Dissertation Completion Proposal - Reza
Reza, Department of Philosophy
Psychology and Virtue Epistemology: Three Studies
Virtue epistemology is a recent development in epistemology, distinguished by a focus on the contribution that the character of epistemic agents makes to their epistemic accomplishments. Virtue epistemologists are united by their belief that the study of intellectual virtues (and vices) should occupy a prominent place (most of them would say the prominent place) in any adequate epistemology. Thus, we may define virtue epistemology as the conceptual and normative study of intellectual virtues (and vices). Paradigmatic intellectual virtues include such traits of character as desire for truth, open-mindedness, carefulness, and curiosity. Among intellectual vices, closed-mindedness, intellectual laziness, intellectual cowardice, and wishful thinking are notable. Virtue epistemologists inquire into the definition and criteria of intellectual virtues (and vices), their various relations to epistemically desirable ends such as knowledge and understanding, and different methods of identifying and classifying them. They are also keen to provide practical advice on how we should conduct ourselves as epistemic agents. The first chapter of my dissertation offers a comprehensive and critical review of contemporary virtue epistemology. Such a review is currently unavailable in the epistemological literature.The rest of the dissertation consists of three case studies on the relevance of psychology tovirtue epistemology, where I carefully look at three major research programs in psychology and attempt to work out, in detail, their implications for a number of issues in virtue epistemology. Along the way, I engage in extensive conceptual analysis of various theses advanced in these psychological researches. I believe that some of my analyses will be of interest to psychologists as well. In the following, I will briefly describe the three case studies, but I wish to begin with saying something about the motivation for this project.
The inspiration for this project came from the realization that virtues and vices are simply (a subset of) traits of personality that are of interest to epistemologists. As traits of personality, virtues and vices are investigated by psychology as well, in particular, by personality theory and social psychology. However, a striking feature of virtually every recent discussion of virtues, whether in ethics or epistemology, has been the neglect of empirical studies of personality. Theorizing in virtue epistemology has almost entirely taken place in a framework of intuitive assumptions about personality: the folk psychology of personality. The starting point of the present work is that epistemology in general, and virtue epistemology in particular, should be informed by the findings of empirical psychology. An epistemologist theorizing on perception or memory can easily find the relevant research in psychology; after all, perception and memory are established topics in psychology. What made the current project particularly difficult was that one can hardly find a well-defined and active research program in psychology focusing on intellectual virtues and vices. This meant that I had to examine a broad range of literature, hoping to find potentially relevant research. Now, I proceed to give brief accounts of the three studies.
1. The Psychology and Epistemology of Need for Cognition (NFC) (Chapter 2):
Rarely have psychologists studied an intellectual virtue so thoroughly. This provides us with a rare opportunity to explore how the empirical study of a trait interacts with the normative and conceptual study of that same trait. Perhaps the most interesting finding about individuals high in NFC is that, contrary to what might be expected, we cannot claim that their information processing activity is relatively objective and impartial. Even though they focus on the merits of the information they receive rather than relying on simple and sometimes unreliable cues and they recall more of the information to which they are exposed, the processing of this information is not necessarily objective and impartial, and can be biased in a number of ways. Psychologists have studied three biasing factors affecting individuals with high NFC: mood, priming, and primacy effect. Discussing these results, I argue that psychology is relevant to virtue epistemology in at least two respects: first, it can help us specify contexts in which traits function or cease to function as virtues; second, it can help us investigate whether the conditions of justified belief, as proposed by virtue epistemologists, are satisfied for individual beliefs, and thus help us determine the sorts of beliefs that are justified.
2. An Internalistic Conception of Intellectual Virtues and Its Psychological Plausibility (Chapter 3)
In this chapter, I examine the contrast between two main conceptions of intellectual virtues, externalist theories and internalist theories. My main goal is to explore the potential relevance of some of the recent work in psychology of self-regulation to the evaluation of the internalistic conception of intellectual virtues. Recently, there has been a virtual explosion of research on the psychology of self-regulation. I present Albert Bandura's research on self-efficacy and its role in treatment of phobias, Walter Mischel's studies of the processes underlying delay of gratification, and finally Daniel Wenger's theory of ironic processes of mental control. I then examine the bearing of this body of research on a key component of epistemic virtue internalism (principle T). I argue in detail that the results of these studies in psychology of self-regulation make this principle highly doubtful. Finally, I critically examine, on purely philosophical grounds, an independent argument advanced by Montmarquet in favor of epistemic virtue internalism.
3. The Nature of Personality: Traits or Social-Affective-Cognitive Processes? (The Remainder of Dissertation, Spanning Several Chapters)
Epistemologists are interested in evaluating traits (virtues or vices), since they believe that not only personality traits have some effect on our epistemic accomplishments, but also that their influence on our epistemic behavior is significant and systematic. I consider this the fundamental assumption of virtue epistemology, and it consists of two claims: A) there are traits. B) (some) traits have strong and systematic influence on a broad range of epistemic behavior. These assumptions seem benign and even self-evident; virtue epistemologists hardly take the trouble to make them explicit. However, the existence and nature of traits as causally efficacious is now the major area of contention among the two dominant approaches in personality psychology, i.e., trait theories, and social-cognitive theories. The best way to understand the contrast between the two types of theories is to understand them as two different theoretical perspectives on explaining the phenomenon of the coherence of personality. The variety of contemporary trait theories adopt traits as their basic units of analysis. 'Traits' refer to personality variables that correspond to coherent patterns of social behavior. Social cognitive theories are most clearly defined by the units of analysis through which they conceptualize personality functioning and differences among individuals. Personality is understood by reference to basic cognitive and affective processes. These processes have social foundations: they develop in social and cultural contexts and are activated by social settings. Thus, they are "social-cognitive" processes. The social-cognitivists strive to understand how multiple mechanisms operate, in concert, as coherent psychological systems. Coherence in personality functioning is viewed as an emergent property of interactions among multiple psychological mechanisms. If "trait" refers merely to a phenomenon --the existence of enduring, coherent patterns of action that distinguish individuals from one another-- then traits indeed are central to the field, and social-cognitive approaches represent a strategy for explaining people's "traits." But "trait" commonly takes on an additional meaning, where it refers to an internal psychological structure or system that is responsible for consistencies in action across sets of behaviors and situations. Social-cognitivists believe that used in this second sense, traits and trait theories are one possible way of understanding phenomenon of personality coherence, and social-cognitive theories are another. In the rest of the dissertation, I plan to do two things: first, investigate exactly what is at issue between these two schools. This naturally leads to the second task. If traits are to be replaced by the units favored among social-cognitive theorists, then we should reconceptualize virtue epistemology. I will raise and discuss the following questions: (i) Does the value of virtues depend on their being traits? Could we subtract away the traitness of virtues and be left with anything as valuable as we take virtues to be? (ii) To what extent do social-cognitive theories undercut what we want traits to do? Could there be trait surrogates that survive the social-cognitive critique? To what kind of evaluation does the critique drive us? What is left of virtue evaluation if that critique goes through? Is there any other kind of evaluation that could take up the slack if there are no traits? And if it does not work, does it still give us some fuel for thought about virtues? (iii) If there are no virtues, evaluation statements would become literally false. Could virtue evaluations have utility, even if false? Can we develop a fictionalist approach to virtue evaluation? (iv) Does virtue epistemology look different on a social-cognitive approach to behavior? Would there be targets of epistemic virtue evaluation? If so, what are those targets? Clearly, they would not be traits. Are complex structures of cognitive-affective factors as causes of action appropriate targets? Actions of what type? Cognitive actions? Should we evaluate not traits like carefulness but rather desires like the desire to be careful? This would give us an epistemology different from a traditional epistemology of belief. In particular, it looks like we would evaluate structures of affects and associated cognitions to determine their truth-conduciveness (or whatever other aim was appropriate from an epistemic standpoint). What advantages/disadvantages does this kind of evaluation have over virtue epistemology and traditional epistemology?
