Ísak Andri Ólafsson

This article develops a virtue-epistemological distinction between general and narrow artificial intelligence (AI) systems by analysing AI competence through Ernest Sosa’s virtue-theoretic framework. First, I outline a general distinction between narrow and general AI. I then characterise AI in a way that bridges its terminology with virtue epistemological concepts. Drawing on Sosa’s idea that the telic structure is replicable for systems with merely functional-teleological aims, I argue that current AI systems can possess first-order competence. I argue that increasing domain-specific competence of narrow AI cannot elevate it to the status of general AI, as that requires the constitutional disposition to assess the aptness of one’s own first-order performances, a second-order competence that no amount of first-order improvement can grant. Finally, I argue that the virtue-theoretic distinction between artificial narrow intelligence and artificial general intelligence depends on whether the AI system possesses second-order constitutional competence.

This thesis consists of five distinct essays within social virtue epistemology, each of which can stand independently, yet all engage with fundamental ideas surrounding trust, testimony, and knowledge transmission. The first two chapters explore knowledge transmission and testimony through a virtue epistemological lens, emphasising the challenges of accounting for testimonial knowledge while maintaining a connection between knowledge and credit. I introduce types of knowledge transmission that do not rely on joint agency or shared intentions, challenging a prominent view in virtue epistemology. I present a type of a credit view that can defend one of the fundamental doctrines of credit views, that knowledge always entails credit, from challenging counterexamples. Trust and testimony both facilitate connections between individuals, making them central to our understanding of how knowledge is shared in social contexts. The third chapter aims to further our understanding of the nature of trust by placing the spotlight on trust features that have gone largely unnoticed, namely, their temporal elements. By expanding on these features, we can make meaningful distinctions between instances of trust that have generally been considered interchangeable. These distinctions and related concepts highlight the subtle differences that meaningfully impact how we approach trust. In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts to epistemic groups in the context of gatekeeping. Epistemologists should be interested in trust, testimony, and transmission as they relate to individuals, but groups are an interesting epistemic subject in their own right. This chapter examines the distinct epistemic roles groups play in shaping the beliefs of their members, and how individuals can benefit from being part of a collective. I then present conditions for justified epistemic gatekeeping and consider what kinds of groups are most capable of fulfilling those conditions. In the last chapter, I consider how to define general artificial intelligence. It is difficult to place large language models within epistemology. At times, they act like epistemic agents, seemingly capable of producing and transmitting knowledge, yet they often appear incompetent and incapable of performing simple tasks. I propose a virtue-theoretic distinction between narrow and general artificial intelligence, in the hopes that it can contribute to our understanding of what makes AI trustworthy, and whether we should think of their predictions as knowledge.

John Greco (2020) sets out to create a unified virtue-theoretic account of knowledge generation and transmission in his book The Transmission of Knowledge. One of the advantages of his view is that it can defend the achievement view from a known strand of counterexamples. To accomplish that, he relies on joint agency being essential to knowledge transmission. Joint agency can be characterized as a sort of interdependent and interactive cooperation between speaker and hearer that share an intention to transmit knowledge. This paper introduces the phenomenon of unwanted knowledge transmission which shows that joint agency, as Greco presents it, is not essential to knowledge transmission. Four types of unwanted knowledge transmissions will be introduced that pose threats to Greco’s account by showing that shared intention, a key characteristic of joint agency, is not present in all instances of knowledge transmission. Finally, some potential ways to defend Greco’s view will be considered and discussed.