Knowledge lecture, 'Knowledge and Wisdom' (in seminar room 1 of the Chrystal Macmillan Building).

ABSTRACT. What is knowledge and how is it related to wisdom? The lecture will go into the nature of knowledge, and into the nature of wisdom, and into how the two are related. These questions will all be considered within a framework of performance normativity to be explained at the outset. This framework will enable us to distinguish varieties of knowledge and of wisdom. In particular, we shall distinguish the local wisdom distinctive of restricted domains from more nearly global varieties. Along the way we shall distinguish the theory of knowledge of our tradition from an intellectual ethics that is more properly allied with wisdom than with knowledge. Epistemology emerges as a richer discipline than the theory of knowledge focused on the nature, conditions, and extent of human knowledge, and on the correlated problems of philosophical scepticism.