Heather Battaly

The intellectual virtues - like open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and the disposition to recognize salient facts - are acquired character traits. This, of course, is a feature they share with the moral virtues. What makes them distinctively intellectual is their connection to desiderata that are distinctively epistemic; the most notable of which are attaining truth and avoiding falsehood.

Though much of Aristotle’s characterization of the intellectual virtues should be found wanting, he does see that there must be a connection between these virtues and truth.[1] Accordingly, James Montmarquet has suggested that “what any contemporary account of epistemic virtue can and should take from Aristotle, at least as its starting point, is [this] association of the epistemic virtues with truth.”[2] Indeed, contemporary virtue epistemologists, Reliabilists and Aristotelians alike[3], have (unwittingly) followed Montmarquet’s advice, but in so doing have disagreed about the exact role of truth in the intellectual virtues. Thus, Sosa has claimed that the intellectual virtues are stable reliable faculties, while Montmarquet has argued that the virtues are characterized by a motivation for truth, but need not be reliable.[4] And, Zagzebski, in an attempt to appease both externalists and internalists, has maintained that the intellectual virtues have both a motivational component, which includes the motivation for truth, and a reliability component.

I believe that there is diversity amongst the intellectual virtues. First, contra Sosa and Zagzebski, some virtues (like open-mindedness) are characterized by motivational and behavioral components, but do not require reliability.[5] Second, contra Montmarquet and Zagzebski, other virtues (like the disposition to recognize salient facts) are characterized by behavioral and reliability components, but do not require virtuous motivations. Here, I defend the first of these claims by arguing that reliability is not required for the virtue of open-mindedness. In so doing, I evaluate four of Montmarquet’s arguments for the claim that the intellectual virtues are dispositions to desire truth but not necessarily dispositions to attain true beliefs.[6] I conclude that though three of his arguments fail, the last succeeds.[7]

Are the motivation for truth and the motivation to perform open-minded acts jointly sufficient for possessing the virtue of open-mindedness? Or, must one also be disposed to perform open-minded acts and to attain true beliefs? In other words, are the virtues simply motivations, or are they also dispositions to behave in certain ways and attain certain ends?

Montmarquet thinks that some (if not all) of the intellectual virtues are motivations to attain true beliefs and other worthy epistemic goals, like understanding. In his view, a person possesses conscientiousness, the primary intellectual virtue, just as long as she is “trying her best or reasonably hard to arrive at the truth and avoid error” - just as long as she is disposed to want to attain truth and avoid error. [8] Montmarquet acknowledges that conscientious agents can be “epistemic fanatics”, and hence, that conscientiousness is insufficient for making an agent epistemically virtuous overall. [9] To be virtuous overall, one must also have the virtues of impartiality (open-mindedness), intellectual sobriety, and intellectual courage, which regulate conscientiousness, preventing it from spawning dogmatism, cowardice, and enthusiasm. [10]

He explicitly denies that the intellectual virtues (secondary and primary) have reliability components. In what follows, I evaluate four of his arguments to that effect and, where appropriate Linda Zagzebski’s responses to them.[11] I contend that his final argument succeeds: intellectual giants of the past lacked reliability, but still possessed certain intellectual virtues.

The primary goal of Montmarquet’s Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility is to show that responsibility for action is derivative from responsibility for belief rather than the other way around. To that end, he argues that doxastic responsibility is derivative from responsibility for exercising one’s epistemic virtues and vices. To illustrate, for us to hold Hitler responsible for his actions, which are justified relative to his beliefs, we must hold him responsible for his beliefs.[12] And to do that, we must hold him responsible for the intellectual character traits, or exercises thereof, that led to those beliefs. But, Montmarquet argues, if we are to hold agents responsible for their intellectual character traits, we cannot build reliability into our definition of the virtues. For, ultimately we have no control over reliability - even our best efforts to determine which traits are reliable might ultimately turn out to be misguided.[13]

But, does the degree of responsibility we have for our virtues prevent them from having reliability components? Suppose that Katy has acquired the intellectual virtue of thoroughness. One might think that if she is responsible for her virtue of thoroughness, then she is responsible for having acquired that virtue. But, though Katy might be responsible for intentionally persevering in her training, knowingly ignoring distractions, and trying to overcome contrary inclinations, she is not responsible for every factor that was necessary for her acquisition of thoroughness. In particular, she is not responsible for the presence of intellectual exemplars in her community - whether her teachers and family members are exemplars is a matter of luck. [14] Given these considerations, we can draw either of the following conclusions. (1) Katy is not responsible for her virtues because there are some pre-conditions of virtue possession over which she has no control. Or, (2) there are some pre-conditions of virtue possession over which Katy has no control; but this lack of control over her external circumstances does not entirely preclude her responsibility for her virtues. We might say that the notion of responsibility in (2) is alive to luck. It recognizes that luck can play a role in our endeavors without entirely stripping us of responsibility. But, and here lies the rub, it seems likely that any account of responsibility that allows Katy to be partly responsible for her virtues when she has no control over her exposure to exemplars will also allow her to be partly responsible for them when she has no control over the reliability of her belief-forming practices. After all, each of these factors depends on external circumstances that are ultimately matters of luck. Accordingly, Katy’s partial responsibility for her intellectual virtues does not prevent them from being reliable.

If these reflections are correct, then Katy is either (1) not responsible for her virtues, or (2) only partly responsible for them; and if the latter, her virtues may still have reliability components. In either case, Montmarquet’s argument - since agents are responsible for their intellectual virtues, those virtues cannot have reliability components - has been defeated.

To his credit, Montmarquet recognizes the difficulties of showing that agents are responsible for their virtues, and retreats from this position. In his words:

We may want to hold Hitler responsible for allowing [his] vices to be exercised in the formation of his beliefs without holding him responsible in anything like a direct way for the existence of these vices. In this way, we hold Hitler responsible for the doxastic equivalent of conduct – for his use of certain qualities of character – without challenging, what seems a truism, that a person is not directly responsible for, and cannot exert direct control with respect to, character traits themselves.[15]

In this passage, Montmarquet places greater emphasis on arguing that agents are responsible for exercising their intellectual virtues. When one exercises one’s virtues, activates them, uses them, one exerts the appropriate effort to set them in motion - one does not sit idly by and allow them to atrophy.

For starters, it sounds a bit odd to talk of agents exercising their virtues as if this required extra effort or were something akin to a separate act. After all, the virtues are habits that are always “on”. But, let’s suppose that this concern can be allayed. Still, we could be responsible for exercising our intellectual virtues, for using our traits, for doing our best to get the truth, even if they had reliability components. For, in holding a person responsible for exercising one of her virtues, we hold her responsible for something akin to performing an act – we do not hold her responsible for the components of the virtue itself.[16] Interestingly, if exercising an intellectual virtue is akin to performing an act, then Montmarquet will have difficulty maintaining that responsibility for action is grounded in responsibility for belief rather than the reverse. For, it now appears that responsibility for belief is grounded in responsibility for exercising one’s virtues and vices, which in turn amounts to responsibility for action.

Second, Montmarquet asks us to imagine that we have discovered that an evil demon has manipulated our world so that true beliefs are, and have always been, best attained by qualities we believe to be vices - dogmatism, carelessness, etc. He argues that we would not then conclude that “these apparent vices are and have always been virtues.”[17] We would not conclude that, say, the intellectual courage and creativity of Galileo were vices and the laziness and conformity of his “intellectually uncurious brother,” Schmalileo, were virtues.[18]

Zagzebski vehemently disagrees. She maintains that if the qualities we believe to be virtues turned out to be unreliable, we would no longer consider them virtues. In her words:

If it turned out that we were wrong about the truth conduciveness of one of these traits, that trait would cease to be considered an intellectual virtue. What we would not do is to continue to treat it as an intellectual virtue and then go on to declare that intellectual virtues are not necessarily truth-conducive.[19]

I submit that this is an irresolvable dispute. Montmarquet’s appeal to the evil demon and Zagzebski’s externalist response indicate that the internalist-externalist debate has invaded virtue epistemology. This same conflict of intuitions led Alvin Goldman to distinguish between two different concepts of justification[20]; and helped William Alston argue that there was no common concept of justification about which internalists and externalists were disagreeing.[21] If Goldman and Alston are correct, this dialogue has reached an impasse. Zagzebski’s and Montmarquet’s competing intuitions about the demon world case indicate that they are employing incompatible thick concepts of intellectual virtue.[22] Hence, further debate between them on this point would be misguided[23], for they would not be disagreeing about a single concept, but endorsing two different concepts – one partly externalist, the other fully internalist.

So, at best, Montmarquet’s second argument will only appeal to those who already have strong internalist intuitions - it will do nothing to convince those with strong externalist intuitions - and at worst, it will facilitate another misdirected debated between internalists and externalists.[24]

Montmarquet argues that some intellectual virtues, like open-mindedness (impartiality), need not be reliable, even though they are widely regarded as reliable and thereby thought to be qualities that the truth-desiring person would want to have. In an effort to avoid building excessive objectivity (and truth-conduciveness) into the virtues, Montmarquet denies that open-mindedness is an openness to others’ ideas insofar as they are objectively likely to be true. After all, he claims, the utterances of a “crazed oracle” could turn out to be true, and if they did, we would not consider openness specifically to it an intellectual virtue.[25] To avoid excessive subjectivity, he also denies that open-mindedness is an openness to others’ ideas insofar as one takes them to be true. For, the category of ideas that one takes to be true could be limited to one’s own ideas. Instead, he thinks that the open-minded person “must have at least some…tendency to see others’ ideas as plausible.”[26] But, what if she tends to see others’ ideas as plausible when they are not actually plausible? Won’t this tendency quickly degenerate into gullibility?

Montmarquet offers two responses. First, he objects to the suggestion that plausibility is an objective notion like truth. On his view, “we find certain things plausible, but relative to our own background beliefs.”[27] Second, he argues that even if ‘plausibility’ does “denote some purely objective likelihood to be true…the mere tendency to have one’s reactions…track such objective likelihoods is not…open-mindedness at all.”[28] It is not open-mindedness because the open-minded person overcomes her initial reaction to other’s ideas as implausible and unfamiliar. Of course, the interlocutor may then respond that open-mindedness is the tendency of one’s overriding reaction to track the truth. But, Montmarquet rejects this as well. In his words:

It is the tendency, for example, to resist initial dismissals based on unfamiliarity that partially constitutes open-mindedness. Whether it turns out that this resistance tracks, or nearly tracks, objective truth will certainly be of epistemological interest. But it is not part of open-mindedness.[29]

Zagzebski responds to the first part of Montmarquet’s argument. She objects to his claim that because plausibility is related to our background beliefs, it is not connected to objective truth. She reminds us that internalists about justification who (sometimes) explain justification in terms of our background beliefs, do not see this as a reason for thinking that justification is not connected to truth.[30] Ultimately, whether or not we take justification and plausibility to be connected to objective truth will depend on how seriously we take skeptical hypotheses. According to Zagzebski, if we set these hypotheses aside, “there is no reason not to expect a reliable connection between the subjective notions of…justifiability, and plausibility and the objective notion of knowledge and its component of truth.”[31] If Zagzebski is correct, and I think she is, the success of Montmarquet’s first objection depends on how seriously we take skeptical hypotheses. At best, it will only appeal to those who already share Montmarquet’s willingness to take them seriously; and will do nothing to convince those who do not.

Montmarquet is guilty of assuming a false dichotomy in his next move – his claim that open-mindedness is not the mere tendency to track objective truth. (Of course it isn’t. If it were, we couldn’t distinguish it from other virtues that track the truth, or even from faculties that are accidentally reliable.) He assumes that open-mindedness either (1) does not involve any connection to objective truth (because plausibility is not objective); or (2) is nothing more than a tendency to track the truth. But, open-mindedness might include both a tendency to track the truth and, to the extent that it is corrective, a tendency to resist initial dismissals based on unfamiliarity. Even though Montmarquet mistakenly employs a false dichotomy, I think that he is on to something, which he best expresses in his final argument.

Montmarquet argues that we regard great intellectual figures like Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton and Einstein to be roughly equal in intellectual virtue, while simultaneously recognizing that their belief-forming practices and theories are not equally reliable. Accordingly, we must claim that the intellectual virtues need not be reliable.

Montmarquet clearly intends this argument to apply to all intellectual virtues, and as such it is too strong. For, there are some virtues like sensitivity to detail which seem to require a reliability component; and others like creativity which do not even aim at reliability. But, I suspect that his argument does apply to virtues like open-mindedness and intellectual courage, provided that those virtues have motivational and behavioral components.[32]

Let’s imagine that we could reconstruct the belief-forming practices that led Aristotle and Einstein to their respective theories of physics. Suppose that they both had entrenched motivations to attain true beliefs; and both believed they were more likely to attain true beliefs about physics if they listened to the ideas of others that were thought to be true - even when those ideas conflicted with their own. Accordingly, each acquired an entrenched motivation to listen to others’ ideas about physics that were regarded as true. Further, suppose that they knew which ideas about physics were thought to be true, and were able to overcome any lingering inclinations they might have had to ignore others’ ideas. Accordingly, Aristotle and Einstein not only had entrenched motivations to listen to these ideas, but were disposed to do so when given the opportunity. This habit, in conjunction with many others, eventually led them to their respective theories about physics. Of course, we regard many of Aristotle’s theories about physics to be false, and Einstein’s to be true. Aristotle’s habit was not reliable with regard to physics, but presumably, Einstein’s was. Still, I submit that we would regard each of them to be equally open-minded. After all, each was ultimately motivated by a desire for truth, rather than a desire for fame or fortune, each was motivated to listen to others’ ideas that were thought to be true, and each listened when given the opportunity to do so. In contrast, the gullible person would have listened to all proposed ideas whether they were thought to be true, or widely rejected as false. While, the dogmatic person would have considered few, if any, of the competing leading theories.[33]

If this is plausible, then open-mindedness does not require a disposition to attain more truths than falsehoods. As Montmarquet suggested at the end of his previous objection, open-mindedness may indeed be reliable, but reliability is not necessary for open-mindedness. [34]

What makes open-mindedness, so construed, an intellectual virtue? What makes it an intellectual, rather than a moral, virtue is its motivational component. Even though it need not track the truth, it is characterized by a motivation for truth. What makes it a virtue, rather than a skill or a habit of some other sort? It is a virtue partly because it is an entrenched habit that expresses the agent’s epistemic values.[35] The morally just person wants to respect the rights of others appropriately because she wants what appears good and believes that respecting the rights of others appropriately is good. In this manner, the motivational component of justice expresses her moral values. Analogously, the open-minded person wants to listen to others’ ideas that are thought to be true because she wants the truth and thinks that she can attain it by listening to those ideas. Moreover, she wants the truth because it appears good from an epistemic point of view. Accordingly, the motivational component of open-mindedness expresses her epistemic values.

But, wouldn’t open-mindedness as I have described it lead to the vice of intellectual conformity? After all, if the open-minded listen to ideas that are thought to be true - and by that we mean ideas thought to be true by the community - wouldn’t they be particularly susceptible to conformity? In response, the open-minded person will not listen to ideas thought to be true by people who are not concerned to get the truth. Rather, she will look to those who are trying their best to determine which ideas are true. This may well involve looking to people who are shunned by the broader community – particularly if that community is primarily interested in ends that compete with truth, like attaining power or selling products. Consequently, the open-minded person must be reliable in his judgments about who is trying to get the truth. To use Montmarquet’s terminology, Aristotle and Einstein must be good at identifying who is conscientious. But, they need not be reliable in their judgments about which ideas are true.

One might also object that I have gerrymandered the virtue of open-mindedness. That I have unjustifiably restricted open-mindedness to Aristotle’s beliefs about physics, and that if I had instead considered open-mindedness as it applied to his entire system of belief it would have been truth-conducive. But, even if it would have been truth-conducive, presumably, it would not have been just as truth-conducive as Einstein’s. Moreover, I would not deny Aristotle the virtue of open-mindedness even if the vast majority of beliefs that it produced in him were false. Presumably, there are lesser-known historical figures of whom this is the case. Lesser known because in addition to valuing open-mindedness, we value actually attaining true beliefs.

Zagzebski thinks that Aristotle and Einstein both possess the virtues of creativity and originality, and agrees that Einstein’s beliefs about physics were more reliable than Aristotle’s. But, this is to offer a stone rather than bread because neither creativity nor originality aim at reliability; they aim instead at understanding. Granted, creativity and originality played an important role in producing their beliefs about physics, but other virtues, like open-mindedness, which do aim at reliability must also have been involved. Zagzebski is silent about these virtues.

Ultimately, I think that both Zagzebski and Montmarquet have been too rigid in their analyses of intellectual virtue. Zagzebski has tried to make all of the traits that we intuitively classify as intellectual virtues fit a single mold. While, Montmarquet seems to have restricted his list of intellectual virtues to those that fit the mold he has chosen. In my view, virtues like open-mindedness require motivations for truth, but do not require reliability. In contrast, virtues like the disposition to recognize salient facts require reliability, but do not require motivations for truth. If I am correct, the virtues are a diverse lot. Consequently, there will be no single simple formula for defining knowledge or justification in terms of the virtues.

[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Book VI.

[2] James A. Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 20.

[3] Ernest Sosa, Alvin Goldman, and John Greco are Reliabilist virtue epistemologists. See Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 8, 13, 16; Goldman, “Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology” in Goldman, Liaisons (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1992), 155-175; and Greco, Putting Skeptics in Their Place (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ch. 7. Montmarquet and Zagzebski are Aristotelians. See Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility; and Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996). On this distinction, see Battaly, “What is Virtue Epistemology?” Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. John Greco and Guy Axtell make similar distinctions in John Greco, “Virtues in Epistemology” in The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology, ed. Paul K. Moser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 287-315; and Guy Axtell, “Virtue Theory and the Fact/Value Problem” in Knowledge, Belief, and Character, ed. Axtell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 177-194.

[4] Sosa and Goldman employ different paradigms of intellectual virtue – sight, hearing, memory, etc.; rather than open-mindedness, intellectual courage, etc. – and think that the virtues need not be acquired. Consequently, they do not share a thick concept of intellectual virtue with Montmarquet and Zagzebski.

[5] To say that a virtue has a motivational component is to say that it is (at least partly) an entrenched disposition to have certain end-directed desires or emotions. See Zagzebski, 126-134. The motivational component of the intellectual virtue of open-mindedness would be an entrenched disposition to want to listen to others’ ideas appropriately because one desires truth and thinks that listening to others’ ideas appropriately will lead to truth. This has two sub-components: a disposition to desire truth (a disposition to desire that which appears good from an epistemic point of view), and a disposition to want to listen to others’ ideas appropriately. To say that a virtue has a behavioral component is to say that it is (at least partly) an entrenched disposition to perform certain acts; e.g. the entrenched disposition to listen to the ideas of others appropriately. Such acts are voluntary; I do not mean to imply that they are involuntary behaviors. To say that an intellectual virtue, like open-mindedness, has a reliability component is to say that it is (at least partly) an entrenched disposition to attain more true beliefs than false ones.

[6] Montmarquet thinks that attaining more truths than falsehoods is not the only worthwhile epistemic end; explanatory understanding is also important. He intimates that there will be a primary virtue (V), which, like conscientiousness, is composed solely of a motivational component, but unlike conscientiousness, consists in the desire for explanatory understanding (rather than for attaining truth and avoiding error). I agree that understanding is a worthwhile epistemic end. Accordingly, I think that some of the intellectual virtues (e.g. creativity) aim more at it than they do at reliability. Virtues whose motivational components are directed at explanatory understanding instead of reliability will not have reliability components. But, this does not address the question of whether those virtues whose motivational components are directed at reliability must also have reliability components. In this paper, I focus on virtues that are associated with reliability rather than some other worthwhile epistemic end.

[7] If Zagzebski and Montmarquet’s debate over the reliability component of the virtues was merely a battle of internalist and externalist intuitions, then it would be misguided. But, in my view, Zagzebski and Montmarquet share enough of a thick concept of virtue to make their debate meaningful. After all, contra Sosa and Goldman, they agree that the virtues are acquired character traits. Since I too share this thick concept, I intend my conclusions about the components of the virtues to be a contribution to the debate among Aristotelian virtue epistemologists.

[8] Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility, 21. I have eliminated Montmarquet’s parentheses.

[9] Montmarquet, 22. To illustrate, suppose that Margie fervently desires the truth, but also fervently believes that she has already attained it: she is absolutely convinced that her studies with David Koresh are yielding true beliefs. Though Margie is conscientious, she is also dogmatic, and thus, not intellectually virtuous overall. In contrast, Zagzebski thinks that the motive for truth does not typically spawn intellectual vices. See Virtues of the Mind, 191 – 193.

[10] Montmarquet, 22. Intellectual courage includes the disposition to face opposition to one’s views appropriately, while impartiality includes the tendency to listen to others’ ideas appropriately. Unlike the “enthusiast”, the intellectually sober person is not disposed to get so carried away with a new idea that he endorses it when it is unsupported by the evidence. Since the role of the secondary virtues is to regulate conscientiousness, they must (unlike conscientiousness itself) have behavioral components. They must at least be entrenched dispositions to perform impartial, courageous, and sober acts. For, to prevent one’s entrenched desire for the truth from spawning dogmatism, one must listen to others’ ideas appropriately when given the opportunity. Simply being motivated to listen to others’ ideas appropriately is not enough.

[11] Zagzebski responds to Montmarquet in Virtues of the Mind, 184 – 194.

[12] Montmarquet, 1-3.

[13] Though we (with good reason) regard impartiality, courage and sobriety to be truth-conducive, they might not be.

[14] Nor is she responsible for having the natural dispositions that make it possible for her to acquire virtue – those dispositions that “from the very moment of birth” make her “just or fitted for self-control or brave[ry]” or thoroughness. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics in Jonathan Barnes, ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1144b5.

[15] Montmarquet, 15.

[16] Suppose that (a) Katy is the resident of a demon world, but has no knowledge of her predicament and (b) she has the opportunity to exercise her virtue of thoroughness, but does not. We can blame Katy for failing to exercise her virtue, even though we would not blame her for failing to adopt belief-forming practices that are reliable. When we blame her for failing to exercise her thoroughness, we do so because we think she had direct control over setting it in motion, whether or not she had control over its production of true beliefs.

[17] Montmarquet, 20.

[18] Ibid. According to Montmarquet, we would have to admit that we underestimated the worth of Schmalileo’s qualities, and we might even begin to encourage their development. But, in so doing, we would regard Schmalileo’s qualities as truth-conducive vices, and Galileo’s as virtues that were not truth-conducive.

[19] Zagzebski, 185.

[20] Alvin I. Goldman, “Strong and Weak Justification” in Goldman, Liaisons (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1992), 127-141.

[21] William P. Alston, “Epistemic Desiderata” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LIII, no. 3 (1993): 527 – 551, esp. 537. Also see Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Cornell University Press, forthcoming) in which Alston argues that there is no property of justification.

[22] “Thick concept” is my terminology; I will not saddle Goldman or Alston with it. See Battaly, “Thin Concepts to the Rescue” in Fairweather and Zagzebski, eds. Virtue Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2001).

[23] This is not to say that all their disputes are misguided – far from it. Zagzebski and Montmarquet share enough of a thick concept of virtue to make many of their debates meaningful. Both name the same paradigms of intellectual virtue; think that the virtues are acquired character traits, which lie in a mean, and involve motivational components.

[24] Analogous comments apply to Zagzebski’s response.

[25] Montmarquet, 23.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., 25, my emphasis.

[29] Montmarquet, 25.

[30] Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, 189.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Montmarquet emphasizes the role of impartiality and intellectual courage in regulating conscientiousness; thus focusing on what I have called their “behavioral” components. He is silent on the topic of whether these virtues have motivational components.

[33] At the very least, the behavioral component of open-mindedness differs from the behavioral components of gullibility and dogmatism. The actions of open-minded people differ from those of the gullible (who listen to ideas they should ignore) and the dogmatic (who ignore ideas they should listen to). Their motivational components may also differ. The dogmatic person may well lack an entrenched motivation to attain truth; though this is harder to see in the case of the gullible person.

[34] I think something similar can be said of intellectual courage. Aristotle and Einstein will be equally intellectually courageous just as long as: (1) both have an entrenched motivation for truth; (2) this motivation spawns an entrenched motivation to face the objections of others that are thought to be reasonable; and (3) both face those objections when given the opportunity.

[35] In cases where the agent’s epistemic values do not correspond to what is epistemically valuable, the agent does not have intellectual virtues. Agents who value, say, beliefs that make them feel better are not intellectually virtuous. I am assuming that truth is epistemically valuable – good from an epistemic point of view. At the very least, the behavioral component of open-mindedness differs from the behavioral components of gullibility and dogmatism. The actions of open-minded people differ from those of the gullible (who listen to ideas they should ignore) and the dogmatic (who ignore ideas they should listen to). Their motivational components may also differ. The dogmatic person may well lack an entrenched motivation to attain truth; though this is harder to see in the case of the gullible person.

[35] I think something similar can be said of intellectual courage. Aristotle and Einstein will be equally intellectually courageous just as long as: (1) both have an entrenched motivation for truth; (2) this motivation spawns an entrenched motivation to face the objections of others that are thought to be reasonable; and (3) both face those objections when given the opportunity.

REFERENCES

Alston, William P. Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, forthcoming.

———.“Epistemic Desiderata.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53, no. 3

(1993): 527 – 551.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan

Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Axtell, Guy. “Virtue Theory and the Fact/Value Problem.” Pp. 177-194 in Knowledge,

Belief, and Character, edited by Axtell. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,

2000.

Battaly, Heather D. “Thin Concepts to the Rescue: Thinning the Concepts of Epistemic

Justification and Intellectual Virtue.” Pp. 98-116 in Virtue Epistemology: Essays on

Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. “What is Virtue Epistemology?” Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of

Philosophy, 2000. On-line at www.bu.edu/WCP/papers/Valu/ValuBatt.htm.

Goldman, Alvin I. “Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology.” Pp. 155-175 in

Alvin I. Goldman, Liaisons. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1992.

———. “Strong and Weak Justification.” Pp. 127-141 in Goldman, Liaisons. Cambridge,

Mass: The MIT Press, 1992.

Greco, John. “Virtues in Epistemology.” Pp. 287-315 in The Oxford Handbook of

Epistemology, edited by Paul K. Moser. New York: Oxford University Press,

2002.

———. Putting Skeptics in Their Place. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Montmarquet, James A. Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. Lanham,

Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993.

Sosa, Ernest. Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology. New York:

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Commentary on Heather Battaly’s “Must the Intellectual Virtues Be Reliable?”

In her paper “Must the Intellectual Virtues Be Reliable,” Professor Battaly makes a number of helpful contributions to an on going debate among virtue epistemologists about the reliability of the epistemic virtues in attaining true belief and avoiding false belief. The prominence of virtue theory in epistemology owes much to Ernest Sosa’s use of intellectual virtues in his externalist theory of justification. Sosa defends a reliablist theory of justification against counterexamples involving exotic but reliable belief formation processes by taking justified belief to essentially be the manifestation of one or more reliably truth tracking epistemic virtues. According to Sosa, epistemic virtues are taken to be truth conducive faculties. On this view, epistemic virtues do have a reliability component. But the externalist’s reliablist conception of intellectual virtues is not without its critics.

Critics of Sosa have rejected the reliablist conception of epistemic virtue in favor of a treatment more parallel to Aristotle’s view of moral virtue. This view takes the intellectual virtues to be character traits like the moral virtues. Unlike faculties, at least some of which are had by nature, states of character are stable dispositions acquired and cultivated through habit. As such, we consider people praiseworthy for their cultivation of virtue and blameworthy for their failure to do so. As opposed as having merely instrumental value as mechanisms for acting rightly, the moral virtues, on Aristotle’s view, are primary ethical goods. Merely acting well does not suffice for leading the good life. Rather, the good life essentially involves having the virtues and acting from these. Accepting this conception of moral virtue doesn’t commit one to any specific deontological account of right action. However, it is apparently no friend of consequentialism. We cannot be consequentialists about action and take some of an action’s moral worth to lie in its being the manifestation of virtue[i]. In the epistemic sphere, this suggests that the esteem we place on justified belief is based not only on justified belief being reliably true, but also on justified belief being the manifestation of an intellectual virtue.

We may value the intellectual virtues for reasons beyond their truth conduciveness and yet take truth conduciveness to be essential to them. So taking an Aristotelian approach does not require that we deny the reliability of the intellectual virtues. While the question of reliability remains open, it also stands in need of clarification. I will be concerned with the nature of reliability later. But at the outset, we should consider whether we are asking if the virtues reliably yield true belief jointly or individually. Battaly recognizes diversity among the intellectual virtues with respect to their reliably in leading to true belief. So clearly the question she is interested in is whether or not the intellectual virtues are individually truth conducive. She holds that some are and some are not reliable. In the paper presented here, she focuses on the virtue of open-mindedness and argues that it does not require reliability. Specifically, she examines four arguments offered by Montmarquet against taking reliability to be essential to the intellectual virtues. She finds fault with three of these arguments but endorses the fourth. I will focus on the fourth as I am not yet persuaded by it.

The first of Montmarquet’s arguments alleges that the intellectual virtues need not be reliable because we could not be held responsible for them if reliability were required. Whether or not intellectual character traits like open-mindedness or intellectual courage are reliable is beyond our control. Since it is beyond our control whether or not our intellectual character traits are reliable, we cannot be held responsible for having reliable traits. But we are responsible for having or lacking the intellectual virtues. So reliability must not be required of the virtues.

Battaly does not think this argument against reliability works. If responsibility for our intellectual character requires complete control then we lack responsibility because we have no control over our training or exemplars. On the other hand, if having some degree of responsibility for our intellectual character is compatible with our lacking control over our training and exposure to exemplars, then responsibility may be compatible with lack of control over whether or not our intellectual character traits are reliable.

Montmarquet’s second argument appeals to internalist intuitions about justification in a way that Battaly finds uncompelling. We are asked to suppose that an evil demon has affected our world so that intellectual vices such as dogmatism, gullibility, inattentiveness are most reliable at attaining true belief. Montmarquet takes it that in this case we would not regard these vices as virtues. Zagzebski’s intuition is that if we discovered that a supposed intellectual virtue were not truth tracking, we would no longer accept it as a virtue. Battaly thinks there is no progress to be made in this dispute because the differing intuitions merely reflect the different conceptions of intellectual virtue held by Montmarquet and Zagzebski. Of course, which of these conceptions we should prefer is precisely what is at issue in Battaly’s paper and she does not regard this issue as irresolvable. It is just this particular way of settling the broader dispute that Battaly deems unproductive.

Montmarquet’s third argument focuses on open-mindedness and attempts to analyze this intellectual virtue as one that need not be reliable. Open-mindedness is taken to involve openness towards the ideas of others in some respect. Indiscriminate openness to the ideas of others is no virtue, but something akin to gullibility. Montmarquet denies that open-mindedness is openness to the ideas of others insofar as they are likely to be true. It would be no virtue to be receptive towards the ideas of a lunatic who just by luck happens to be right. We might instead regard open-mindedness as openness towards the ideas of others insofar as one takes them to be true. But this would make open-mindedness compatible with dogmatism. Montmarquet ultimately wants to understand open-mindedness as involving a “tendency to see others’ ideas as plausible.” Whether plausibility is truth-tracking becomes a point of contention between Montmarquet and Zagzebski. As opposed to objectively tracking truth, Montmarquet takes what we find plausible to be indexed to our background beliefs. I find this plausible. But, I do not fully appreciate what place talk about plausibility has in analyzing open-mindedness. I’m inclined to understand open-mindedness as merely the willingness to revise one’s own beliefs in light of new evidence and argument. Vetting evidence for credibility and argument for cogency strikes me as the work of other intellectual virtues. This conception of open-mindedness would appear to be much easier to divorce from reliability. However, as I will suggest in response to Montmarquet’s fourth argument, this appearance may be deceiving.

The last of Montmarquet’s arguments against the reliability of the intellectual virtues in Battaly’s discussion, the argument she ultimately endorses, is the argument from intellectual giants. Montmarquet states this argument as follows:

First let us try to distinguish epistemic virtue from mere truth-conduciveness in general. Two persons can differ in the quantity and quality of their evidence – even in the quality of the means by which that evidence was acquired – without, it seems, being different in epistemic virtue. For the epistemic virtues should be personal qualities – not evidentiary states, hypotheses, theories, strategies, or anything else. Aristotle’s evidence and methodology may have been inferior, from the standpoint of truth-conduciveness, to those of later inquirers; but we regard him nonetheless as an ideal inquirer, insofar as his personal qualities suit him to this role. The progress of science, then, may make us better instruments for arriving at truth, but not better people – even from a purely epistemic standpoint.[ii]

As Battaly puts this argument “we regard great intellectual figures like Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton and Einstein to be roughly equal in intellectual virtue, while simultaneously recognizing that their belief-forming practices and theories are not equally reliable. Accordingly, we must claim that the intellectual virtues need not be reliable.” As Battaly also notes, surely there have been many inquirers that were every bit as epistemically virtuous as Einstien but who we don’t know by name because they just didn’t get the truth often enough or on the crucial points.

Certainly, there are great disparities among equally intellectually virtuous people with regard to how many truths they believe and what proportion of their beliefs are true. However, I want to suggest that this difference need not be understood as a difference in the reliability of their intellectual characters to yield true beliefs. States of character are traditionally thought of as complex dispositional states. So we are here concerned with the reliability of various dispositions to manifest themselves in true belief. But for a disposition to be reliable is not for it to be manifested all or even some of the time. Rather, for a disposition to be reliable is for it to be regularly manifested when the disposition’s precipitating conditions obtain. By analogy, two cars may be equally reliable though one starts on the first try with much greater frequency because its owner consistently remembers to fill the fuel tank and turn off the lights. The epistemic dispositions to produce true belief might well have been equally reliable in Einstien’s case and Ptolemy’s. Yet these dispositions might have manifested in many more truths in Einstien’s case than in Ptolemy’s because Einstien’s life more frequently enjoyed the realization of the precipitation conditions for these dispositions. Perhaps the epistemic virtues yield true belief consistently only in epistemically ideal circumstances. The yield of truths by the epistemic virtues may vary significantly with the quality of one’s epistemic circumstances. Einstein enjoyed relatively good epistemic circumstances in comparison to Ptolemy.

There are other issues concerning reliability worthy of mention here. There appear to be a number of options for gauging the relative reliability of believers. We might compare the reliability of individuals in similar epistemic circumstances according to the number of truths believed by each, the ratio of truths to falsehoods, the rate at which true beliefs are acquired, or the rate at which false beliefs are rejected for true ones. I have no particular preference among these. Nor to I suppose the choice of a metric for reliability is arbitrary. But some metric must be selected before we are in a position to make reasoned comparisons of epistemic reliability. Also, we want to recognize a difference between reliability in grasping and believing known truths and reliability in discovering new truths. There may be further senses in which we might regard individuals as reliable believers of truth.

Finally, I’d like to return to open-mindedness for a moment. I earlier suggested that open mindedness might be thought of simply as a willingness to revise belief in light of new evidence or argument. Judgments about plausibility can be left to other intellectual virtues. Would this view really make it easier to deny that open-mindedness specifically is truth tracking? As I suggested earlier, I have some reservations about regarding any of the intellectual virtues as truth tracking in isolation. Instead, I’m inclined to recognize a certain kind of unity of the intellectual virtues. This is not to deny diversity in the specific natures of the virtues. Rather, I want to suggest that having intellectual virtue involves having all of the virtues, not just some. Here is a way to understand this thesis of unity. We take the virtues to be dispositional states. Among the precipitating conditions for any of the intellectual virtues to manifest in true belief may be the having of other intellectual virtues. What combinations of intellectual virtue will yield true belief in what circumstances may vary. But taking the various intellectual virtues to have each other among their precipitating conditions for producing true belief suggests that open-mindedness, whatever else it may also be, is a disposition to produce true beliefs in good epistemic circumstances provided one also has various other intellectual virtues and capacities.