Lecture 5 (March 30) focused on the second - reliabilist - axis of virtue epistemology, according to which virtues relate not to character, but to competence and therefore to certain cognitive traits that constitute the agent. The position of its most eminent representative, Ernest Sosa, has been described in terms of its evolution and complexities [1]. For Sosa, "everything that has a function, natural or artificial, has virtues"(Knowledge in Perspective, 1991, p. 271). And since our primary intellectual function is to arrive at true beliefs, intellectual virtues are whatever enables us to accomplish this end with our faculties, whether natural or acquired, and, in so doing, achieve a good end (Cf. Plato, Republic, Book I and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics).
The classical intellectual virtues are therefore not limited to open-mindedness, perseverance and courage. Vision, memory, induction and deduction and other cognitive faculties are also epistemic virtues that do not at first sight require (contra the responsabilist) either virtuous actions or virtuous motives. Distinguishing between several modalities of knowledge - "animal", "reflexive", "full and complete" - Sosa places increasing emphasis on the virtue ofepistemic agentivity. Thus 1. epistemic virtues are fairly reliable and stable faculties or skills in the sense that they are dispositions that lead to more true beliefs than false beliefs. 2. They can be natural or derived (i.e. linked to learning): vision is a natural virtue; knowing how to interpret an MRI image is a derived virtue. Skills acquired through critical thinking and logical reading are also derived virtues. 3. Virtues do not require intellectually acquired motivations. 4. But virtues are indeed "skills", a term now indifferently substituted for "virtue" or "competence". Knowledge is thus "the true belief born of intellectual virtue, the belief thatturns out to be right because of virtue, and not right by coincidence". We have emphasized the merits of this approach, which is attentive to the degree of complexity, depending on the field, of skills, its convincing responses to those who criticize it for evacuating the intentional, volitional and agential aspect of knowledge [2], the advantages of grasping the unity of knowledge by integrating perception, cognition and action, and distinguishing, within the epistemic virtues, between what is "auxiliary" (pertaining rather to the "ethical" virtues: perseverance, courage) and what is "constitutive" of knowledge, reminding us of the risks of drawing intellectual virtues too much on the side of moral virtues (well seen by Russell in chapter IX of the Skeptical Essays: "the evil that good men do"), risks consisting in making us lose sight of what may be intrinsically virtuous about intellectual achievements themselves.s, 2011.
