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Lecture 6.2 - Introduction to epistemic virtues and vices
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来自 The University of Edinburgh 的课程
Philosophy, Science and Religion: Philosophy and Religion
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从本节课中
Epistemic Virtues and Vices in Science and Religion
In this lecture, Professor Mark Alfano discusses the role of epistemic virtues and vices in science and religion. The lecture has three main sections. First, Alfano distinguishes four types of epistemic virtues and vices. Source virtues such as honesty make someone an excellent primary source of knowledge. Receiver virtues such as intellectual humility make someone an excellent recipient of knowledge provided by sources. Conduit virtues make someone an excellent conveyor of the knowledge they receive from others to third parties; these dispositions might include a willingness to gossip carefully in order to protect others from a sexual predator, as well as the virtues that journalists try to embody. Echo virtues make someone an excellent sounding board for others. Along the way, Alfano mentions various vices that can attach to people in the role of source, receiver, conduit, and echo. In the second part of the lecture, Alfano uses the notions of source, receiver, conduit, and echo virtues to make sense of scientific collaborations and trust in science by laypeople. In section three, he shows that unless we have unreasonably high credence in very long chains of conduit virtues, we should not accept testimony in favour of miracles or divine revelation.
与讲师见面
Dr Orestis PalermosResearch Explorer
School of Philosophy
Dr Mark HarrisSenior Lecturer in Science and Religion
School of Divinity
Professor Duncan PritchardProfessor of Philosophy
University of Edinburgh
Dr J Adam CarterResearcher
Epistemology - Philosphy
Dr Mog Stapleton
Think of individual people as nodes in a directed network where each node
refers to a single individual, and each directed edge indicates that
that person communicates with whoever the edge points to.
We can then describe a dyad,
like the one pictured here, as one where person A talks to person B.
So person A is the one doing the telling and
person B is the one doing the listening.
If we think of communication in this way,
we might start to think that there are specific traits or
dispositions that make someone very good at communicating what they already know.
And then there might be other dispositions that make someone very good
at hearing what someone else knows.
Now of course, somebody might be good at both of these.
In which case, we could enhance our network by having them both
communicate and be communicated with.
But the point is that we can understand individuals
in terms of their roles in a communications network.
But of course, telling and
listening aren't the only things that can happen in communication.
We can also overhear other people.
We can remember what they said.
We can forget what they said.
We can retell what someone said back to them saying something like, so
what you're telling me is blah blah blah.
And we can also retell what they said to some third party who might tell it to
some fourth party who might tell it to some other party further down the line.
This sort of communications network,
the one pictured here is going to be useful for us because it helps us to find
the four types of virtues that I mentioned in the outline.
Source virtues are the dispositions that make someone an excellent
source of knowledge for other individuals.
So, that doesn't mean that they're necessarily good at looking around in
the world and seeing what's going on.
It means that they're good at communicating what they happen to know,
no matter how they came to know it.
These are the best studied virtues in virtue epistemology.
And there are many examples of them.
Some of them involve moral character as well as epistemic character.
So they include virtues like honesty, sincerity,
trustworthiness and intellectual generosity.
If you're going to receive testimony from someone,
if someone is going to tell you what they know, it's much better for
you if you know that that person is honest.
You can trust them more easily.
Similarly, if someone is sincere,
then what they have to say is probably going to reflect their knowledge.
Similarly, if someone is trustworthy, they can be trusted.
And someone who is intellectually generous isn't stingy with what they know.
They tell you all you need to hear, not just some bits of it.
Source virtues have also been studied in the philosophy of language,
including by H Paul Grice.
Who, in a 1975 paper,
argued that there is a duty to be cooperative in a communicative exchange.
When he talks about cooperation, he specifically is thinking about
the cooperativeness of a speaker rather than the cooperativeness of a hearer.
And he said that there are four main ways that someone can
manifest this cooperativeness.
He called these the maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner.
Quantity has to do with saying all that someone needs to hear and no more.
Quality has to do with saying what you know and indicating that you know it,
saying what you guess and indicating that you merely guess it,
and saying what you doubt and indicating that you doubt it.
Relation has to do with
saying things that are relevant to what's gone before in a talk exchange.
So not just randomly asserting things that you happen to think are true, but
asserting things that are relevant to what's been said before.
And manner has to do with the rudeness or
propriety in the way in which someone speaks.
For instance, not talking over someone,
listening to their whole sentence before responding and so on.
The source virtue related to the maxim of quantity
can be thought of in terms of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean.
According to this theory many if not all virtues are a mean or
an average between two vices, two bad ways of being.
And, example that Aristotle often uses is courage.
He says that a courageous person is neither two confident nor
not confident enough.
That a courageous person fears neither too much nor too little.
In terms of the maxim of quantity we can think of the mean in terms of neither
providing too much information nor providing too little information.
Someone who says too much, who says things that they do happen to know to be true but
which are more than this hearer needs to know, might engage in
things like mansplaining or what is sometimes called conversational terrorism.
Whereas someone who gives too little might be described as intellectually stingy or
even as lying by omission.
The disposition to adhere to the maxim of quality can also be thought of
in terms of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean.
So someone can go too far in one direction or the other.
So in the direction of excess someone
might be pathologically lacking in confidence.
So even though they know something they might be disposed never to say so,
because they just might be wrong.
Or they might be reluctant to speculate, because they
think that that would be a violation of saying only what you have evidence for.
In the other direction,
someone might violate the maxim of quality by passing of their opinions as knowledge.
Or by passing off their speculation as their opinions.
In terms of the maxim of relation, someone who is too
keen to stick to only what's relevant might lack creativity.
They don't think of things that are somewhat relevant but only indirectly so.
Whereas someone who goes too far in the other direction
could be accused of engaging in evasion, deflection, and non sequitur.
So if this is right, it suggest that there are source virtues related to
not just honesty and sincerity and trustworthiness as we saw it before,
but also to these topics that are discussed in the philosophy of language
namely, the maxims of quantity, quality, and relation.
It's less clear to me that the maxim of manner fits this kind of analysis,
so I'll turn now to receiver virtues.
These are the virtues that makes someone an excellent receiver of communication
from another rather than an excellent source of information for another person.
They relate to testimonial knowledge,
so someone who is an excellent receiver who has virtues related to receiving
communication is more likely to acquire knowledge from others and less likely
to be deceived by others who are lying or speaking over confidently and so on.
Such dispositions have been studied in virtue epistemology and
social epistemology by people like John Greco and Ernie Sosa.
A second type of receiver virtue that has gotten
some interest recently is epistemic justice.
This is a concept that Miranda Fricker introduced in 2007.
Her basic idea is this, sometimes we're subtly biased against other people.
We think that,
well, this sort of person doesn't tend to have knowledge about this topic.
And so, when someone tells us the truth, even if they're expressing their
knowledge, we might not take them seriously as they deserve.
She calls that credibility deficit.
There are also credibility excesses.
These occur when someone belongs to some kind of group that we take more seriously
than they deserve, perhaps people who have an accent that we find charming.
Fricker says that epistemic justice is the virtue of according exactly the right
amount of credibility to the statements and assertions of other people.
And not applying either credibility excesses or the one that she's more
interested in credibility deficits to what they have to say in a systematic way.
Even more recently there's been some work on the virtue of intellectual humility.
Which is an interesting disposition because unlike many virtues it's one where
having it might be inconsistent with knowing that you have it.
There's no problem with an honest person thinking that they're honest.
And there's no problem with a courageous person thinking they're courageous.
But a person who goes around bragging about how humble they are,
probably isn't really humble.
So this is an interesting virtue that I and
some others have started to investigate recently.
And it's easily thought of as a receiver virtue
because if someone tells you something that you didn't know or
if somebody tells you something that you disagree with, then humility is required
in order to investigate their claims and take them seriously.
There is perhaps also a disposition not to make assertions or
take the assertions of others onboard with the right amount of credibility.
But also to ask question to use interrogative statements rather than
assertions.
And these would be the interrogative analogs of the Gricean Maxims
that we discussed just before in the section on the source virtues.
And they would have to do with asking the right questions of the right people
at the right time for the right reasons and so on.
Christopher Hookway published a paper in 2010
in the Journal Episteme that had to do with such receiver virtues.
Two other kinds of virtues that have not been discussed as much
are conduit virtues and echo virtues.
Where a source virtue makes someone an excellent original source
of communication,
and a receiver virtue make someone an excellent recipient
of information from someone else,
a conduit virtue makes someone an excellent conduit
through which knowledge or information can pass.
They might do this by believing what they've been told and
reporting it as their own knowledge to someone else.
Or they might express such a conduit virtue by quoting or
paraphrasing what someone else has said.
Conduit virtues have been almost entirely neglected by philosophers,
including people who work on virtue epistemology.
Two recent exceptions to this trend are papers that I co-authored,
in the first instance, with Brian Robinson,
a paper on the virtue of gossiping well.
And a paper that I co-authored with Gus Skorburg on journalistic virtues,
which have to do, we argue with taking the words of
people from various groups seriously and reporting them on,
even if one is not likely to make a lot of money off of such reporting.
Much contemporary non-academic attention however has been paid to conduit virtues.
So for instance there was an article recently in the news
about a strategy that some women used in the first term of the Obama White House
that they called amplification.
What this meant was that whenever a woman made a point in an important meeting,
another woman would repeat it and refer it back to the first person who spoke.
They did this because they found that unless they amplified
they would be spoken over by the men at the meetings.
And sometimes the man would even take credit for
the women's contributions claiming them as their own.
So conduit virtues have to do not just with repeating what someone said but
also with giving them credit for it when one does repeat what they said.
Another example of non-academic attention to conduit virtues is
the #SayHerName which was started by Kimberle Crenshaw
very recently in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
She doesn't disagree with the Black Lives Matter movement, but she found that they
paid disproportionate attention to police violence against black men.
And she wanted to raise awareness about police brutality towards black women,
as well.
To #sayhername insists on
not just reporting statistics about women who have been harmed by the police,
but individualizing them, and humanizing them by insisting on saying their names.
Another example of a conduit vice, in this case, was recent outrage over Donald Trump
retweeting anti-Semitic memes that he got from alt right accounts on Twitter.
Another thing that Trump is often accused of doing,
in fact which he often does do, is say things like, a lot of people are saying,
and then reporting a conspiracy theory or an innuendo.
In fact, this is been responded to also on Twitter
by people who started using the hashtag many people are saying,
and mocking Donald Trump with it.
Echo virtues are the fourth type of virtues we're going to think about
in this discussion.
And they might seem a bit unnecessary.
After all, if I tell you something and
then you just repeat it back to me, that seems sort of useless.
And if I tell you something and you repeat it to yourself, again,
that might seem kind of useless.
So echo virtues, maybe rightly, have been ignored by most philosophers.
There are three exceptions I can think of, however.
David Wong,
a philosopher at Duke University has written about character echos.
He has the idea that when I tell you what I think and what I care about and
what I value, you might echo that back to me in a slightly distorted and
perhaps even idealized way in order to help me crystalize what I
really care about, in order to help me Find out what sort of person I really am.
And he thinks of this as a process that mostly is just true to what
the source originally reports to what A says to B, but
which might involve a certain amount of benevolent or charitable distortion.
Two other examples are the philosophers Blustein and Margalit.
Who've written about ritual echoing, specifically of people who've died.
Blustein speaks about the dear departed, so family and friends who have died.
And Margalit specifically focuses on the Holocaust, and
the duty to remember this atrocity and others like it.
Both of them point out that memory is fragile, and that one way
to strengthen memories, one way to ensure that we don't forget is to repeat,
either to ourselves or to each other, sometimes in ritualized ways.
An echo virtue that's been investigated to some extent in clinical practice
is defined methodology which I'll mention just in a second.
First I want to show you an example of an echo virtue related to Holocaust.
This is a picture that I took in the town of Hauta in the Netherlands this year,
these are [FOREIGN] which means stumbling blocks or stumbling stones.
And there are thousands of these now, throughout Europe
that have been placed in the ground in front of the houses where Jews
were last living before they were taken to concentration camps and death camps.
And the point with these is that they are very simple, they are easy to miss and
that's what makes them stumbling blocks in a way.
But they ensure that we don't forget
these people who were killed during the Holocaust.
The FIND methodology which stands for
Filming Interactions to Nurture Development
is being developed at Phil Fisher's Lab at the University of Oregon.
And what he basically does is he films parents interacting with
high risk children and he edits the video of these interactions to ensure that
only the very best interactions are shown back to the parents when they watch them.
And then these are used as a kind of role model for the parents.
Where they, themselves, become their own role models because they get back an echo
that shows only the best of them.
