Talk:Virtue epistemology

Virtue Responsiblism
Reading through the section on James Montmarquet I'm struck by the subject description of Code "fanatacism or dogamtism" in the writing. I don't see anywhere where these words are used by James himself as cited in the reference. I recommend removing this language. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8109:B6C0:A4BF:B036:CC6F:861:F1A9 (talk) 20:28, 30 November 2020 (UTC)

Virtue Epistemology / Epistemic Virtue
I found this article here when I watched Lecture 8 from The Great Courses on philosophy to read about Virtue Epistemology. There’s also the article of Epistemic virtue. I wonder if it would make sense to combine both articles? Or not? I’m happy to hear back from you. --JoeB (talk) 23:24, 27 December 2019 (UTC)

Comments from James Hooten
The field of virtue epistemology is pushing the boundaries of conventional epistemology. While much of the work to this point has centered on the place of virtues and the epistemic agent in a theory of knowledge, the very notion of epistemology is being pushed beyond this traditional understanding because of the focus on virtue and the agent. I have updated the article on virtue epistemology with a partial, working bibliography on recent studies in the field. Comments, questions, and additions for the article would be most welcome.

As a side note, my master's thesis, which I am in the process of writing, is on St. Thomas Aquinas and Virtue Epistemology. I would be most interested in other work being done in virtue epistemology, especially work that takes the moral theory of other notable figures in philosophy and theology and applying it to contemporary virtue epistemology.

Thanks! -James Hooten

context
I'm trying to clean up this article a bit in response to the context tag, so please check it over to make sure I haven't distorted anything in the process. The meaning of the statement that intellectual virtues "can either be conceived of as faculties or as exemplary traits" isn't clear to me from reading the article, so I don't know how to explain it. - AdelaMae (t - c - wpn) 00:02, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

disambiguation
Moral epistemology is redirecting to here but this would confuse someone whos looking for something similar to meta-ethics. I think there should be a disambiguation sign which would redirect to it. --189.33.208.9 21:28, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I've placed a disambiguation notice at the top of the page, is it what you had in mind? Skomorokh  incite  22:18, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Major change
I'm about to post a major change to this article. I'm currently heading up a group of senior philosophy majors that have been tasked with fleshing this article out for our final seminar class. I have attempted to retain as much of James' content as possible, and I have retained his bibliography. If there are any problems, do not hesitate to contact me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Thaumazein (talk • contribs) 01:52, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Yo, thanks for pledging to improve the article. A major pitfall of students and academics trying to help develop Wikipedia articles is that they engage in original research, which is expressly forbidden in the encyclopedia. So please, cite your sources if you add or alter any claims to the article. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions, and thanks again for your commitment. Regards, Skomorokh  02:11, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
 * No problem. There is no original research, and everything that I can cite, is cited. There's going to be some cleanup work in the next few days, I'm sure.Thaumazein (talk) 03:33, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Some changes
1. In the lead, we currently say that virtue epistemology


 * combines the central tenets of virtue theory (also called “virtue ethics”) with classical epistemological approaches.

I'm not sure this is true. Linda Zagzebski gives John Greco as an example of a reliabilist version of virtue epistemology, pretty much as a counter-example to her version of virtue epistemology. She says of Greco's theory that it is:


 * a form of reliabilism and is not modeled on virtue ethics, but it makes internal conditions for epistemic value crucial. (Zagzebski, 2001, p. 5)

And then contrasts it with her version of virtue epistemology: "[my] version of VE is explicitly modeled on virtue ethics" (p. 5). It's arguable whether a virtue reliabilist account is combining "the central tenets of virtue theory" (Zagzebski seems like a pretty reliable source for suggesting that Greco-style reliabilism doesn't) "with classical epistemological approaches". It's rather hard to say that reliabilist theories, whether virtue-based or not, have much in common with "classical epistemological approaches" given that that reliabilism was advocated precisely because of the failure of "classical epistemological approaches" (by which, I presume we mean something like justified true belief of the sort Gettier attacked).

I've replaced that with the sentence:


 * A distinguishing factor of virtue theories is that they use for the evaluation of knowledge the properties of the persons who hold beliefs in addition to or instead of the properties of propositions and beliefs.

This is probably not perfect and may need tweaking, but it seems to catch the spirit of virtue epistemology better than the existing sentence which doesn't really tell you anything other than "well, it's epistemology but with virtues in it!", which one can presumably tell from the title...

2. I've added a paragraph from the introductory section of the Zagzebski collection which hopefully gives some clue as to the original motivation of Sosa. I used Zagzebski here precisely because she's a secondary source commenting on Sosa's paper. —Tom Morris (talk) 18:31, 27 December 2012 (UTC)