Skepticism, virtue and transmission in the theory of knowledge: an anti-reductionist and anti-individualist account

This contribution to the topical collection presents an overview of my previous work in epistemology. Specifically, I review arguments for the claim that important skeptical arguments in the history of philosophy motivate externalism in epistemology. In effect, only externalist epistemologies can be anti-skeptical epistemologies. I also review motivations for adopting a virtue-theoretic account of epistemic normativity. Such an account, I argue, has considerable explanatory power regarding the nature, value and scope of knowledge. In addition, a virtue-theoretic account is tailor made for externalism. In effect, it shows how externalist epistemologies can also be normative epistemologies. Finally, I review arguments in favor of a general framework for understanding the epistemology of testimony, and, in particular, the transmission of knowledge. The framework motivates anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony, as well as the common anti-reductionist theme that trust can be epistemically significant, as opposed to merely practically significant. The framework, I argue, also weds nicely to a virtue-theoretic account of epistemic normativity, and in doing so answers an important objection to virtue epistemology—that the view is overly individualistic.

1. Bertrand Russel, Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997): pp. 25–26.

2. John Greco, Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

3. For the present purposes we can put issues about Hume interpretation aside. The point is to construct an interesting skeptical argument rather than to capture Hume’s intentions.

4. For example, see Barry Stroud, Hume (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 56), n11; and D. C. Stove, Probability and Hume's Deductive Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, p. 51).

5. Notice that this is true even on Berkeley’s radical idealism, where objects in “external” reality are constituted by stable and coherent bundles of ideas. That is, it is only a contingent fact, if it is a fact at all, that present appearances are a reliable indication of stable and coherent bundles.

6. John Greco, Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

7. Adapted from Chisholm Theory of Knowledge, 2nd edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977, p. 105).

8. In what follows I refer to Jeter circa 1999.

9. Jennifer Lackey, “Why We Don't Deserve Credit for Everything We Know,” Synthese 158, 3 (2007): 345–361; and “Knowledge and Credit,” Philosophical Studies 142, 1 (2009, pp. 27–42).

10. John Greco, The Transmission of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

11. Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

12. Elizabeth Fricker, “Second-hand knowledge,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73, 3 (2006): 592–618: p. 596. Italics original.

13. Moran and Hinchman also defend this idea. See Edward Hinchman, “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70:3 (2005, pp. 562–587); Richard Moran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” in Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa, eds., The Epistemology of Testimony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2006, pp. 272–306); and Moran, The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

14. For similar reasons, the new view also avoids a dilemma put forward by Duncan Pritchard. We saw that, according to Lackey, traditional virtue epistemology cannot correctly analyze both (a) testimonial knowledge and (b) standard Gettier cases, her idea being that the two kinds of case pull in different directions, making it impossible for virtue epistemology to accommodate both. In similar fashion, Pritchard argues that traditional virtue epistemology cannot accommodate both (a) testimonial knowledge and (b) barn facade-style cases involving environmental luck; again, the idea being that the two kinds of case pull the view in opposing theoretical directions. [For example, see Duncan Pritchard, “Knowledge and Understanding,” in Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard, The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010)]. The new view avoids Pritchard’s dilemma in essentially the same way that it avoids Lackey’s—by giving up the idea that all testimonial knowledge is attributable to the intellectual virtues of the hearer.

It is a great honor to have a topical collection in Synthese dedicated to my work in epistemology. My heartfelt thanks go to Nuno Venturinha for organizing and editing the volume, and to each of the contributors for their participation.

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1. Philosophy Department, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

   John Greco

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Correspondence to John Greco.

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