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Knowledge, Understanding and Virtue

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Virtue Epistemology Naturalized

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 366))

Abstract

In a number of recent pieces, Duncan Pritchard has used cases with the structure of Goldman’s infamous fake barn case to argue against (i) a promising virtue epistemological account of knowledge and (ii) a promising knowledge-based account of understanding. This paper aims to defend both of these views against Pritchard’s objections. More specifically, I outline two ways of resisting Pritchard’s objections. The first allows for knowledge in fake barn cases and explains the intuition of ignorance away. In contrast, the second response appeals to a plausible alternative account of understanding. Each of the resulting views is shown to be epistemologically viable and preferable to the alternative Pritchard’s offers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Pritchard actually endorses a slightly different account of achievement so that his resulting account of understanding ends up being slightly different also. However, these differences are of no consequence for the purposes of this paper.

  2. 2.

    In Kelp (2009b) I argue that this case causes a problem even for the most refined versions of the safety principle on the epistemological market. For further counterexamples to safety see Neta and Rohrbaugh (2004) and Comesaña (2005).

  3. 3.

    Of course, this is not to say that VK-UK has now been established. There might be theory that does better than VK-UK so understood.

  4. 4.

    Some such accounts have been offered by Greco (2010), Sosa (2010) and myself (Kelp 2011).

  5. 5.

    For a similar case see Grimm (2006).

  6. 6.

    I think that, ultimately, attributions of understanding why afford a contextualist semantics. Accordingly, a more precise version of this account would state that the task relevant to attributions of understanding why p consists in being able to give an explanation of why p that meets the explanatory demands at issue in the context of attribution. However, since for the purposes of this paper, there is no need to address the issue of contextualism about attributions of understanding, I will work with the simpler, non-contextualist version.

  7. 7.

    Notice that once one goes contextualist about attributions of understanding why p there are a number of ways in which one could accommodate WF in one’s semantics. Most importantly, one could make WF part of the contextually determined explanatory demands. This would leave open the possibility of there being contexts in which the attributions of understanding are true even though the explanation the agent would provide is does not satisfy the well-foundedness requirement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Christoph Kelp

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  1. Christoph Kelp
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Correspondence to Christoph Kelp .

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  1. Department of Philosophy, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Abrol Fairweather

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Kelp, C. (2014). Knowledge, Understanding and Virtue. In: Fairweather, A. (eds) Virtue Epistemology Naturalized. Synthese Library, vol 366. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04672-3_20

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