Virtue Epistemology Essay

Is virtue all we need? Virtue epistemology is the theory that all of the things we believe are done so through an ethical process. They play an important role, in that our own personal experiences and intellectual facets are what drive this process. The fundamental idea of virtue epistemology is that knowledge is a form of a more general phenomenon, namely success through abilities. Which is turn means: knowledge is a cognitive achievement through cognitive abilities (perception, memory, experience, etc.). Knowledge doesn’t need to be anything beyond a justified true belief.

Almost all epistemologists, since Edmund Gettier’s 1963 article, have agreed that he disproved the justified-true-belief conception of knowledge. He proposed two examples

This theory entails merging two theories of knowledge: virtue epistemology and anti-luck epistemology. A key premise in Pritchard’s theory incorporates those two separate epistemic conditions that which are specifically designed to accommodate the two master intuitions about knowledge. He makes a case that cognitive achievements are compatible with knowledge which undermines the principle of environmental luck, the same luck that is widely thought to threaten knowledge in instances such as the barn façade case that Ginet

This instance then leads him to form the presupposed belief that what he sees is indeed a barn. Henry is correct in that his belief is true. Because he happens to be driving through the country, and an individual would not normally expect that some object in the distance that seems to be a barn while cruising through the country would be anything other than exactly what it appears to be. Most would agree that Henry is justified in his belief. Therefore, Henry has a justified true belief that what he sees is a barn. However, it is then revealed that the countryside in which Henry found the barn is scattered with façades of barns, which in simple terms are constructions that are meant to look like barns from a certain perspective (i.e., Henry’s), but are not genuinely barns. In actuality, the barn that Henry did happen to see was the only actual barn in the area, and it is by sheer coincidental luck that Henry happened to form his belief about that particular figure he perceived in the distance. The point of this example is to show the instance I previously stated above of the concept where some information is intended to mislead but just so happened to reveal its true