Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Jonathan Kvanvig, A.J. Ayer and Alvin I. Goldman

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6 ideas

13. Knowledge Criteria / B. Internal Justification / 1. Epistemic virtues

19730	Epistemic virtues: love of knowledge, courage, caution, autonomy, practical wisdom... [Kvanvig]
	Full Idea: Virtue theorists may focus on the particular habits or virtues of successful cognizers, such as love of knowledge, firmness, courage and caution, humility, autonomy, generosity, and practical wisdom.
	From: Jonathan Kvanvig (Virtue Epistemology [2011], III)
	A reaction: [He cites Roberts and Wood 2007] It is interesting that most of these virtues do not merely concern cognition. How about diligence, self-criticism, flexibility...?

19731	If epistemic virtues are faculties or powers, that doesn't explain propositional knowledge [Kvanvig]
	Full Idea: Conceiving of the virtues in terms of faculties or powers doesn't help at all with the problem of accounting for propositional knowledge.
	From: Jonathan Kvanvig (Virtue Epistemology [2011], IV B)
	A reaction: It always looks as if epistemic virtues are a little peripheral to the main business of knowledge, which is getting beliefs to be correct and well-founded. Given that epistemic saints make occasional mistakes, talk of virtues can't be enough.

19732	The value of good means of attaining truth are swamped by the value of the truth itself [Kvanvig]
	Full Idea: The Swamping Problem is that the value of truth swamps the value of additional features of true beliefs which are only instrumentally related to them. True belief is no more valuable if one adds a feature valuable for getting one to the truth.
	From: Jonathan Kvanvig (Virtue Epistemology [2011], IV B)
	A reaction: His targets here are reliabilism and epistemic virtues. Kvanvig's implication is that the key to understanding the nature of knowledge is to pinpoint why we value it so much.

13. Knowledge Criteria / B. Internal Justification / 4. Foundationalism / a. Foundationalism

19678	Strong foundationalism needs strict inferences; weak version has induction, explanation, probability [Kvanvig]
	Full Idea: Strong foundationalists require truth-preserving inferential links between the foundations and what the foundations support, while weaker versions allow weaker connections, such as inductive support, or best explanation, or probabilistic support.
	From: Jonathan Kvanvig (Epistemic Justification [2011], II)
	A reaction: [He cites Alston 1989] Personally I'm a coherentist about justification, but I'm a fan of best explanation, so I'd vote for that. It's just that best explanation is not a very foundationalist sort of concept. Actually, the strong version is absurd.

13. Knowledge Criteria / B. Internal Justification / 4. Foundationalism / c. Empirical foundations

5163	Basic propositions refer to a single experience, are incorrigible, and conclusively verifiable [Ayer]
	Full Idea: There is a class of empirical propositions, which I call 'basic propositions', which can be verified conclusively, since they refer solely to the contents of a single experience, which are incorrigible.
	From: A.J. Ayer (Introduction to 'Language Truth and Logic' [1946], p.13)
	A reaction: A classic statement of empirical foundationalism. I sort of agree that 'single experiences' are a 'given' for philosophy, but is questionable whether there is anything which could both be a single experience AND give rise to a proposition.

13. Knowledge Criteria / B. Internal Justification / 5. Coherentism / c. Coherentism critique

6873	Coherent justification seems to require retrieving all our beliefs simultaneously [Goldman]
	Full Idea: The problem of Concurrent Retrieval is a problem for internalism, notably coherentism, because an agent could ascertain coherence of her entire corpus only by concurrently retrieving all of her stored beliefs.
	From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §3)
	A reaction: Sounds neat, but not very convincing. Goldman is relying on scepticism about short-term memory, but all belief and knowledge will collapse if we go down that road. We couldn't do simple arithmetic if Goldman's point were right.