Inferential Abilities and Common Epistemic Goods

Abstract

While the situationist challenge has been prominent in philosophical literature in ethics for over a decade, only recently has it been extended to virtue epistemology (See also forthcoming work on this issue by Doris and Olin, Heather Battaly, Christian Miller in Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue. (Fairweather & Flanagan eds.)). Mark Alfano argues that virtue epistemology is shown to be empirically inadequate in light of a wide range of results in social psychology, essentially succumbing to the same argument as virtue ethics. We argue that this meeting of the twain between virtue epistemology and social psychology in no way signals the end of virtue epistemology, but is rather a boon to naturalized virtue epistemology. We use Gird Gigerenzer’s models for bounded rationality (2011) to present a persuasive line of defense for virtue epistemology, and consider prospects for a naturalized virtue epistemology that is supported by current research in psychology.