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Chapter 7 - Knowledge Is Extrinsically Apt Belief

Virtue Epistemology and the Temporal Objection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2020

By
Anne Meylan
Edited by
Christoph Kelp  and
John Greco
Christoph Kelp
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
John Greco
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

According to Sosa’s virtue epistemological account, an instance of (animal) knowledge is a belief that instantiates the property of being apt. The purpose of this contribution is, first, to show why this claim is, without further clarification, problematic. Briefly, an instance of knowledge cannot be identified to an apt belief because beliefs are states and aptness is a property that only actions – and no states – can exemplify. Second, I present the metaphysical amendment that the tenants of virtue epistemology can adopt in order to avoid this objection. This conducts me to suggest a new, metaphysically sounder version of the virtue epistemological account of knowledge in which knowledge is extrinsically apt belief.

Keywords

aptnessmetaphysics of statesperformancestemporal shapeextrinsic vs. intrinsic normative property.
Type
Chapter
Information
Virtue Theoretic Epistemology
New Methods and Approaches
 , pp. 166 - 180
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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