Chapter 11 - Virtue and the fitting culturing of the human critter

Summary

The fitting culturing of the human creature, in particular, the inculcation of the virtuous capacity that constitutes epistemic belief-forming competence, should draw upon pertinent information from cognitive science about human cognitive endowments and limitations, and also upon socially mediated forms of melioration. In these important respects, virtue epistemology and naturalized epistemology are smoothly complementary. In much of the epistemological literature having to do with objective epistemic justification, global reliability has been a central concern. Modulational control enhancing reliability is a pervasive epistemic demand when engineering for truth-seeking. The chapter describes a framework for cognitive science, largely inspired by connectionist modeling in cognitive science, that fits well with the virtue theorist's claim that epistemically excellent belief-formation outstrips rules. It formulates the claims using the expression actual competent human belief-formation, by which one mean actual human belief-formation that is either fully competent or at least approximates full human epistemic competence reasonably well.