SHORT NOTES ON Virtue Epistemology, Religious Epistemology, Social Epistemology, Naturalized Epistemology, Feminist Epistemology, Moral Epistemology

 SHORT NOTES

Virtue Epistemology:

            Virtue epistemology is a contemporary philosophical approach to epistemology that stresses the importance of intellectual, and specifically epistemic virtues. By directing attention on the knower as agent, virtue epistemology is in part modelled after virtue ethics, since virtue ethics focuses on moral agents rather than moral acts. Epistemology, as commonly practiced, focuses on the subject’s beliefs, asking questions like: Are they justified? Are they instances of knowledge? When it comes to accessing how the subject herself is doing with regard to the pursuit of truth and the seeking of knowledge, this assessment is carried out by looking at the epistemic quality of her beliefs. But, virtue epistemology reverses this order of analysis, placing priority of emphasis on the subject herself and assessing her epistemic virtues and vices, that is, her good and bad ways of forming beliefs. For Virtue epistemology then, our doxastic procedures, that is, our procedures for forming beliefs makes us epistemically virtuous or vicious.

            Taking into account the relevant desiderata (desired essentials) for belief formation, wherein every belief must have a warrant would be an example of an epistemic virtue. Whereas, jumping into conclusions would be an example of an epistemic vice. It is only after we have determined which ways of forming beliefs are reliable or unreliable; which ways count as epistemic virtues or vices that we can, as a second step, determine the epistemic quality of particular beliefs.  

Religious Epistemology:

            In the history of philosophy, there abounds a plethora of arguments for the existence of God, ranging from the cosmological argument to the ontological argument and even the argument from design. From an epistemological point of view, the question is whether such arguments can constitute a rational foundation of faith, or even afford us knowledge of God. A further question is whether, if God exists, knowledge of God might not also be possible in other ways, for example, on the basis of perception or perhaps mystical experiences.

There is also a famous problem casting doubt on the existence of God: Why, if God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent being, is there evil in the world? Here, the epistemological question is whether, based on this problem, we can know that God (thus conceived) does not exist.

Another central issue for religious epistemology is raised by evidentialism. Evidentialism avers that knowledge requires adequate evidence. However, there does not seem to abound any adequate evidence of God’s evidence. Does this, then, make it possible for theists to endorse evidentialism? The answer is obviously No. This is because the kind of evidence intended for the knowledge of God is not sensual but one afforded in the form of premises from which one may infer theistic conclusions.

Social Epistemology:

            Social epistemology is the study of the social dimension or determinants of knowledge, or the ways in which social factors promote or perturb the quest for knowledge. When we conceive of epistemology as including knowledge and justified belief as they are positioned within a particular social and historical context, epistemology becomes social epistemology. Some writers use the term ‘knowledge’ loosely, as designating mere belief. On their view, social epistemology should simply describe how social factors influence beliefs, without concern for the rationality or truth of these beliefs.

How to pursue social epistemology is a matter of controversy. According to some, it is an extension or re-orientation of traditional epistemology with the aim of correcting its overly individualistic orientation. According to others, social epistemology ought to amount to a radical departure from traditional epistemology, which they see, like the advocates of radical naturalization, as a futile endeavour.

Naturalized Epistemology:

The concept of naturalized epistemology is the brain-child of W.V.O. Quine. For Quine, naturalised epistemology is the patterning of the epistemological pursuit after the methodology and spirit of science. Our epistemological enquiry in this new setting, Quine argues, is to be concerned not with providing exemplars for science, but with basing our construction or projection of the external world based on the interaction between inputs from stimulations on our sensory surfaces and inputs arising from our conceptual sovereignty. Here, epistemology is fixed in a new setting as a component of natural science and as a chapter of psychology. Quine says that our object in this new setting of epistemology is “studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data…” He further says in another place that, “our liberated epistemologist ends up as an empirical psychologist, scientifically investigating man’s acquisition of science.”

In naturalising epistemology, Quine maintains that epistemology in the new setting becomes enlightened because it no longer seeks solution to the sceptics’ challenge outside science but realises that the sceptics’ challenge springs from science itself, and that in coping with it, we are free to use scientific knowledge. Quine sees philosophy and science in the same boat, a boat which like Neurath’s boat, we could rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it.

            Epistemology therefore for Quine, can make progress by adopting the scientific attitude of continually rebuilding the framework of its conjectures and refutations on the platform of sense experience (observation sentence) and theory. Quine’s proposal is human, speculative, not feigning the impossible and pragmatic. In fact, for Quine, naturalised epistemology is one in which the epistemic enterprise takes cognisance of the limited powers of the human agent, focusing then on what can be known not what we ought to know. Since, as Quine avers, it is useless to seek to reach objective truths about reality because it is impossible. The ‘ought’ then, as Quine thinks, should always imply ‘can’ in our epistemological objectives so that we do not end up recommending procedures that cognizers cannot attain.

Feminist Epistemology:

            Feminist epistemology is one that investigates the relevance that the gender of the knower has to epistemic practices, including the theoretical practice of epistemology. It is typified both by themes that are exclusively feminist in that they could arise from a critical attention to gender, and by themes that are non-exclusively feminist in that they might arise from other politicizing theoretical perspectives besides feminism.

            When construed in a non-controversial way, the subject matter of feminist epistemology consists of issues having to do with fair and equal access of women to, and their participation in, the institutions and processes through which knowledge is generated and transmitted. Viewed in this way, feminist epistemology can be seen as a branch of social epistemology.

            When we move beyond this initial characterization, feminist epistemology becomes controversial. For some, its aim includes the project of studying and legitimizing special ways in which women can acquire knowledge. For others, feminist epistemology should be understood as aiming at the political goal of opposing and rectifying oppression in general and the oppression of women in particular. At the extreme end, feminist epistemology is closely associated with postmodernism and its radical attack on truth and the notion of objective reality. It also represents a radicalizing innovation in the analytic tradition, which has typically assumed on a social conception of knowledge.

Moral Epistemology:

            This is a discipline, at the intersection of ethics and epistemology, that studies the epistemic status and relations of moral judgements and principles. It developed out of an interest common to both ethics and epistemology, in questions of justification and justifiability in epistemology, of statements or beliefs, and in ethics, of actions as well as judgements of action and also general principles of judgement. Its most prominent questions include the following: Can normative claims be true or false? If so, how can they be known to be true or false? If not, what status do they have, and are they capable of justification? If they are capable of justification, how can they be justified? Does the justification of normative claims differ with respect to particular claims and with respect to general principles?