Epistemology has spawned many
schools of thought during the past century with provocative sounding names like
epistemic naturalism, compatibilists, coherent theorists, foundationalists and
so on. The traditional epistemic quest has been to establish criteria for when
we may permit ourselves to say we know something rather than merely believe or
suspect it. This task sounds rather straightforward initially but it quickly
deteriorates into a blur of relationships between psychology, ontology, logic
and even metaphysics. Does knowing some “x” require that some x in fact exist
or be true? If it does then that prompts both ontological argument and
metaphysical speculation. Does knowing something require a special creature
capable of grasping a fact and being able to distinguish it from mere beliefs?
If it does then psychology must be called upon to settle issues of what sort of
creature it is that can come to know. Finally, is knowing about the successful
conclusion of specific inferential procedures or the excellent exercise of
habits of mind? In the first case this requires attention to logic and in the
second attention to psychology or maybe even moral theory. It is in this last
area wherein we find the authors of Guy Axtell’s Knowledge, Belief and
Character.

Of late, there have been a handful
of very competent philosophers such as Ernest Sosa, Linda Zabzebski and
Jonathan Kvanig who have been following the lead of Alvin Plantinga who look
not to establish certainty as the grounds for knowing but rather rely on
instead on warrant. These theorists grant the skeptic’s charge that nothing can
ever be known for certain but we are warranted in our claim to know if we have
exercised certain cautions and employed generally reliable inferential tools
for reaching our decisions about matters of knowledge. In some sense, this
effort of giving an account of epistemic success extends as far back as Stephen
Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument, wherein he situates knowing process
within the context of inferential habits a community of thinkers has found
reliable. Certainly the secularists among Axtell’s selection are content with
this general approach even though each would claim to have much to add to
Toulmin’s original reasoning. These authors go by the name reliabilists and
feminist reliablilists are especially keen on extending the grounds for warrant
beyond anything Toulmin would have ever imagined. Other reliabilists are even
more ambition than the feminist inclusions in Axtell. These are the true virtue
theorists that Axtell features in his own survey essay. Kvanig, Sosa and
Zabzebski argue that warrant towards knowledge is secured through the
conscientious exercise of certain inferential techniques—hence the virtue
theoretic approach to epistemology. While the virtue approach is not intimately
tied into a religious metaphysic, I think it is no accident that the heavy
hitters in this field have, like their predecessor Plantinga, a strong
commitment to establishing grounds of warrant for religious belief.

Axtell has done an excellent job of
selecting outstanding examples of the virtue theoretic approach to
epistemology. I think he may cloud the issues a bit by folding reliabilism in
with a virtue theory approach since even Hilary Putnam’s so-called internal
realism could be contrived as a sort of reliabilist approach but certainly not
one as limited as virtue theory. For someone interested in these issue,
Axtell’s book is a great introduction.

©
2002 Paul A. Wagner

Paul
A. Wagner is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Project in
Professional Ethics at the University of Houston – Clear Lake.

Categories: Philosophical