Duncan Pritchard

In this article I return to an argument that I presented in earlier work to the effect that virtue epistemology is at worse false and at best unmotivated. In the light of recent responses to this argument from such figures as John Greco, Guy Axtell, and Kelly Becker, I here re-state and re-evaluate this argument. In the process the original argument is refined and supplemented in key respects and some of the main charges against it are shown to be unfounded. Nevertheless, I also argue that at least one of the objections to the original argument—due to Becker—may well be on the right lines, and I draw some conclusions in this regard.

Here is a common ‘intuition’ that you’ll often find expressed regarding the epistemological externalism/internalism distinction. It is the thought that epistemological internalism, whatever its other faults, at least leaves the possession of knowledge a transparent matter; whereas epistemological externalism, whatever its other merits, at least makes the possession of knowledge opaque. It is the status of this view of the externalism/internalism contrast that I wish to evaluate in this paper. In particular, I argue that on the most credible interpretation of this ‘transparency’ thesis it is in fact inconsistent with even a minimal version of epistemological internalism. I conclude that knowledge is opaque on any plausible construal of knowledge, and consider some implications that this result has for the contemporary epistemological debate.

We offer an overview of what we take to be the main themes in Annalisa Coliva’s book, Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense. In particular, we focus on the ‘framework reading’ that she offers of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and its anti-sceptical implications. While broadly agreeing with the proposal that Coliva puts forward on this score, we do suggest one important supplementation to the view—viz., that this way of dealing with radical scepticism needs to be augmented with an account of the meta-sceptical problem which this proposal generates, which we call epistemic vertigo.