Joshue Orozco

This dissertation argues that knowledge is best understood as a true belief acquired through the manifestation of intellectually virtuous performance. I argue that intellectually virtuous performance requires intellectual responsibility but not a characteristic motivation. I distinguish my view from other conceptions of intellectual virtues; particularly the virtue reliabilism of Ernest Sosa and John Greco and the virtue responsibilism of Linda Zagzebski. I argue that intellectual virtues are best understood along the lines of Aristotlean skills by looking at various puzzles in epistemology and showing how this view can make more progress in solving these puzzles than its competitors.

Since Ernest Sosa's (1980) seminal paper, a variety of views on the nature of intellectual virtues and their role in one's epistemic theory have emerged. These views, including Sosa's original, largely draw from moral counterparts for their motivation, articulation, and defense. Consider two broad accounts of intellectual virtues: Consequentialist Conception (CC): An intellectual virtue is a stable disposition, ability, or power to reliably acquire epistemic goods (e.g., true belief and knowledge). Aristotelian Conception (AC): An intellectual virtue is a character trait involving an underlying psychological and behavioral structure directed at various epistemic goods.

Epistemologists often remark that knowledge precludes luck. A true belief based on a guess or hunch is not knowledge because it seems merely fortuitous, too much of an accident, and, well, lucky that one happened to get things right. Of course, true beliefs based on guesses and hunches are not justified. However, Gettier cases have persuasively shown that even justified true beliefs can admit knowledge‐precluding kinds of luck. So in what sense are justified true beliefs that don’t amount knowledge lucky or ‘true only by chance’? I will address three different approaches to epistemic luck that have received significant attention in the recent literature: reliability approaches to epistemic luck, credit approaches to epistemic luck, and responsibilist or control approaches to epistemic luck. I will then turn my attention to the implications that epistemic luck has for other epistemic states. I will focus particularly on state of understanding and examine whether, and to what extent, understanding is vulnerable to epistemic luck.

Children learn and come to know things about the world at a very young age through the testimony of their caregivers. The challenge comes in explaining how children acquire such knowledge. Since children indiscriminately receive testimony, their testimony-based beliefs seem unreliable, and, consequently, should fail to qualify as knowledge. In this paper I discuss some attempted explanations by Sandy Goldberg and John Greco and argue that they fail. I go on to suggest that what generates the problem is a hidden assumption that the standards for testimonial knowledge are invariant between children and cognitively mature adults. I propose that in order to adequately explain how children acquire testimonial knowledge we should reject this hidden assumption. I then argue that understanding knowledge in terms of intellectual skills gives us a plausible framework to do so.