VIRTUE THEORETIC RESPONSES TO SKEPTICISM Axtell

Virtue Theoretic Responses to Skepticism

Guy Axtell

1. Introduction

Virtue theory concerns philosophical evaluation of human agents in their interaction with the world. Being embedded in a world, both natural and social, the interactions 
of human agents give rise to ethical and to epistemic contexts, which in turn become the primary locus for the descriptive, explanatory and normative tasks with which 
philosophy concerns itself. The central focus in virtue theory on understanding agents and the habits and dispositions through which their interactions in the world unfold 
allows for the acknowledgement of analogies between epistemic and ethical evaluation, but for the acknowledgement of disanalogies as well.

      Virtue theory has been applied to numerous domains of philosophic study, and its roots arguably go back to some of the earliest Greek discussion of the motivations 
to philosophize. Its resurgence over the past four decades has taken place first in the subfield of ethics, and since the 1980’s in the subfield of epistemology as well.[1] 
Questions about how to proceed in the study of core epistemic concepts like justification, knowledge, and understanding are ones that contemporary virtue epistemologists 
quite often engage. Skeptical arguments are another, and indeed are closely caught up in discussion of the former concepts and the problems that surround them. Even 
where no ‘true skeptics’ are present to support them, skeptical arguments, whether those of “global” (radical) or “local” (domain-specific) import, help to uncover the 
depth in a conception of epistemic agency, and allow us to reflect more carefully upon our human epistemic condition. As John Greco puts it, the study of skeptical 
arguments “drives positive epistemology.”

This paper focuses on the responses that proponents of VE make to radical skepticism, and particularly to two related forms of it, Pyrrhonian skepticism and the “underdetermination-based” argument, both of which are receiving widening attention in recent debate. Section 2 of the paper briefly articulates these two skeptical arguments and their inter-relationship, while section 3 explains the close connection between a virtue theoretic and a neo-Moorean response to them. As I cannot fully canvas the growing field of VE, the focus will primarily be on leading figures such as Ernest Sosa, who develops “virtue perspectivism” in a series of papers and in his 2004 John Locke Lectures, and John Greco, who develops “agent reliabilism” in Putting Skeptics in Their Place (2000) and recent papers. In Sections 4-5 I advance my arguments for improving the prospects of virtue-theoretic responses, sketching a particular version of VE that seeks to recast somewhat how we understand the “externalist turn in epistemology,” thereby suggesting ways of improving the adequacy of philosophical responses to skepticism.

2. Pyrrhonian Skepticism and the Underdetermination Argument

One type of skepticism that current debate takes especially seriously is expressed in underdetermination-based arguments. According to such arguments, one’s total evidence, at least as considered internalistically from a first-person perspective, underdetermines one’s judgment in favor of common-sense realism over alternative ‘hypotheses’ that depict us as victims of systematic deception. Here is how Pritchard (2005) more formally articulates for study UA, the “template underdetermination-based skeptical argument”:

(U1) If my evidence does not favour my belief in everyday propositions over the known to be incompatible skeptical hypotheses, then I am not internalistically justified in believing everyday propositions.

(U2) My evidence does not favour my belief in everyday propositions over the known to be incompatible skeptical hypotheses.

(UC) I am not internalistically justified in believing everyday propositions (and thus I lack knowledge of everyday propositions). (2005, 205)

Pritchard takes the underdetermination argument to reflect especially well the motivations behind contemporary neo-Pyrrhonism (see also Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), 2004). He rightly points out that (the explicit appeal to what is “internalistically justified” not withstanding) we can find versions of this argument among the ancients as well. Indeed I would connect the underdetermination principle[2] with the principle of the equipollence (roughly, ‘justificational equivalence’) of theoretical suppositions or “judgments” in the thought of the second-century A.D. skeptic Sextus Empiricus. In Outlines of Pyrrhonism, his most basic characterization of skepticism is this:

Skepticism is an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgments in any way whatsoever, with the result that, owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed, we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense and next to a state of ‘unperturbedness’ or quietude [ataraxia] (1, 8).

In Sextus and Agrippa’s Pyrrhonism, the attempt of anti-skeptical philosophers to escape the equipollence of theoretical judgments is found to land them upon one or another point of a trilemma, where the philosophic reconstruction of one’s ability to know (or alternatively, one’s prerogative to claim rational justification for one’s belief), is a) viciously circular, b) endlessly regressive, or c) ultimately arbitrary. ‘Agrippa’s Trilemma’ remains a matter of deep concern in contemporary epistemology. As Pritchard points out in Epistemic Luck (2005) it centrally supports the view “that any claim to know can be called into question via the skeptical techniques the Pyrrhonian skeptics have identified, and [that] this highlights the ultimately ‘brute’ nature of our epistemic position” (220).

Another reason why Pyrrhonian skepticism and the underdetermination argument are chosen as the focus of our examination is that they allow us to engage the issue of how “the externalist turn in epistemology” over the past several decades impacts the prospects of the anti-skeptic’s path in philosophy. It is clear that the externalist turn and with it, the rejection of access internalism, has recast the role of positive epistemologists in dialogue with skeptical challengers. But do externalist responses merely change the topic and avoid the real challenge of skepticism, as its critics allege? Or are they as their proponents claim, highly advantageous by allowing us to see how arguments like UA can come can appear insurmountable when they are not? These questions are pertinent here because, while it would be an overstatement to say that there is a single distinctive virtue theoretical approach to skepticism, the best-known proponents of virtue epistemology clearly take advantage of externalist responses to skepticism, believing that it provides strong resources both for diagnosing the motivations to skepticism, and for responding to the skeptic’s strongest arguments. In the next section we can canvas some of their views.

3. Nature and Reason in the Common-Sense Tradition

Philosophers as diverse as Pascal and Hume have seen the primary tension inclining us to radical skepticism as that between “nature” and “reason.” “Who will unravel this tangle?” asks Pascal. “Nature confutes the skeptics, and reason confutes the dogmatists […such that a person] can neither avoid these two sects, nor hold fast to either one of them!”[3] Nature inclines us to common-sense beliefs (such as the existence of an external world, of other minds, of causal regularities in nature, etc.) while reason inclines us to take seriously skeptical arguments that would impugn our capacity for knowledge even of these things. The underdetermination argument stated in Section 2 expresses one key form of the skeptic’s worry. Doesn’t our apparent inability to eliminate known-to-be incompatible radical skeptical hypotheses by reflectively good reasons demonstrate at least that our human condition is lacking in qualities that are epistemically desirable? Doesn’t it, further, impugn our ability to know and our epistemic responsibility in attributing justified belief to ourselves and others?

G. E. Moore’s “common-sense realist” reply is to defend our natural confidence in our everyday knowledge and our ability to claim it for ourselves. But critics allege that his reply is question-begging, and therefore hangs upon the circularity horn of the above mentioned skeptical trilemma. Contemporary “neo-Moorean” responses argue that Moore’s response is actually quite illuminating, but only after it gets a retrofit to reflect a reliabilist stream in modern epistemological thought stretching back to Thomas Reid. Sosa (2000b) and Greco (2002a) both discuss how Reid, too, is part of the commonsense tradition, and how certain aspects of his reliabilist orientation are subtly suggested in Moore’s better known “defense of common sense” (1925).[4]

For the virtue epistemologists we are considering, developing a neo-Moorean argument with the kind of naturalized conception of reason that can take advantage of the resources of reliabilist externalism would be quite advantageous. Hence Greco finds it illuminating to study the substantive and methodological continuities between Reid and Moore in his “How to Reid Moore.” Greco argues that neither is ‘simply insisting’ that we know what the skeptic denies, or whether each is in his own way an astute critic of skeptical arguments. Rather, both authors held that the evidence of sense is no less reasonable than that of demonstration, and for Reid at least, as for contemporary reliabilists and other epistemic externalists, introspective consciousness, perception, memory, testimony, and inductive reasoning are all possible sources of knowledge in addition to deductive or demonstrative reasoning.

In “How to Defeat Opposition to Moore,”[5] Sosa’s articulation of a key area of contemporary debate focuses upon the skeptical “argument from ignorance,” hereafter AI. This begins with two definitions:

h I am a handless brain in a vat being fed experiences as if I were normally embodied and situated.

o I now have hands.

Then follows Sosa’s version of the argument:

1. I don’t know that not-h

2. If I don’t know that not-h, then I don’t know that o.

So, C. I don’t know that o

Sosa characterizes the three main positions that have been adopted on AI:

Skeptic: 1, 2; therefore C

Nozick et al.: 1, Not C; therefore Not 2

Moore: 2, Not C; therefore Not 1

The skeptic holds the Moorean escape from skeptical conclusion C to be viciously circular, but the neo-Moorean responds that the logic of the argument cuts two directions, such that if I do know that I have hands, then I do know that skeptical hypotheses inconsistent with this knowledge are false, even if I haven’t directly considered them all.[6]

Sosa’s basic description of knowledge is “apt performance” in the way of belief. For a belief to be apt, as Sosa puts it in his Locke Lectures, A Virtue Epistemology, is for it to be “correct in a way creditable to the believer, as determined by how salient is the believer’s competence in the explanation of his being right” (2007, 60; see also his 2002a and 2002b). On Sosa’s view, epistemic competence is socially as well as individually seated, and virtue-theoretic terms better describe this competence than other approaches. Whether considering a correct belief due to intellectual virtue or a right action due to practical virtue, the competence and performance of agents are central to our explanations of virtuous success, and a virtuous performance will involve both the agent’s constitution and situation.

Since the aptness of the agent’s belief entails that its correctness is attributable to a competence exercised in appropriate conditions, the concept of aptness is an externalist one, and the condition an externalist condition. Yet Sosa accommodates certain intuitions traditionally associated with epistemic internalism by retaining the importance of “reflective coherence” in the individual, and a strong sense of human knowledge even at its lowest rungs as an achievement. These concerns with the lasting significance of reflective coherence are developed in the fuller account he describes as “virtue perspectivism,” which requires that agents achieve a degree of epistemic “ascent”: “reflective knowledge goes beyond animal knowledge, and requires also an apt meta-apprehension that the object-level perceptual belief is apt” (2007, 81).

It is important to point out at this juncture that none of the authors mentioned here sees a need to ‘go internalist’ in order to acknowledge and respect “the understanding and coherence dear to intellectuals.”[7] Sosa, Greco, Zagzebski, Riggs, Axtell and others each adopt what has been called a “compatibilist” view of the relationship between our internalist and externalist interests in explanation. They each articulate a distinction between personal and objective justification that they take to be miscast as a distinction between internalism and externalism conceived, as the typically are, as mutually exclusive and exhaustive accounts of epistemic justification. Epistemic compatibilism and incompatibilism will be more fully discussed later, but Greco’s (2005) description of VE as “mixed theory” is one expression of it, where he writes, “The main idea is that an adequate account of knowledge ought to contain both a responsibility condition and a reliability condition. Moreover, a virtue account can explain how the two are tied together. In cases of knowledge, objective reliability is grounded in epistemically responsible action.”

Still, each has distinctive views in this area, and Greco (2004b) worries that Sosa’s meta-requirement of epistemic perspective makes broader concessions to internalism than is necessary, perhaps hampering rather than improving VE’s anti-skeptical force.[8] The concern with an epistemically relevant distinction between reflective and animal knowledge, and his stratified or ‘two tiered’ account of justification seems to be a recurring theme in contributors including Greco to the watershed Ernest Sosa and his Critics volume (Greco, ed. 2004a; see Kornblith, for example). But Sosa’s “Replies” there, and the 2004 Locke Lectures, A Virtue Epistemology engage these concerns quite directly.

In Putting Skeptics in Their Place Greco examines a wide range of skeptical problems, and argues that responding to them drives us to a form of reliabilist externalism centered on the cognitive abilities of epistemic agents (compare also Audi 2004). A key thesis in Greco’s “agent reliabilism” is that the core “relevant alternatives intuition” and this form of VE are mutually-supportive. The relevant alternatives intuition as Greco describes it is the common-sense suggestion that modally far-off error possibilities do not present relevant philosophical challenges to our ability to know most of the things we think we know. Philosophers can remain true to this intuition and harness its anti-skeptical import by relating it to the settled dispositions and competencies through which agents strive for truth and effective agency in the world in which they find themselves. If the kinds of cognitive dispositions a person must manifest in order for her to meet a normative requirement of reliability are sustained by her thinking conscientiously, then this latter concept is important as well and shows us that issues of motivation and habituation remain important factors in any sound philosophic understanding of our epistemic agency.[9]

Greco thinks that agent reliabilism provides some unique resources for redressing the faulty assumption that for agents to have knowledge they must be able to discriminate the truth of their beliefs from every alternative skeptical scenario regardless of its modal distance from the actual world. Firstly, we need to understand relevant possibility in terms of the “possible worlds” semantics of modal logic: A possibility is relevant if it is true in some close-by possible world, and closeness is to be understood in terms of overall world similarity (2000, 206). Secondly, it is virtue theory which best captures our reasoning about which possibilities are relevant: the very concept of knowledge, and therefore of the relevant possibilities that must be excluded for its possession, involves reference to cognitive abilities and dispositions:

In the language of possible worlds, someone has an ability to achieve some result under relevant conditions only if the person is very likely to achieve that result across close possible worlds. But if knowledge essentially involves having cognitive abilities, and if abilities are dispositions to achieve results across close possible worlds, then this explains why possibilities are relevant only when they are true in some close possible world. Specifically, only such possibilities as these can undermine one’s cognitive abilities. In an environment where deception by demons is actual or probable, I lack the ability to reliably form true beliefs and avoid false beliefs. But if no such demons exist in this world or similar ones, they do not affect my cognitive faculties and habits ( 207).

4. Three Competing Anti-Skeptical Strategies

We have focused primarily upon the work of Sosa and Greco because of the direct contributions each has made to a philosophically adequate response to radical skepticism. Turning in this section to points about VE made by its critics, we will describe and engage Sven Bernecker’s objections informed by a kind of austere externalism that rejects epistemic compatibilism, and Richard Foley’s objections from an internalist perspective on justification that result in his proposal for “a trial separation between the theory of knowledge and the theory of justified belief.” This serves my later purposes, since I want first to defend epistemic compatibilism in this general way before going on to develop philosophical support for its specifically virtue-theoretic versions.

A thorough-going externalist, Bernecker considers and rejects Sosa’s and Greco’s epistemologies as forms of what he characterizes more generally as epistemic compatibilism. This is a useful term but defined only vaguely by the claim that it is possible to “combine satisfactorily internalist and externalist features in a single theory” (2006, 81). The target indicated by his critique is quite wide, but Bernecker’s “Prospects of Epistemic Compatibilism” provides a useful taxonomy of different arguments in the literature supporting distinct versions of compatibilism. Sosa’s and Greco’s accounts are singled out for extended criticism (the latter in Bernecker 2007) for the reason that the virtue epistemologists offer some of the best-sustained defenses in contemporary epistemology of views associated with epistemic compatibilism.

Of course, nobody could hold that what needs to be reconciled are internalism and externalism as understood in the usual stipulative definitions of them. Internalism about justification is standardly defined for introductory purposes as the thesis that all of the elements that justify a belief must be accessible to the mind upon reflection, with externalism being defined as the negation of that thesis. Notice that this style of definition excludes a middle and leaves the terrain of theories of justification asymmetrically shaped: Internalism is a positive thesis of specified meaning, while externalism, by its purely negative character, is left to a wide parcel that might admit of a plurality of positions once developed as positive epistemologies.

Externalism invites ‘mixed’ theory but does not necessitate it: Compatibilists are those who accept the invitation, while ‘incompatibilists’ is what we can call those (at either end of the scale running from pure internalism to pure externalism) who spurn the invitation to mixed theory. Hence Bernecker’s incompatibilist stance is not simply the rejection of internalism, something which is true of all forms of externalism by the definitions he employs. His stance, rather, is that externalists should reject any concerns about epistemic evaluation arising from the first-person perspective. Contrary to the thrust of VE, Bernecker’s proposal is that we give up efforts at reconciliation and embrace instead a conception of naturalized epistemology on which only third-personal concerns play a central explanatory role.

Besides being able to distinguish different kinds of compatibilism, we should also want a taxonomy that acknowledges as “incompatibilist” such eliminative forms of externalism as Bernecker maintains. In order to get a proper handle on the range of positions in the debate, I propose adopting the broadest taxonomy possible, which we might do by adapting that familiar trichotomy between theorists who view themselves as “Enemies,” “Strangers,” or “Partners” in any given debate. More formally, we’ll describe these as the “Conflict,” “Independence,” and “Integration” models of the interests in explanation engaged by the internalist/externalist debate. This three-fold taxonomy allows us to see three quite distinct models of the relationship of internalist and externalist interests in explanation, each well-represented in present-day debates in analytic epistemology. Moreover, when we extend this taxonomy to inform us about divergent forms of VE specifically, we find a confirmation that few if any existing forms of VE adopt the Conflict model, but instead support one or another form of epistemic compatibilism.[10]

Finally, we may further explore differences within the “compatibilist” camp. Here positions can be usefully divided between those adopting the Integration model and those adopting the Independence model. This choice between the two models supporting epistemic compatibilism overlaps with a fairly clear distinction between what I will term “Strong” and “Weak” forms of VE. First, let’s refer to any analysis of knowledge that defends an areteic (i.e., virtue theoretic) condition on knowledge as “Strong VE”. This term is broad enough to include Sosa, Greco and Zagzebski as proponents, despite their outstanding differences. The Integrative model suggests that a correct account of knowledge is one that finds epistemic reliability and epistemic responsibility not as sources of antithetical third and first-personal ‘logics,’ but as normative concepts mutually presupposed in a proper understanding of self-reflective agents like us. Second, there are today quite a number of authors who can be described as virtue epistemologists because they acknowledge an epistemically-central place for the study of the intellectual virtues, yet see its place lying entirely outside the analysis of knowledge proper.[11] These are, on our taxonomy, proponents of “Weak VE,” and they have sometimes been the most explicit critics of the preoccupation with analysis of knowledge and justification in epistemology and in Strong VE in particular. When used to illuminate differences within the family of virtue-theoretic epistemologies, our taxonomy clarifies the point that proponents of Strong VE typically maintain Integrationist models for epistemic compatibilism, while proponents of Weak VE typically subscribe to Independence models.[12]

In summary thus far, our proposed taxonomy allows for the fact that Independence and Integration models are often employed by epistemologists who are not proponents of VE in either the strong or weak sense; but it also identifies under-noticed sources of tension between epistemologists, and a veiled debate with quite direct implications for how best to respond to radical skepticism. As “models” rather than “theories,” Conflict, Independence and Integration represent in our taxonomy three different discursive strategies (Table 1), and the choice between them demands that we think closely about which one best serves anti-skeptical philosophy.

Table 1: Three Competing Anti-Skeptical Discursive Strategies

Metaphor Model Description

Enemies

Conflict

(or incompatibilism)

Standard access internalism as excluding externalist elements; also ‘pure’ or ‘eliminative’ externalism as in Bernecker’s stance against all forms of compatibilism.

Strangers

Independence

(or weak compatibilism)

Foley’s compromising “separation proposal” which severs the link between knowledge and justification, while maintaining that internalism remains correct when understood as something like a theory of personal justification tied to a general theory of rationality; includes “Weak” VE where belief out of intellectual virtue is epistemically desirable, but isn’t studied for any connection to knowledge-possession.

Partners

Integration

(or strong compatibilism)

‘Mixed theories’ of justification that are externalist in character but maintain requirements for personal justification/proper motivation as well as for agent reliability; includes “Strong VE” where the requirement of successful belief out of intellectual virtue carries both kinds of demands.

We can now utilize this taxonomy to state a stronger thesis: that as an anti-skeptical strategy, adoption of the Conflict model constitutes a dialectical mis-step. One reason for this that I have already suggested but will continue to develop is that a neo-Moorean argument well serves the interests of an externalist response to skepticism, yet the neo-Moorean approach thrives in an environment of epistemic compatibilism while withering apart from it. More specifically, when starting from incompatibilist assumptions, externalists are tempted to go beyond acknowledging instances of unreflective ‘brute’ knowledge, to supposing that most if not all human knowledge is merely of this nature. Here the concerns shared predominantly but not exclusively by internalists and skeptics, concerns about our cognitive responsibility in the human modes of inquiry we conduct and the evidences we use when we provide reflective reasons for our beliefs, appears lost or simply given up. The “brute nature,” of the human epistemic condition is conceded as we learn to leave first-personal perspectives out of the field of the theory of knowledge. Perhaps reflective of such an austere form of externalism, Bernecker explicitly rejects Sosa’s concern with “so-called reflective knowledge,” denying that it amounts to a central concern of epistemology as he defines it, and countering it with the suggestion that unreflective ‘brute’ knowledge is simply paradigmatic of what we must take knowledge to be. According to our own compatibilist approach, however, contemporary neo-Pyrrhonists such as Barry Stroud (2004a, 2004b) are actually correct to see the kind of externalist response to skepticism afforded by ‘unmixed’ or ‘eliminative’ forms of externalism, as philosophically unsatisfying.[13]

Having considered and briefly responded to eliminative externalist objections to VE, let us briefly look at the problem of the stability of epistemic compatibilism in light of certain objections stemming from an internalist conception of justification. Externalists and internalists are in agreement that questions about agent responsibility in inquiry are distinct from questions about the agent’s internal access to reasons. Alvin Goldman, an externalist, rightly points out that access internalism is quite compatible with the ‘epistemic sloth’ of an agent who is subjectively justified only because she shirks her responsibility to carefully investigate or weigh potential counter-evidence to her belief. Lawrence Bonjour, an internalist/coherentist, recently conceded that despite having earlier conflated these issues, “being epistemically responsible” is neither necessary nor sufficient for “internalist justification” as he continues to use that term (2003, 176). This broad agreement suggests that compatibilists can respond to Bonjour’s internalism by drawing more fully on the distinction between a) VE’s interest in concerns with epistemic responsibility in personal justification, and b) the strong demand that Bonjour allows the skeptic to make, that there be available an “internalist justification” with which to respond to the Underdetermination Argument.[14]

Another related criticism of Strong VE coming from an internalist perspective is captured by Foley’s proposal for a “trial separation between the theory of knowledge and the theory of justified belief.” Foley claims that externalism and internalism “need not be competitors at all.” He finds their conflict to be due to a major false assumption they share, “that the properties which make a belief justified are by definition such that when a true belief has those properties, it is a good candidate to be an instance of knowledge” (2005, 314). It was this assumption of logical connection between knowing and having justified belief, Foley charges, that prompted many externalists who until fairly recently were only reacting against justification-driven accounts of knowledge, to seek to reconceive justification externalistically as well.

Foley does indeed provide an interesting reading of the debate by articulating and questioning what he simply calls “the unfortunate assumption” that would have us assess the satisfactoriness of a theory of justification by the service it provides in improving one’s analysis of knowledge. The adequacy of an account of justification, at the very least, certainly needn’t be restricted to its contribution to the analysis of propositional knowledge; but Foley’s proposal demands more than this, a full (though trial) separation of the two theories. Sosa, he thinks, still makes the unfortunate assumption. But Foley overstates his argument that externalists and internalists “are principally concerned with different issues,” by claiming that the one is concerned with the theory of knowledge, and the other with the theory of justified belief (2004, 60). It is this division that I take as providing Foley’s Independence model for epistemic compatibilism.[15]

Although Bernecker’s and Foley’s objections are both directed against Sosa, it should be clear that they reflect some otherwise quite antagonistic philosophical motivations. In contrast to the stance against Strong VE that both authors’ exhibit, the position I will argue for in section 5 remains conservative enough to retain a conceptual connection between knowledge and personal justification. In response to Bernecker I hold that adoption of the Conflict model constitutes a dialectical mis-step for anti-skeptical philosophy; in response to Foley I point out that there are numerous such ‘separation proposals’ in epistemology today, and many of them upon closer inspection undermine rather than improve our ability to respond to radical skepticism. The advantageousness of the Integrationist stance in this regard should be readily apparent, and though I have yet to make a positive case to show its philosophical stability in the face of the skeptical challenge, we can at least conclude thus far that the “prospects” for epistemic compatibilism are not something that should be easily dismissed, at least if a philosophically satisfying response to radical skepticism is part of what any theory of knowledge should strive for.

5. Improving the Prospects of Externalist Responses to Skepticism

Edmund Gettier’s objections in “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? (1963) to the ‘standard’ or Justified True Belief (JTB) analysis of knowledge provided a spur to what has since come to be termed the “externalist turn in epistemology.” But the received view of what I will call Gettier’s Challenge, wherein the task is to produce an analysis of knowledge with truth and justification as conditions, plus some further condition specifically to handle Gettier cases, is multiply ambiguous. It presupposes that the justification condition remains in place unaffected through the externalist turn in epistemology, with an externalist “Gettier condition” coming only by way of simple addition—as ‘fourth condition’ suggests. It also seems to push at every instance towards “infallibilism,” the view that for the challenge to be met, the other conditions in our analysis won’t suffice unless they actually entail the truth of the target belief.

If this is the way matters stand, they can easily be seen to motivate just the kinds of radical or eliminative externalism that we previously identified and found wanting. But fortunately, this motivation for infallibilism in epistemology depends on a dubious conception of Gettier’s Challenge. On my view, the externalist turn does not spell the end of the legitimate concern of epistemologists with personal justification, but does necessitate its thorough reconceptualization. To help motivate this claim I want to suggest an alternative construal of Gettier’s challenge that accepts its impetus to externalism as a correct implication, but provides a quite different understanding of how epistemology needs to change on account of it. On this construal we can affirm that infallibilism is no part of Gettier’s legacy, and take the impetus to externalism as genuinely empowering a new mode of response to radical skepticism.

The argument in support of these claims will proceed in three steps. First, contrary to the demand that the received view triggers, for a statement of ‘thick’ conditions to inform us what will be sufficient for knowledge in any case whatever, I argue that we need only include ‘thin’ or deflated conditions in our analysis, conditions capable of being flexible enough to take on very different content in response to different cases at hand. This first step is best exemplified in the literature in the proposal made by Heather Battaly (2001) in “Thin Concepts to the Rescue: Thinning the Concepts of Epistemic Justification and Intellectual Virtue.” Second, our claim that personal justification remains important, but cannot retain its original, internalist construal through the course of the externalist turn, will be supported through the work of Michael Williams (2001, 2005). I construe Williams as an Integrationist whose form of strong epistemic compatibilism is embodied in his “Default and Challenge” model of epistemic justification (hereafter DCM). Third and finally, we develop the symmetries between these two proposals: we spell out the philosophical advantages of ‘marrying’ the thin concept of an epistemic virtue as a condition on knowledge to the DCM as embodying the kind of analysis that should be sought once we’ve fully eschewed attachment to the tradition and internalistically-motivated Prior Grounding model. It is this third step, I will argue, that provides epistemology with new resources for a more self-consistent form of compatibilism, and through it a more philosophically satisfying response to radical skepticism.

a. Thin concepts of epistemic justification and intellectual virtue.

In her essay “Thin Concepts to the Rescue,” Battaly argues that we can circumvent much ill-motivated debate “by recognizing that the concepts of justification and intellectual virtue are thin. Each is thin because it has multiple conditions of application […such that] there is no definite answer as to which of these combinations is necessary, or which is sufficient, for its application” (99). Internalists and externalists (and sadly to some extent virtue epistemologists too) drag out unsupported debates by ‘picking the poison apple’ of tacitly thickening these thin concepts in different ways. A “combinatorial vagueness” ensues that spurs heated exchanges and seems to invite still further thickening of a condition as a way to make an analysis more precise and to avoid counter-examples to the necessity and sufficiency of its stated conditions. But just what is this debate over, she asks, if there is “no sharp distinction between the combinations of conditions that are, and those that are not, necessary and sufficient for its application”? (104)

To avoid picking the apple, Battaly prescribes leaving the concepts of justification and intellectual virtue with little pre-given meaning. A thin areteic condition is a condition that remains largely formal in character, but is for that same reason highly flexible, being able to take on different meanings in different contexts. To place it into one’s analysis of knowledge is thereby merely to present the skeptical interrogator with “a roughly drawn sketch that can be completed in different ways” (107).

If this proposal is useful it is because what epistemologists want to analyze through terms like ‘justified’ and ‘knows’ actually occurs along a range or spectrum.[16] Left in a formal or deflated manner, an areteic condition can be ‘bent’ in several directions, allowing it to stand in for a diverse list of possible meanings of justification—items ranging from simple ‘aptness’ that might invite reference to only the faculty virtues in some instances, to the complex reason-giving and sensitivity to counter-evidence that we associate with the application of critical reflective intelligence, and with sound reflective intellectual habits and inquisitive methods.

But can this first step of the argument lead us anywhere worth going? By suggesting we can treat justification this way, aren’t we conceding that we fail to meet a reasonable demand by the skeptic for a single set of “thick” necessary and sufficient conditions that define knowledge across its entire knowledge spectrum? If so, we must explain both why skeptical arguments have the initial plausibility to deserve serious attention, and why they lose their force or don’t arise in the same way when we proceed by our own premises. In order to meet this burden, we will need to take a second step involving a more direct examination of just what our dialogical obligations to the skeptic actually are.

b. The “Default and Challenge” model of epistemic justificationn.

Williams’ form of epistemic compatibilism makes a crucial contrast between the Prior Grounding conception of knowledge (hereafter PGM), and the Default and Challenge model (hereafter DCM).

[T]o take account of externalist insights, we have to detach the idea that knowledge is essentially connected with justification, not only from the classical demonstrative ideal and its infallibilist descendants, but also from all conceptions of justification that insist on respecting the Prior Grounding [Model]. Effecting this detachment leads us to see justification as exhibiting a Default and Challenge structure, where constraints on the reasonableness of challenges and the appropriateness of justifications are contextually variable along several dimensions.[17]

Not only the Agrippan Trilemma, but also the traditional internalist conception of justification builds in the PGM, which Williams characterizes as composed of four inter-related theses of an internalist and evidentialist orientation.[18] If we implicitly adopt the PGM from the outset, then we accept an asymmetry of justificational obligations and an unrestricted commitment on the part of claimants to demonstrate entitlement to opinion; “If all reasonable believing is believing-on-evidence, the skeptic is entitled to ask for the evidence to be produced,” generating a vicious regress. But absent this requirement, the skeptic holds no right to issue such “naked challenges.”

Many authors have noticed substantial connections between epistemic internalism and motivations to skepticism. Williams explains this connection by noting that the PGM “both generates the threat of skepticism and constrains our responses to that threat” (2001, 188). On the DCM, by contrast, “questions of justification arise in a definite justificational context, constituted by a complex and in general largely tacit background of entitlements, some of which will be default” (158). What Williams calls our default entitlements are not “mere assumptions,” because they are always provisional and backed up by a defense commitment. The most important point of Williams’ approach for us to develop is a different conception of our discursive obligations. Adopting the DCM means that challengers and claimants share justificational responsibilities, and hence that one needn’t concede to the gross asymmetry that the PGM instantiates: “no move in the game of giving and asking for reasons is presuppositionless. On a Default and Challenge conception of justification, there is no room for either the skeptic’s global doubts or the traditional epistemologist’s global reassurances” (150).

c. Marrying thin concepts and the default and challenge model.

From the one side, the DCM is not only compatible with, but seems to require for its completion, two distinct targets for philosophical analysis: one for the default mode of inquiry and the other for particular motivated challenges in particular cases. The thin and thick description of intellectual virtues supply the DCM with just the kind of explanations one might intuitively think the ‘default’ and ‘challenge’ contexts call for: Thin descriptions for our default philosophical mode of life, and thick descriptions for more skeptical philosophic mode of life, or simply, whenever a defense commitment is engaged for the attributor of knowledge to a particular agent.[19]

In the default situation , no particular challenge is set before us and so one or more ‘thin’ conditions on knowledge suffices; areteic and anti-luck conditions (one or both) are good candidates for this since they aim to provide what is needed while keeping the focus on naturalistically-grounded talk of the agent’s cognitive habits and dispositions. ‘Thin concept analysis’ featuring virtue-theoretic terms, in particular, underscores a naturalistic approach to knowledge (one grounded in our habits and dispositions) that nevertheless preserves the link Williams wants with issues of personal justification (or responsibility). Prior to or in lieu of a motivated challenge to truth and virtue having come apart in a particular case, a thin areteic condition suffices for the expectation that the truth of the agent’s belief will be of epistemic credit to her as an agent. By contrast, the dialectical context in which there has arisen a motivated challenge over a particular case calls for a different kind of analysis, and in this contest thickly describable dispositions and acquired virtues again seem to provide adherents of the DCM with just the kind of explanation their model calls for.

Viewed from the other side, proponents of VE might come to see adoption of the DCM as advantageous if they find that it helps them clarify the very different explanatory roles that thick and thin concepts play in our field. If the DCM supports a more stable form of epistemic compatibilism, as Williams clearly holds, then its adoption and the consequent relinquishing of preconceptions about justification bound up in the PGM may aid inquiries into the relationship between our normative and naturalistic posits, and into what Riggs (2007) describes as “the conceptual connections among a family of concepts that include credit, responsibility, attribution, and luck.” For in responding to a particular motivated challenge to our attribution of knowledge to an agent, we are essentially responding to concerns that the agent either has a false belief despite her best cognitive effort, or else to concerns that the agent should not be accorded the epistemic credit that we normally would accord her for her cognitive success — that is, for the truth of her belief (for Greco’s account of epistemic credit, see his 2003a and 2003b).

Adoption of the DCM also aids VE my providing another way of understanding the importance of the “relevant alternatives intuition.” “It is easy to miss the fact that the practice of justifying is only activated by finding oneself in the context of a properly motivated challenge,” and when we miss this we allow the skeptic “to transform the ever-present possibility of contextually appropriate demands for evidence into a unrestricted insistence on grounds, encouraging us to move from fallibilism to radical skepticism” (Williams 2001, 150). After Williams’ proposed dialectical re-positioning, the anti-skeptical philosopher’s inability to answer the skeptic premised upon conditions set forth by the PGM can be acknowledged, but the demand itself reasonably set aside.[20]

The view we have arrived at through our three-step argument underlines the pragmatic wisdom behind Battaly’s proposal for harnessing the resources of thin concept analyses of central epistemic terms, and acknowledges the force of Williams’ demand that self-consistent externalists stop answering to demands whose rationale lies only in the Prior Grounding model of our discursive obligations to the skeptic. Moreover, we have taken a step somewhat unique in the literature by intentionally tying the Battaly and Williams proposals closely together, arguing that doing so multiplies the anti-skeptical force of each taken separately. In summary of the arguments in sections 4-5, my intention has been to point out how the force of virtue theoretic responses to skepticism might be substantially enhanced by realizing their symmetries with the Default and Challenge model of the discursive obligations holding between skeptical interrogators and anti-skeptical interlocutors. It isn’t merely circular reasoning or arbitrary assumption to hold that modally far-off possibilities do not present philosophical objections to our ordinary practices of knowledge attribution. Adoption of the DCM allows us to see this, while leading to an understanding of Gettier’s Challenge that invites neo-Moorean epistemologies that draw upon the core relevant alternatives intuition.[21]

Notes

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