How to behave virtuously in an irrational world — Part III

[This essay was recently published in the journal Disputatio. I present here a version adapted to a more general public because I think it may be of interest.]

Virtue epistemology: dealing honestly with the irrational

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and provides the criteria for evidential warrant — it tells us when it is in fact rational to believe or disbelieve a given notion. Virtue epistemology is a particular approach within the field of epistemology, which takes its inspiration from virtue ethics. The latter is a general way to think about ethics that goes back to Aristotle and other ancient Greek and Roman thinkers.

Briefly, virtue ethics shifts the focus from questions such as “Is this action right/wrong?” to “Is the character of this person virtuous or not?” The idea is that morality is a human attribute, which has the purpose of improving our lives as individuals embedded in a broader society. As such, it does not yield itself to universal analyses that take a God’s-eye view of things, but rather starts with the individual as moral agent.

Similarly with science: contrary to widespread belief (even among scientists), science cannot aspire to a completely neutral view from nowhere, because it is by nature a human activity and therefore bound by the limits (epistemic and otherwise) that characterize human intelligence and agency. Because science irreducibly depends on specific human perspectives, it can provide us only limited access to the world-in-itself. We can observe and explore the world with increasingly sophisticated tools, but we will always have a partial view, and a distorted understanding, of reality.

That’s why both the scientist and the skeptic of pseudoscience can benefit from a virtue epistemological way of thinking: since scientific knowledge is irreducibly human, our focus should be on the human agent and the kind of practices, enacted by that agent, that make it possible for her to arrive at the best approximation of the truth that is accessible to us. In practice, this means that we should cultivate epistemic virtues and strive to avoid epistemic vices.

Here is a partial list of epistemic virtues: attentiveness, benevolence (principle of…