GUY AXTELL

EPISTEMIC-VIRTUE TALK:

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF AMERICAN AXIOLOGY?

"The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life." John Dewey

INTRODUCTION: VIRTUE'S HEADWAY INTO EPISTEMOLOGY

Virtue-talk is often heard among philosophers, primarily among groups of ethicists who associate themselves with virtue ethics. But recently it is being heard with increasing frequency among epistemologists as well. From the latter group, one might hear such phrases as intellectual "virtue" and "vice," doxastic "responsibility" and "incontinence," epistemic "character" and "praiseworthiness," and even epistemic "luck," all used much in consonance with more familiar counterparts in virtue ethics. The use of such terms as "epistemic virtue" indicates that in order to address problems confronting normative epistemology, philosophers are exploring parallels with the methods and conceptual resources available to virtue-centered or aretaic ethics. This approach in ethical theory has itself experienced a resurgence over roughly the past three decades, partly in response to discontent with deontological and consequentialist ethics, and partly due to a growing sense of the unity of fields typically classified under "practical" philosophy.

Much of the recent work in virtue epistemology has focused on the problem of skepticism, and on the internalist/externalist debates about knowledge and justification. Other discussions have focused upon the relationship holding between virtue epistemology and the results of research in the social and cognitive sciences. But here again the basic issues are not sharply set off from those that are centrally discussed in virtue ethics. This paper will examine some of the theoretical and twentieth century historical background for the re-emergence and interconnection of virtue-centered accounts in both ethics and epistemology. I will examine the continuity of virtue-centered approaches in both fields, and to the basis for the divergence of virtue-centered accounts from influential assumptions underlying mainstream analytic philosophy in America --particularly at metaphilosophical and methodological levels. ^{^[i]}

I have both a theoretical and an historical point to develop. The theoretical point is that the re-introduction of the essentially Greek notion of intellectual or epistemic virtue does not merely represent an "analogizing" attempt by epistemologists to borrow methods which have had success in normative ethics. The grandest upshot, I want to argue, is metaphilosophical: it is the possibility of addressing challenges to philosophy's normativity on the basis of an essentially unified conception of human knowing and valuing. On this view, the renewed interest by philosophers in virtue-centered accounts is indicative of an appealing shift of metaphilosophical positions, one which represents a corrective for intemperances associated with the perspectives of analytic philosophy, and with positivism in particular. The thesis of unity here referred to is different from the more famous Platonic/Aristotelian thesis of the `unity of the virtues,' which is understood as a thesis restricted to the field of ethics. Hence the term "metaphilosophical" is employed to specify the type of unity that is implied.^{^[ii]}

The historical thesis of the essay is that, thus construed, virtue epistemology exhibits significant concordance with ideas associated with "general theory of value" or "value theory" or "axiology" in American and Continental philosophy earlier in the twentieth century. I will use these terms as equivalent here. The notion of value employed in the development of this theory was by no means restricted to moral value specifically, but had broader implications. Historical considerations can help us to better understand the background issues affecting developments within both ethics and epistemology. The historical sections of the paper identify key assumptions about knowledge and valuation which I want to suggest are shared in common between proponents of general theory of value and proponents of contemporary virtue epistemology.

The "meta" term will recur frequently in this essay in order to identify questions specifically relating to conceptions of second-order discourse. This should not be a source of confusion: "meta-level" discourse has generally been conceived as higher or second order discourse reflecting upon the use of language in a particular area or academic discipline. Hence the term "metaphilosophy" denotes a study by philosophers about the conception of philosophy itself, its goals, and relationships such as those either between philosophical and non-philosophical disciplines, or among philosophy's own sub-disciplines such as epistemology and ethics. "Meta-ethics" and "meta-science" are also broadly accepted terms for denoting a second-order study in ethics and science, respectively. Second order study of language and meaning has often been represented during our current century as a strictly analytic endeavor, initially at least quite removed from any kind of valuative judgment an individual might make. Hence, one central issue for us concerns alternative conceptions of this second-order study and its perceived relationship to the first-order discourses exemplified in "normative" ethics or "normative" (for instance `rational reconstructive') epistemology. For our purposes a form of discourse will be understood to be normative if it (either implicitly or explicitly) applies normative or evaluative terms such as are found in "good reasons" explanations of human judgments. While sharply debated issues in action theory and rationality theory attend the philosophy of explanation, they are not our primary concern and for the most part can be left aside.

Now in certain respects, the metaphilosophical idea of inquiry into intellectual and other kinds of virtue as constituting a unified study, marks a step forward in an attempt to overcome the Fact/Value problem as it manifests itself in both rationalist and empiricist branches of modern philosophy. Both of these primary traditions within modern philosophy had to respond to the question of where values or value judgments were to be fitted once primacy was ascribed to description of objects and actions, and once propositional content was divided without remainder between categories such as those of "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact" (Hume), or the "analytic" and the "synthetic" (Kant). These assumptions remained common ground for empiricists and rationalists through 1900, and were still prominent, for instance, in the thought of G.E. Moore as well as in that of his critics. The answers that were given to the question about the status of values in both rationalist and empiricist traditions tended to exacerbate the Fact/Value and Is/Ought problems. Prime examples of this tendency are Moore’s conception of good as a ‘non-natural property,’ coupled with the early emotivist response that if not a natural fact, good could not be a fact or have cognitive/scientific status at all.

In another respect, the thesis of the unity of intellectual and ethical virtue may also mark a step back in philosophical history by recalling a pre-modern and characteristically Greek metaphilosophical principle. This will be the case if one takes the thesis to entail a more symmetrical treatment of knowledge and valuation than could be endorsed under the guiding assumptions of modern philosophy. The classical principle, conceived by the Greeks as requisite for philosophical intelligibility, would be that of the "true" and the "good" as distinguishable yet allied spheres of meaning. In the view of at least one contemporary writer on our subject, James Montmarquet, who has explored some of these issues in his Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (1993), contemporary virtue-centered epistemology has an explicit metaphilosophical goal: to reveal similarities between ethics and epistemology out of which we can understand their respective differences as emerging. The broader ideal standing behind this goal is what Montmarquet calls "a unified conception of ethical and epistemic virtue," and a unified conception of epistemology and ethics as two primary normative sub-disciplines of philosophy.

Apart from Montmarquet's attempt to cast attention on the need for a reconstruction at the metaphilosophical level, it remains unclear to what degree interest in such a unified conception of virtue can be accorded to other thinkers examined here. Ernest Sosa coined the term "virtue epistemology" in a series of recent articles collected in his Knowledge in Perspective (1991). Writers such as Montmarquet, Jonathan Kvanvig (The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind, 1992), and John Greco (1993a & b) criticize Sosa and Alvin Goldman and, while exhibiting substantial sympathies with virtue-centered approaches, already suggest alternative epistemic projects than those that they develop. Hence we are advised to use a distinct term --"virtue-centered epistemology"-- to indicate the sympathetic but more diverse group of thinkers who have joined the debate.

The next section briefly familiarizes the reader with the central claims of virtue epistemology in the work of Sosa and Goldman (1992) and with some selected aspects of the surrounding debate. The third section focuses upon the unique alternatives general theory of value posed to the predominant forms of meta-ethics moving into the mainstream in the period between the two world wars. There I examine the opposition between proponents of general theory of value, including R. B. Perry and John Dewey, and proponents of logical empiricism, the program of which depended crucially upon a sharp first-order/second-order discourse distinction. A fourth section examines how accounts of meaning or cognitive significance were connected for the logical empiricists with accounts of explanation, where labor was clearly divided between philosophical (normative) and psychological (strictly causal) domains. Through this connection the method of logical analysis was adduced as support for an asymmetrical scheme of explanation. This scheme could only be maintained based on formal differences assumed to obtain between "the language of science" and "the language of ethics." Both logical empiricists and emotivist meta-ethicists such as C. L. Stevenson relied upon this formal division of languages, though today it is often criticized as involving a fallacy of division.^{^[iii]} Finally, I examine the problem of explanation in the context of debates surrounding philosophical naturalism and anti-naturalism. Various forms of naturalism are delineated including that of the virtue epistemologists, and their widely varying responses to the problem of philosophy's normativity are discussed. I support the unique "criterialist" form of naturalism associated with virtue epistemology (Maffie 1990), arguing that it best represents the relationship between philosophy and the sciences in the study of human knowledge and valuation.

RECENT WORK ON VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY

The naturalistic movement in American thought has found itself deeply divided at both early and late stages of the twentieth century. The camps of self-described naturalists have primarily divided over the Is/Ought problem and issues concerning the status of normativity in a naturalistic philosophy. This deep division is witnessed among both naturalist ethicists and epistemologists, and a brief overview of the problem of normativity in each field may help us to see what is unique about virtue epistemology’s version of naturalism.

In ethics a problem that was tantamount early in the century was whether a scientifically respectable account of values should be descriptivist (cognitive) or emotive (non-cognitive). After more than three quarters of a century of debate, during which time both cognitive and non-cognitive accounts have become increasingly sophisticated, the core issues of this debate remain sharply contested. The issue we will focus upon is not whether or not moral "facts" exist, but what role moral qualities, properties and character traits play in explanations of various kinds. Many key terms of both moral and epistemic evaluation, such as “rationality,” have been used in a dual role as both explanatory and justificatory. Some naturalist meta-ethicists approve of this dual role, as does the moral realist Railton (1993), who argues that it can be freed from intuitionistic associations and that it reflects the “normative suffusion” of both moral and epistemic language. Other naturalists disapprove of it, as does Gibbard (1993), whose non-cognitive or "norm-expressivist" account of rationality develops around his proposal "that we can render meanings in a pared down, dualistic language: a language of pure facts, along with a single, pure normative element" (p. 53). The philosophical differences expressed in the recent exchange between these two authors are quite sharp. Despite them, both writers agree that philosophy can no longer carry on with the sharp asymmetry in treatment of the moral and the rational, of practical and theoretical reason, or of norm governance outside and inside of science,. All these dichotomies reflect attitudes associated with early twentieth century forms of analytic philosophy. Both agree that "the Janus-faced explanatory/justificatory character of judgments of rationality raises a host of philosophical questions."^{^[iv]} A more symmetrical treatment of normativity, and a deepened concern for the ways human interests affect the logic of explanation, are concerns they commonly share as part of their commitments to naturalism.

Turning to epistemology and the “naturalistic turn” that occurred there, we find some interesting parallels with the situation in ethics. The form of normative epistemology associated with positivism is the "rational reconstruction" of a cognitive decision or judgement; such a reconstruction, as in cases of scientific decision-making, was clearly approached in the Janus-faced manner as both explanatory and justificatory. Even Rudolph Carnap's student W. V. O. Quine recognized the tacit intuitionism in the thought of his mentor; this recognition was part of what led him to challenge foundationalism and to ask anew whether epistemology can be naturalized and still retain a normative orientation. Quine's influence set off a wave of 'naturalized epistemology' projects that basically answered "No!" to this question; Quinean naturalized epistmeology sought to replace normative epistemology with 'scientized' epistemology in the form of a descriptive psychology. Quine's ideas fall into those of a group commonly referred to as the eliminative naturalists. They hold views that are today closely associated with the idea that causally explaining knowledge obviates the need for an inquiry into the justification of beliefs. Some philosophers such as Hilary Putnam have described this attempt to jettison normativity as 'philosophical suicide' rather than the externally-betokened 'end of philosophy'; Putnam even takes the situation as evidence for a need to dismiss naturalism. Still others side with the naturalists against anti-naturalism, and aprioristic accounts, but draw quite different conclusions than do the eliminativists from the problem of the normativity of theoretical reason. It is only this last group that we will focus upon: those who maintain a version of normative naturalism, or the thesis of the compatibility of normative and naturalistic elements in epistemology. Normative naturalists, then, are embattled on the one side by the real or imaginary global skeptics; on the other they are beset by various groups that cite the incoherence of global skepticism and the failure of epistemology focused on the normative idea of "justification" as evidence for its needed elimination.

For those naturalists who maintain the possibility of normative naturalism as well as those who reject it, an adequate account of the relationship between norms and descriptions is extremely important. Our central concerns come back into focus when we see that the orientation of many contemporary naturalists including such pioneer virtue epistemologists^{^[v]} as Sosa and Goldman is not that of eliminative naturalism. By contrast, what Maffie (1990) terms the "criterial" naturalism of Sosa and Goldman motivates an attempt to retain the central normative concerns of epistemology --concerns for instance with justification, aims, criteria, and methodological standards. Criterial naturalism develops a systematic proposal for the transformation of epistemology. If ought implies can in epistemology as in ethics, then epistemology is not an autonomous discipline; it needs to rely on the results of the natural and social sciences. Proponents of virtue epistemology insist upon the methodological continuity of epistemology and the sciences, and attempt to inform epistemology through and integrate it with our best current scientific conceptions of human reasoners and valuers.

The following brief characterization of virtue epistemology highlights both causal and evaluative issues, and attempts to clarify some interconnections between them. Causal and evaluative issues are separable about divergent explanatory interests, but both can be approached through a unified conception of the virtues and their role in the production and evaluation of belief. Let us look briefly at how this alternative development of the naturalistic and normative aspects of epistemology is articulated through their treatment of knowledge and justification.

The approaches that Sosa and Goldman have developed to rehabilitate the notion of knowledge are associated with epistemic reliabilist and externalist views.^{^[vi]} For Sosa as for Goldman, virtue epistemology is a modified form of generic reliabilism, which basically holds that knowledge is true belief resulting from a reliable cognitive process. Generic reliabilism comes in a variety of types, and the notion of a cognitive process can be given various glosses. The restriction virtue epistemology adds is that the cognitive processes that are important for knowledge are those that have their bases in a cognitive virtue (Greco, 1992). Knowledge is true belief that results from one's cognitive virtues, where "results from" and "derives from" are taken in a causal sense. An intellectual or cognitive virtue is a "skill" or "competence" for reaching truth and avoiding error with a high rate of success in a certain field under certain specifiable conditions. “Faculties,” “processes,” and "mechanisms” are all term that reliabilists somewhat vaguely employ, but the notion of virtues and vices, Goldman holds, should be associated “with processes operating with specific parameter values,” these parameter values being understood in terms of truth-conduciveness (Goldman, 1992).

This causal construal of knowledge as true belief produced through a cognitive virtue has parallels in action theory and in virtue ethics, where a stable disposition has causal-explanatory value for a particular action if the action was fully characteristic of that excellence. In the case of the archer who hits her target by accident, neither a tendency nor a skilled capacity is truly exhibited, because there is no stable disposition present as there is in the case of a skill-driven success. We can say that the action was characteristic of such a skill, but we do not directly attribute it to the skill, because the action was merely rather than fully characteristic of it.^{^[vii]}

While Sosa holds that virtue epistemology downgrades the centrality of the issue of justification for epistemology, it does not obviate its importance or the legitimacy of the communal interests in explanation that motivate it. Virtue-talk plays an essential role in his discussions of justification and related issues. Goldman ties justification closely to the cognitive abilities and propensities of human agents, and both Sosa and Goldman allow pragmatic elements into their conceptions of justification. Generally speaking, “justification, like “warrant,” and "positive epistemic status" is a term epistemic evaluation or appraisal; the questions is addresses are those of the quality of belief and of what faculties or processes are to count as virtues and vices. As a part of normative epistemology it is concerned with making epistemological judgments and (in a weak or strong sense) with prescribing guiding systematic principles. In this sense at least, a justification is closer in kind to an “argument” than to an “explanation." Therefore every effort should be made to respect the distinction between explanations and justifications, even while recognizing that the purposes for which they are used may in various instances. Moreover, normative epistemologists have usually been defenders of the view that “reasons” can be “causes” in cases of human belief-acquisition. Montmarquet for example points out that “a virtue-based account will insist...that what justifies a belief must stand in some causal (or at least explanatory) relation to it rather than...merely a logical or evidentiary relation” (1987b, p. 496). Having virtues is different from employing or instancing them, and it is the causal or explanatory occurrence of the instancing of virtues that enters into the justification of a particular belief.

We usually address factors that confer epistemic authority through two concepts: knowledge and justification. The distinction between issues of knowledge and of justification is addressed in Sosa’s work through the development of two distinctions: that between apt belief and justified belief, and that between animal and reflective knowledge. In the general sense in which knowledge is the product of reliably truth-conducive faculties, animals can have knowledge if their faculties function properly within their natural environment. Hence aptness represents for Sosa that which, in addition to truth, is required for knowledge. For a belief to be apt means for it to derive causally from a reliably truth-conducive faculty or aptitude. Aptness of belief is to be understood in terms of the reliability of its producing faculties, and so aptness yields animal belief. But aptness alone cannot yield justified belief. It is non-reflective, and this is where Sosa's second distinction becomes pertinent. For reflective knowledge, beyond believing aptly or out of virtue, a further restriction will state the sense in which one must be aware of their own virtuous basis for belief. “For reflective knowledge you need moreover an epistemic perspective that licenses your belief by its source in some virtue or faculty of your own” (p. 277). So the distinction is between "externalist, reliability-bound aptness and internalist, rationality-bound justification" (1995). In taking this approach, Sosa departs somewhat from those of generic reliabilism, which demands an externalist account of both knowledge and justification.^{^[viii]} Sosa is saying that having reasons for belief involves there being appropriate inferential and coherence relations with one’s other beliefs. The idea of an epistemic perspective involves the notion, usually associated with internalism and non-naturalism, of an agent’s accessibility to his own reasons. Sosa characterizes Goldman's view as a "reliability process" account in contrast to a virtue epistemic account, because a focus on external aspects of the cognitive process does not allow the subject her place as the seat of justification. Sosa’s virtue perspectivism therefore illustrates the extent to which Sosa’s views about justification synthesize with foundationalism and coherentism, two traditional opponents of reliabilism. Justification arises from the proper functioning of our intellectual faculties in an appropriate environment, and depends further, according to Sosa, upon the cognitive agent having a coherent epistemic perspective.^{^[ix]} Justification requires that first order beliefs be placed in epistemic perspective, where an agent reflects upon the sources of her belief, the reliability of these sources, and the broad coherence of this belief with others she holds. On the view Sosa calls virtue perspectivism, "intellectual virtue is something that resides in a subject, something relative to an environment...." (p. 140). Virtue perspectivism makes persons and their intellectual character the focus of the question concerning whether justification is possessed.

So-called "Gettier-type" counter-examples discussed over the past thirty years have been an impetus to the abandonment of the "tripartite" account of knowledge as true-justified-belief. By driving the issues of knowledge and justification apart, they sparked interest in a reliabilist approach to knowledge and what Sosa calls a "demotion" of issues regarding justified belief. Sosa uses the apt/justified and animal/reflective knowledge distinctions to analyze and offer unique interpretations of our intuitions concerning knowledge and justification in additional widely discussed cases, and the problems they raise such as "the new evil-demon problem," the "meta-incoherence problem," and "the generality problem" (Bonjour 1995).

James Montmarquet and Jonathan Kvanvig are authors of the first two book-length studies of the "virtue epistemology" literature. Kvanvig agrees that a virtue theory in the domain of epistemology is worth pursuing, but he argues that to pursue it requires a shift away from Cartesian and methodological individualist assumptions he claims to find still present in its versions. Montmarquet holds that virtue-based normative epistemology is "essentially incomplete," needing to be complemented by a descriptive account that facilitates knowing more about the natural world and the human reasoner. His account of the epistemic virtues center around the prime virtue of epistemic conscientiousness and classes of virtues that represent forms of conscientiousness. Since this focus restricts the notion of virtues to character-traits specifically, he contrasts it with what he calls Sosa's "teleological" account, in which any truth-conducive capacity, faculty or process appears to count as an epistemic virtue. This focus also relates virtue epistemology to problems such as Kuhn's, concerning holding, articulating and weighing a list of cognitive values in ongoing ampliative processes of theory-choice.^{^[x]} From what we have seen in this section, intellectual or epistemic virtues are deemed important to a variety of writers for a variety of reasons. Some accounts, like responsibilism and proper functionalism, have a significant place for the virtues, but still differ from virtue epistemology. Even among those who hold that the virtues should hold a central place in epistemology, there are important differences as to what precise role they play, and whether that role outstrips the use of virtue theory in defense of reliabilism. It is differences such as those just mentioned that motivate the distinction noted earlier between "virtue epistemology" proper and what I am calling virtue-centered epistemology.

GENERAL THEORY OF VALUE AND ITS DIVERSE PROPONENTS

In 1929, Scottish philosopher John Laird used vibrant metaphor in expressing this idea: "In the main, it is possible that the current philosophy of value is essentially new; with the wine of adventure in its veins. Value may prove to be the key that will eventually release all the human sciences from their present position of pathetic, if dignified futility."

Stemming from tendencies toward generalization in history of ethics and in social sciences concerned with questions of value, a new field of study was initiated in the first decade of the twentieth century: --value as a unified subject matter for philosophy.^{^[xi]} Some early sources for the debate are found in Brentano's thought, in the development of economics, and in the Meinong/Ehrenfels debate over whether the source of value lay in desire or in feeling (Pepper, 1968). W. M. Urban was responsible for introducing the term "axiology," to an American philosophical audience in 1909 in his book Valuation. He was but one among many notable American scholars whose influences reflect years of training taken around the turn of the century in Austria and Germany. The idea of a general theory of value was first brought up for open discussion at the APA convention of 1913.^{^[xii]} Although not amounting to a genuine philosophical movement, proponents of value theory had a significant voice in American academic debates between 1913 and approximately 1940. Edel and others have noted the "new broom" attitude toward metaphysics --and by association with it, normative ethics-- with which the Vienna Circle philosophy entered upon the American academic scene in the 1920s and 1930s. Ironically then, this clash on American academic soil appears to have been initiated by two schools of thought with Austrian roots, the Austrian School of Economics and the school of thought that began as the Vienna Circle. Speaking more broadly, proponents of value theory stood against the mainstream philosophical current in that period which Darwall, Gibbard and Railton characterize in their "Toward Fin de Siecle Ethics" (1992) as "the heyday of analytic meta-ethics."

I want to pursue thematic connections between virtue-centered epistemology and general theory of value in the first half of the twentieth century. In order to do so, the next section will discuss what the general theorists or axiologists alternatively called the "general nature of value" (R. B. Perry), "axiological standpoint on knowledge" (W. M. Urban), or, relative to Dewey's thought, "empirical axiology," "empirical theory of value," or "theory of valuation."^{^[xiii]}

My claim of a thematic connection is not that the American axiologists displayed a keen interest in virtue specifically, though that is true of some particular figures including Dewey. Proponents of virtue ethics, as is well known, have often bemoaned the neglect of virtue theory during the period under study. For instance, Philippa Foot noted in 1978 that "For many years the subject of the virtues and vices was strangely neglected by moralists working within the school of analytic philosophy" (1978).^{^[xiv]} This point is correctly held to be important in understanding developments in twentieth-century meta-ethics and the re-emergence of options represented through virtue ethics; yet in order to keep our focus on metaphilosophical assumptions (and to bemoan just the right sort of neglect!), we will need to identify a different group of thinkers than the virtue ethicists. I will show rather that interest in a unified conception of ethics and epistemology was anticipated by the group we can call the "axiologists." This gives evidence that representing the metaphilosophical assumptions underlying virtue-centered epistemology as a re-emergence of positions basic to the American axiologists is useful and informative. I will devote special attention to Dewey's process-oriented account denoted by the replacement of the focus on the conceptual term "value" with a social scientific as well as philosophical focus on multiple processes of "valuation." The implications of theory of value, or again in Dewey's terms, a theory of valuation, are not contained in that sub-discipline known as meta-ethics. Since its proponents take knowing and valuing to be interdependent, a theory of valuation is deemed essential for an adequate philosophical study of the aims and governing norms of an extremely wide range of human practices.

The orientation of the earliest axiologists was mixed up with German/American humanism and idealism, as well as Austrian/German value theory or Werttheorie. Rickert in Germany, and Peirce and Urban in America, each developed logic as a normative science of principles that must be acknowledged if intelligible communication is to be possible. The theme of philosophical intelligibility and its interdependence with the goal structures constituting a "community of interpretation," was a central theme in the philosophies of Royce, Creighton and Urban.^{^[xv]} The orientation of the axiologists tended to become more naturalistic later on. This orientation is quite apparent not only in R. B. Perry's General Theory of Value in 1926, but also in Dewey's and Edel's thought.^{^[xvi]} Perry's early work is that of a "new realist" reacting polemically to idealism. His shifts away from some of these early views interestingly provide a counterpoint to Dewey's own shift from Hegelian idealist and humanist influences to a more naturalistic position (Wilson, 1990). But the point is that through these shifts there remained a substantial middle-ground; despite sharp differences concerning proper philosophical methodology, the support which general theory of value received was quite broad-based, representing both humanist and naturalist philosophers. There were sometimes sharply-worded published exchanges between Perry, Dewey and Urban in 1913 and ensuing years. Still, there was also substantial agreement in their views about the need for value theory, and in rudimentary agreement about what the new theory should take as its focus of study. This does not mean that differences across the two primary camps of axiologists were not pronounced, only that they were less vital than those with analytic philosophers who held no place for a general theory of value. None of the axiologists, naturalist or humanist, appear to have disagreed substantially with the view Dewey expressed in Chapter Ten of The Quest for Certainty (1929): "The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives, and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct his conduct, is the deepest problem of modern life."^{^[xvii]}

With respect to outstanding differences, the naturalists in this debate faulted the non-naturalists for displacing careful analysis with essentially intuitionistic notions of criteria. Perry in fact made a similar criticism of Dewey, despite Dewey's adherence to a form of pragmatic naturalism (Eames 1970, 1977). Dewey in turn insisted that a view such as Perry's, which defines value in terms of desires and interests actually held, is "but a starting point."^{^[xviii]} Meta-ethics must maintain the crucial distinction between prizing and appraisal, the desired and the desirable. Interest theories reduce the latter to the former halves of these distinctions, thereby ignoring the vital axiological questions of the regulation of goods by creative intelligence: "Desire and purpose, and hence action, are left without guidance, although the question of regulation of their formation is the supreme problem of practical life."^{^[xix]} An interest account expresses a partial truth because it is one species of a "relational" theory about valuing. Dewey first characterized his own theory as relational, as opposed to absolutistic; he ultimately opted for the alternative term "transactional" because it better expresses his emphasis on operational thinking (or experimental empiricism) and on social rather than individual behavior.

Focus on Dewey's work is particularly helpful here because his theory of valuation provides a possible middle-ground position on many issues that divided naturalism from humanism, as well as cognitivism about ethical judgment from emotivism. The development of Dewey's meta-ethics was in part a response to C. L. Stevenson's. Both writers asked whether appraisals, including effort put into thinking about human aims or goal, makes any rational difference. For Dewey a theory of valuation played important even if strictly limited roles in the social processes of the formation of ends. "A theory of valuation as theory can only set forth the conditions which a method of formation of desires and interests must observe in concrete situations."^{^[xx]}

Consideration of the role played by habit and character is integrated almost seamlessly into Dewey’s experimental empiricism, often viewed by his critics as simply a form of consequentialism. Dewey conceived of virtuosity as a matter of habit, some habits constituted biologically, but most acquired. Selection of and habituations to the virtues are critical practices, and the very notion of valuation was of course for Dewey intimately connected with criticism, with "appraisal," and with what he termed creative intelligence. The integration of character was seen as an achievement, and this view was reflected in his definition of character as the interpenetration of virtues. This theme in Dewey is clearly shaped by his study of Aristotle's conception of the "unity of the virtues," the inseparability of character and practical reason or phronesis. "Habit" for Dewey did not allow a sharp distinction between the purely intellectual and the socially conditioned. In "Habits and Will" for instance, he notes that "The serious matter is that this relative pragmatic, or intellectual, distinction between moral and non-moral, has been solidified into a fixed and absolute distinction, so that some acts are popularly regarded as forever within and others forever without the moral domain."^{^[xxi]} From the side of science, science is "regulated activity, i.e., conduct, behavior, practice." The discrimination of axiological traits, be they scientific or ethical, could not occur except as a matter of selective interest and reflection. Even in science one finds an important element of direction by an idea of value. This emphasizes Dewey's theme of a "continuity of experience" in which, as Daniel Wilson (1990) points out, science and ethics were viewed as mutually essential "aspects of the effort to control change rationally."^{^[xxii]}

Dewey's late writings around mid-century are pertinent because they exhibit a renewed interest in value theory; they also display a straightforward symmetry in the use of terminology for knowing and valuing. The "knowings-knowns" terminology he had employed for years to maintain a process/concept distinction in epistemology, is substantially paralleled in Dewey's last writings through his employment of the term "valuings-values."^{^[xxiii]} Given the underdeveloped state of Dewey's Theory of Valuation (1939), the priority he assigns value studies has often been dismissed as an inconsistency. Dewey held that while aesthetics and the special sciences such as ethics, economics, and logical theory represented distinct fields or aspects for the study of valuation, the neglect of value theory would lead to the continued "reification of aspects into separate types." This position is evident in his thought as late as his mature statement near mid-century in "The Field of Value." Such neglect, he held, impedes a broader philosophical consensus attainable through recognition of the indispensable role axiology plays in reasoned discussion of normative issues involved in real life problems of all kinds. Continuity between the social and natural sciences is achievable, and such an achievement would help mitigate the Fact/Value and Is/Ought dichotomies; however, this continuity must also link the sciences and philosophy, and cannot become reality without greater attention to a general philosophical theory of valuation.

Their differences aside, some close parallels between Dewey's views and Perry's 1926 General Theory of Value are readily apparent, since Perry also disputed the treatment of theory of value as "a sort of by-product." Perry stated that the result of one-sided treatment of the special sciences

has been both to enlarge the scope of these special branches of knowledge, and also to lose sight of what they have in common. Each of them has been guilty of claiming too much for that variety of value with which it has been primarily occupied.^{^[xxiv]}

The last two decades of our current century have witnessed the exacerbation of 'turf wars' between philosophers, historians, psychologists, sociologists and sociobiologists over the study of scientific knowledge and scientific change. Both Perry and Dewey would likely both view these disputes as illustrative of an inadequate conception of philosophy, wherein neglect of general theory of value sustains undue interdisciplinary conflict. Turf wars involve disciplinary "boundaries" and boundaries are often imposed through epistemic conceptions of a division of labor. The impositions by philosophers of divisions of labor (e.g., Lakatos' internal and external history of science, or Laudan's and Newton-Smith's "arationality principles") intimately involve assumptions about explanation, and more specifically about the role of different fields or disciplines in the explanation of human judgment, motivation, and action. We next turn to focus more closely upon these issues of explanation.

LOGICAL ANALYSIS AND THE DIVISION OF EXPLANATORY LABOR

This essay is intended to recapture the lost grounds for Laird's enthusiasm about the prospects of axiology. We have noted how well Dewey's views accord with Laird's statement, which saw the generalized idea of ‘value’ as providing a key to unlock neglected resources. In recounting the relevant aspects of twentieth century academic philosophy in America, we will address with equal seriousness Alain Locke's 1935 comment on how the widespread influence of analytic philosophy was serving "to stifle embryonic axiology with its promising analysis of norms." "American thought," Locke acknowledged in a commentary as valid today as it was upon its publication, "has moved tangent to the whole central issue of the normative aspects and problems of value."

In saying this, do we say anything more than that values are important and that American philosophy should pay more attention to axiology? Most assuredly; --we are saying that but for a certain blindness, value-theory might easily have been an American forte, and may still become so if our predominantly functionalist doctrines ever shed their arbitrary objectivism and extend themselves beyond their present concentration on theories of truth and knowledge into a balanced analysis of values generally.^{^[xxv]}

How did the logical empiricists think that the divide they had insisted upon between meta-theory and normative theory could be unproblematically bridged in one context --that of science-- but not in other or non-scientific contexts? The bridge was constructed through that project called "explicationism." This is a term used to refer to the idea that a formal linguistic basis exists as support for the quite divergent conclusions logical empiricists reached about the respective content of scientific and ethical judgments. Epistemology conceived as "the logical syntax of the language of science" was to be strictly analytic second-order discourse, and so in effect `above the battle of the schools.' Rational reconstructive epistemology is possible because there exists a continuity between the presumably analytic explication of theoretical terms (that is, the study called meta-science), and the normative epistemic principles and methodological rules of science. Given the demarcation criteria for scientific discourse they insisted could be maintained, it was concluded that practices of norm generation and criticism were one thing within science --a matter of the "logic of science" (Carnap, Reichenbach)--, and quite another beyond the domain of science --a matter of emotive or conative-affective as opposed to cognitive activity.^{^[xxvi]}

Yet a second question can be addressed: What follows for the philosophy of explanation from our rejection of the faulted logical empiricist treatment of meaning or content? More pointedly, what follows for our conception of normative epistemology and its "good reasons" explanations of human cognitive decisions? What then are its foundations? Logical empiricist assumptions about explanation followed from sharp linguistic distinctions that are not supported apart from their connections with logical empiricist views about meaning or cognitive significance generally. In Carnap's and Reichenbach's influential works we are met with the kind of asymmetrical approach to explanation that Alan Gewirth characterized as early as 1960 as a primary dogma of empiricism: its "normative" or rational reconstructive account of scientific judgment, carried alongside its "positive" or causal account of ethical judgment.

Unsupported asymmetries have no basis in a naturalistic account of explanation. The explicationists' project, one of gleaning epistemic standards for belief and judgment from "the language of science" by logical analysis, was dependent upon the assumption that theoretical science has a unique status as an axiomatic practice, and is thereby set off as a natural kind. Asymmetries of explanation spring from the presumed uniqueness of theoretical science as an axiomatic endeavor. The division of labor noted by Gewirth above represents only one instance, albeit a basic one, between the explanatory chores of logic and psychology. This distinction was ensconced as basic to logical empiricist views about explanation through Reichenbach's famous distinction between the "context of justification" and the "context of discovery." Related divisions still prominent include knowledge and error, rational and arational episodes of judgment or cognitive commitment, and "internal" and "external" history of science (Lakatos, Newton-Smith, Laudan). What I find surprising is that the intimate connection is not more generally recognized between the legacy of analytic epistemology and the grand-scale repudiation of normative epistemology and rational reconstructionism since the 1970s. In one or another way, the effect of dividing off a certain formal class of normative decisions as calling for evaluative explanation, and others as calling for a causal (psychological, sociological, biological) explanation, has always been to promote an unsustainable division of labor between philosophy and the sciences. Such divisions of labor today continue to be challenged by sociologists as presupposing unsubstantiated asymmetries of explanation. Yet many of their own projects expounded as successors to normative epistemology, such as the Edinburgh `Strong Programme,' raised a false dilemma between "normative" philosophical approaches and materially or causally-oriented sociological approaches to scientific judgments and scientific change. They represent what Perry might have correctly viewed as overzealous explanatory claims by disciplines which have a handle on just one specific "variety of value." In the terminology employed here, this is to say that they have exclusive focus upon only one "aspect of norm governance" (Will, 1988 & 1993).

One might reply that these objections to unsubstantiated asymmetries of explanation are dated, however, if they target only an abandoned positivist form of rational reconstructive explanation. Still, our arguments can easily be updated to encompass a far broader group of analytic epistemologists if we utilize Hilary Putnam's "Companions in Guilt" argument. This argument was directed against Gilbert Harman, one who throughout the 1980s continued to champion the concurrent holding of the two positions of scientific realism and moral relativism. In Harman the old "analytic bridge" from meta-science to normative scientific and epistemic rules has been transformed into a synthetic bridge --a kind of `hard-wiring' of epistemic principles (but not, of course, moral principles) into human agents. The account of this bridging mechanism is no more conceptually adequate than its predecessor; its recognition and rebuttal by Putnam (1990) as still dependent upon a tacit form of intuitionism leaves Harman in much the same position as the logical empiricist who claimed that the bridge was constructed on the basis of science's uniqueness as an axiomatic system.

This "Companions in Guilt" argument bears some similarity to our previous line of inquiry. But in Putnam’s thought it has been broadened into a tu quoque response to the skeptical challenge that Harman himself posed to ethicists and insisted was inescapable for them. Essentially the force of the "Companions in Guilt" argument is this: without the special privilege of the hard-wiring which Harman and others afford themselves (in order to bridge the Is/Ought gap and give content to evaluative explanations of scientific judgment), the skeptical challenge will hit no less hard (though perhaps no more hard!) in epistemology than they themselves presume it will in ethics. That is to say, justification, simplicity, and truth all exhibit the same problems that goodness and kindness do, from an epistemological point of view (Putnam, 1990).

Putnam of course is not really skeptical about the possibility of normative epistemology, and he certainly is not alone in viewing eliminative naturalism and Rorty's "new pragmatism" both as the mistaken pathways resulting from a self-destructive legacy of retreat from the normative in analytic philosophy. Since Putnam really intends that we extricate ourselves from the insinuation of "guilt" for the normative character of our various forms of theoretical reason, the "Companions in Guilt" argument also appears to have a deeper message: that the disparate approaches to explanation that have accompanied predominant strains of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century have led us astray, and that the intellectual community is better served by a philosophy able to treat in greater unison the problems of knowledge and of valuation.

FROM DIVISIONS OF LABOR TO INTERDISCIPLINARITY

IN THE STUDY OF NORM GOVERNANCE

In the last section we considered suggestions that our "received views" about the explanation of normative judgments contain deep-seated asymmetries. We briefly focused upon less widely recognized but still important dogmas of the overlapping empiricist and analytic traditions from which such asymmetries issued. As was previously only suggested, in my view what best accounts for recent renewed interest in more symmetrical treatments of knowledge and valuation is a philosophical legacy in which (a) asymmetrical assumptions about explanation rooted in nineteenth century scientism came to result in (b) a deep fragmentation of reason with respect to norm governance. The ensuing stages, which perhaps need only mention rather than argumentative support (since they are often pointed out by others) would be roughly: (c) the appearance of a `pragmatic turn' within analytic philosophy itself, which along with the Kuhn-inspired "historical" turn of the 1960s and 1970s, has initiated (d) an extended period of confusion, sharp disagreement, and working out of positions about the implications of the normativity of theoretical reason.

My attempt to situate historically recent virtue-centered epistemology through connection with goals of American axiology has not led me to take any specific view on the issue of moral realism or anti-realism.^{^[xxvii]} More is asserted at the ontological level about ethical properties and their explanatory efficacy in the work of Peter Railton and so-called "Cornell Realists" like Nicholas Sturgeon than needs to be supported in defending my thesis. I have focused primarily upon differences among self-described naturalists over the philosophical treatment appropriate for normative predicates. General theory of value, as we saw, was developed along naturalistic lines, and the thought of both Dewey and Perry was sufficiently tough-minded to retain an intimate continuity with the sciences. This spirit was clearly exemplified in Perry's conception, when he wrote sixty years ago that he saw general theory of value as a field of philosophy, yet still "a part of the modern scientific movement...borrow[ing] both the results and the techniques of the special sciences of human life." "It profits by what biology, psychology, and the new social sciences have learned about man, and it employs in its own behalf the genetic, comparative, analytic and descriptive methods which they have successfully exemplified."^{^[xxviii]} Dewey's pragmatic naturalism is largely consistent with Perry's statement on the important functions served by axiology, and with Perry's views about the continuity between value theory and the empirical methods and results of the sciences. Dewey criticizes “Anti-Naturalism In Extremis" in his 1944 article with that title; his middle-period writings on the theory of valuation do not contradict his later claim that "Evaluative judgments cannot be arrived at so as to be warranted without going outside the `value field' into matters physical, physiological, anthropological, historical, socio-psychological, and so on."^{^[xxix]} The major substantive difference between their respective naturalism accounts, as I interpret them, is that Perry's descriptivism in ethics ally him closely with definist or reductivist branches of naturalism, whereas Dewey's later writings reveal a thinker better seen as perched upon the criterialist branch of naturalism.

Virtue epistemology I see as the clearest and fullest contemporary development of criterialist naturalism, although recent critiques suggest that the association between the virtues and a naturalistic account of content need not be taken as necessary. Given space constraints, I have had to discount two approaches: I rejected the non-naturalistic account that insists upon philosophy's "autonomy," and I also rejected the eliminative branch of naturalism, the view that epistemology as a normative enterprise needs to be eliminated. These appear dubious contenders, yet there are still a number of positions which merit much serious attention in the future.^{^[xxx]} Some of these might indeed be non-naturalistic positions with a substantial ability to "track" naturalistic ones. Note that Putnam, who (I think mistakenly) identifies naturalism with reductionism, rejects the notion that human reasoning can be naturalized. Michael Morris' The True and the Good (1992), for another example, is an extensive recent development of a non-naturalistic theory of content and propositional attitudes. Certain forms of anti-naturalism are likely to remain viable and are given some measure of support through a point made by William Alston: the assertion that knowledge has an irreducibly valuative dimension is in principle consistent with a denial of the view that valuative concepts are sui generis.

Yet the idea of "continuity" between philosophy and the sciences has evidently been a central theme defining naturalism in all its various strands at least since the classic statement of American naturalism in the 1944 volume Naturalism and the Human Spirit, to which Dewey and Edel contributed. In contemporary thinkers such as Montmarquet one finds a concern to expand discussions of continuity beyond the kinds of connections that are the strict focus of the eliminative and reductive branches of contemporary naturalism. Such concern motivates a new inquiry into the continuity of science with philosophy, one that casts this continuity in terms of a general unifying account of knowledge and valuation. The proposed expansion of the issue of continuity retains not only the philosopher's own special interests in explanation, but also, as some other alternatives do not, philosophy's central role in guiding the integration of the special sciences. Philosophers can guide the integration of the special sciences by organizing their contributions to the understanding of the generation, criticism and revision or change of norms; they can also do so by providing a framework that counters the reductive or overbearing explanatory programs that we have sometimes seen emerge from the social, cognitive and biological sciences. To provide such guidance, philosophers may need to foster the alliance proffered by social epistemology. While illuminating the `rhetorical character of disciplinary boundaries,' social epistemologists oppose the anti-normativism of the sociology of scientific knowledge during the 1980s and the broader legacy of "normative retreat" in both English and American branches of analytic philosophy (Fuller, 1993).^{^[xxxi]}

A principle of continuity may be cast in a variety of ways, and the distinctive version of naturalism that I support has been termed "criterialism" (Maffie, 1990). This term denotes the idea that the continuity between philosophy and the special sciences is strong enough to maintain natural facts as the ground or criteria for the assignment of normative predicates, though not necessarily strong enough to warrant the reductionist or definist claim that valuative predicates or properties reduce to or are exhaustively definable by natural facts. One can hold that facts about the nature of human cognition and cognitive practices yield explanations of why certain traits are virtues, without holding that evaluations are deducible from or definable as nonevaluative facts. But one can also hold that in the context of a fallibilist epistemology, it is virtues and skills and not definitions that are the best regress-stoppers with respect to the problem of justification. The criterialist course in virtue epistemology may not be satisfactory to all self-described naturalists, who might find it in certain respects too close to the non-naturalism described above. It does, at least as I have developed it, necessitate a resituation of norm governance in science within a broader and more varied class of social practices. But despite Kvanvig's argument that the concerns of virtue epistemology are inextricably intertwined with "fundamental structural epistemology," Sosa's and Goldman's developments of virtue epistemology are already oriented towards achieving the integration of philosophy with the cognitive and social sciences (Goldman 1992, 1993a & b).

The upshot of our discussions of virtue epistemology epistemology is to support both the specific criterialist form of naturalism with which it is associated, and the guiding role it is capable of re-establishing for philosophy in the study of human reasoners and valuers. As I have argued, both points can be seen when we consider metaphilosophical reasons for the re-emergence of a virtue-centered approaches in both ethics nd epistemology. Areas of research in which it would be helpful to pursue in my view include the following:

(1) to clarify the metaphilosophical grounds for analogies and disanalogies between meta-ethical and meta-epistemological theory and debate;

(2) to investigate the naturalistic merits of various virtue-centered accounts of knowledge and justification, and in particular how adequately they are able to separate and show a connection between causal-explanatory and normative issues in epistemology;

(3) to debate the viability of the criterial naturalism associated with virtue epistemology vis-a-vis definist/reductionist naturalism and various forms of non-naturalism,

(4) to explicate the divergent interests in explanation which various biological, psychological, sociological and anthropological programs exhibit with respect to the study of norm governance in various human practices, and how a pluralistic conception of norm governance might show their mutual conncetions,

(5) to explore further how research into (1)-(4) above may aid in guiding the further integration of philosophy with the social and cognitive sciences.

Department of Philosophy/102

University of Nevada, Reno

NOTES