Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'The Definition of Good', 'Virtue Epistemology' and 'Assertion'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

---

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.

19. Language / F. Communication / 2. Assertion

18052	An assertion aims to add to the content of a context [Stalnaker, by Magidor]
	Full Idea: Stalnaker starts with the general thesis that the role of a successful assertion of s is to update the context by adding to it the content of s.
	From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 5.3.2
	A reaction: This is to be compared with criteria of meaningfulness, such as verificationism, and with Grice's rules of conversational implicature. Presumably if you assert what the context presupposes, you fail to assert, without being meaningless.

19. Language / F. Communication / 5. Pragmatics / b. Implicature

14718	An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter]
	Full Idea: Stalnaker's guiding idea is that in making an assertion the speaker is trying to get the audience to rule out certain possibilities. ....If all goes well, further planning will proceed on the basis of a smaller and more accurate range of possibilities.
	From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics
	A reaction: This sounds intuitively rather plausible, and is a nice original thought. This is what we pay clever chaps like Stalnaker to come up with. It seems to imply some notion of verisimilitude (qv. under 'truth'), depending on how much narrowing happens.

23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 1. Virtue Theory / c. Particularism

18671	The ground for an attitude is not a thing's 'goodness', but its concrete characteristics [Ewing]
	Full Idea: The ground for an attitude lies not in some other ethical concept, goodness, but in the concrete, factual characteristics of what we pronounce good. ...We shall not be better off if we interpolate an indefinable characteristic of goodness besides.
	From: A.C. Ewing (The Definition of Good [1948], p.172), quoted by Francesco Orsi - Value Theory 1.4
	A reaction: This is a forerunner of Scanlon's Buck-Passing theory of the source of value (in other properties). I approve of this approach. If I say 'actually this very strong cheese is really good', I'm not adding goodness to the cheese.