A. Virtue Epistemology > "Epistemology Through Thick and Thin: Call for Papers
I suggest a discussion over thick and thin (T/T) concepts can help illuminate research overlaps and potential synergies between those working primarily in ethics and in epistemology. The Phil Papers volume will certainly contribute to that interface between ethics and epistemology, its focus being on the less mainstream appeal to thick concepts in epistemology today.
[1. What is the best way to understand the distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts? Are there problems with the analogy from the case of ethics?]
Reply: There are probably many ways to understand the T/T distinction and its importance in epistemology. I suggest we try to understand it in ways that help illuminate rather than obfuscate the differences between evaluating particular beliefs and appraising agents. The T/T distinction is deeply enmeshed with the differences between act/belief and agent evaluation. Now there are very many "primacy" issues that arise with this thought. Are thick concepts conceptually prior, or vice versa? Is agent or belief/act evaluation primary, and the other derivative? These are interesting debates, but if our goal is to be able to 'put the T/T distinction to work' for us as I think we should, then I suggest trying to be neutral to the primacy issues, and working instead first on the 'logic' of T/T concepts and the explanations that can be couched in terms of them. We may come to evaluation with an interest either in the agent or the particular belief and its truth. Or the case and the kind of information we are presented with by it may dictate whether belief or agent evaluation is most pertinent. So whether we invoke/ascribe thinner or broader characterological traits to an agent can depend in some ways simply on our explanatory interests--whether we are more concerned with particular beliefs or holistic character, explanation or justification in the sense of conformity with norms, etc.
[Are there problems with the analogy from the case of ethics?]
Reply: Certainly Dewey, Anscombe, Williams, McDowell and various others think that approaches or traditions the tend to feature or focus around thick ETHICAL concepts have quite a different flavor that those that focus, as Anscombe held of the Church-influenced “law conception of ethics.” “In consequence of Christianity for many centuries, the concepts of being bound, permitted, or excused became deeply embedded in our language and thought.” This deontological mode of talking was “already associated with ‘culpa’—‘guilt—a juridical term. The blanket term ‘illicit’, ‘unlawful,’ meaning much the same as our blanket term ‘wrong,’ explains itself. It is interesting that Aristotle didn’t have such a blanket term” (1958, 30). I would hold that epistemology does not escape this technique—that its ‘law conception’ is equally suspect and for some of the same historical or developmental reasons.
But of course there are some important disanalogies as well. Moreover, Williams did note, and rightly so, that ‘thin’ concepts serve at least one very useful and even indispensable role: As enabling “criticism”; without this, the view is surely open to the charge of ‘quietism.’ So I would want to retain and indeed develop this important continuing function of thin concepts. A central question we should be aware of is whether we are interested in beliefs/act or agents, or again, in explanation or evaluation in terms of conformity with norms. These are questions we must ask both in ethical and epistemic evaluation—they are points about the use of T/T concepts that hold generally across ethics and epistemology (some points about T/T concepts hold for aesthetics as well). I don’t think of the epistemic analogue of the particularist strain in virtue ethics being especially helpful. Rather, I hold that second-wave virtue epistemologists are 'thickies' in some obvious senses, but not necessarily in others, and that they shouldn’t overplay the shift ‘from’ thin to thick concepts. Let’s look at some of the specific interests that qualify second-wavers as ‘Thickies’:
--their approach bids epistemologists to get up out of their armchairs and engage empirical date about human cognition from social psychology: for instance, the rich literatures on "metacognitive control" and "need for cognition" that Lepock and Lahroodi have respectively written on.
--their approach parallels the considerably shift from first-wave to second wave virtue ethics, by its current growing interest in "thick" descriptions of particular intellectual virtues. For instance, self-trust, conscientiousness, open-mindedness have each been given increasing interest.
Common among 'we thickies,' then, has been the sense of a needed shift from 'virtue epistemology' to 'theory of epistemic virtues' (as Lahroodi puts it), or again from the traditionalists' concern with 'thin' concepts of "justification," "warrant," etc., to what Baehr calls "character epistemology."
But the shift needn't be and shouldn't be seen as exclusionary, as I see it, but rather as an 'enabling' self-limitation: the 'thicker' and more demanding understanding of intellectual virtues that the thickies typically work with needn't be taken to exclude the 'conservative' interests of first wave virtue epistemology in concerns about scepticism and in the analysis of propositional knowledge ('knowing that') and justification.
In summary of this approach to how to understand the distinction, we are best-prepared to navigate the terrain and avoid unmotivated debates if we allow that as philosophers we have there are a plurality of legitimate interests in the thick as well as the thin and that these interests typically shape the form of the explanations/evaluations we seek and the concepts we invoke to pursue them. We will have a
lot more commonality in our approaches this way, than if our discussions of thick and thin concepts are deeply colored by theory-driven commitments to the primacy of the one kind of concept over the other.
Accordingly, the basic theme in my approach (see 'Expanding Epistemology') is that we don't so much need a 'move from thin to thick" in epistemology, as a clarification of the role thick and thin characterological ascriptions EACH plays in the fulfillment of the various but equally legitimate explanatory and evaluative tasks we set ourselves.
2. Would the move from a thick to thin epistemology lead to significant changes in how we do epistemology? If so, is this desirable?
Reply: Given the paragraph's introducing "Epistemology Through Thick and Thin," it would seem more straightforward to ask about a move from thin to thick rather than from thick to thin. No matter, as my thesis has been that we don't need so much a shift from the one to the other, but to understand the interconnection of T/T concepts to our explanatory and evaluative interests. But clearly epistemologists during the post-Gettier era has focused on 'thin' epistemic concepts such as justification and knowledge. This goes together with that orientation within virtue epistemology itself that Jason calls "Conservative," and the project of conceptual analysis of knowledge more generally. Second-wave V epistemology--'Thickies' as I call them--do likely find a strong parallel between this unbalanced focus on thin epistemic concepts in epistemology, and the focus on thin concepts like 'right' and 'good' in ethics.
It is Anscombe's influential article of a half century ago (1958) "Modern Moral Philosophy" which is often cited as a locus classicus for the re-consideration of virtue-centered ethics," and where thick concepts (though she didn't use the term) are taken are used in counter-examples to the popular non-cognitivist metaethics of the period in Ayer, Stevenson, Hare, etc. To follow the British end leads to Foot's influential paper of 1978, and to B. Williams' argument building on Foot's in emphasizing that virtue and other thick terms undermine the fact/value dichotomy that underlay the emotivist account of meaning and the thesis of the reducibility of thick concepts into independent descriptive (non-evaluative) and evaluative aspects. The particularist form of virtue ethics the Williams developed and Dancy pushed further in recent years, is thus rather hostile to the 'Thinnie' establishment it challenged. I won't follow this further at present since the point is to assess the plausibility of an epistemological analogue. I don't see epistemological thickies as analogous to particularists in ethics (though others might?), but I do want to argue that:
--Virtue epistemology is generally following a pattern seen in virtue ethics, in terms of dissatisfaction with the analysis of knowledge and the thin-concept focus it invokes, and a 'turning away'.
--Interest in epistemic responsibility and the particular character virtues and their interaction with practical reasoning and ethical traits, sentiments, etc. is very desirable as an alternative topic from the perspective of a thickie.
--the focus on thick character traits like the reflective virtues are also desirable as a way of retaining the importance of "personal" justification in the achievement of our various virtue-pertinent goals: not just true belief and propositional knowledge but understanding, etc.
--the focus on thick concepts also tends to support considerations of credit, key concerns in the credit account of knowing, so it can actually aid rather than merely 'replace' traditional focus on thin terms like 'justification' and 'knowledge.'
--the focus on thick concepts is also desirable for leading away from singular concern with belief acquisition, and on to belief change, maintenance, etc., and from focus on atomistic pieces of knowledge to more (moderately!) holistic approaches that evaluate the agent and the quality of her actions in inquiry (zetetic activity).
Heather's paper "Thin Concepts to the Rescue" I think is consistent with most of this, though the language of thick/thin can be confusing. But her basic claims I take it were that justification is not quite the "family relations concept" that Alston took it to be (with NO agreement over which among a various "list" of possible application are necessary and/or sufficient for its application). But internalists and externalists shared LITTLE in common over it (they shared, as Riggs alternatively put it, only a basic sense of 'what justification is for,' but disagreed about much else. The debate was in this way according to Heather largely under-motivated, as epistemologists were typically talking past one another by implicitly using 'thickened' (internalist and externalist) accounts of what should have all along been seen as a thin concept--i.e., one with multiple and quite varied conditions of application. The proposal for 'thin concept analysis' as saving philosophers in this and similar debates from stalemate and stagnation, suggests essentially that we see justification as a range or spectrum. If we don't, then we will continue to have the kinds of debate where externalists assert as sufficient for knowledge a set of conditions that internalists (rightly) don't take as sufficient for distinctively human 'of high-end' knowledge, and internalists assert as necessary for knowledge a set of conditions that externalists (rightly) don't take as necessary for knowledge at the low end of the range ('animal,' 'children's' or 'brute externalist' knowledge. (That's just nuts, and I've described the 'paradox of general sufficiency' that analytical philosophers fall into when they try to give 'reductive definitions' of range concepts and family relations concepts (see Adam Carter's "A Happy Triumvirate" on criticism of me on this, though).
Anyway, this, then, that the language of Heather in calling for 'thin concept analysis' doesn't on my view run deeply counter to the conception of 2nd-wave virtue epistemology as "thick-oriented," but actually is compatible with and supports it because it moves debates over justification out of the limelight and makes room for the responsibilists interests in a research program into the character virtues--into 'character epistemology' to end with Jason's preferred term again.
[3. How are particular thick concepts to be understood?] Williams understood thick concepts including the terms of moral virtue as world-guided (because of their greater descriptive content vis-a-vis thin evaluative terms like right and good) and action-guiding (perhaps a thesis of motivational internalism. Others like Peter Goldie today more explicitly endorse a motivational internalism build on the manner in which thick concepts are "embraced." When embraced in a robust way, they provide the agent with "reasons" for action. (Such an account is recognizably Aristotelian and non-Humean, one might say). I will explain this more fully, but the question that initially arises with the possibility of a viable epistemic analogue. That is, if the notion of grasping thick ethical concepts/virtue in an engaged way (roughly, 'sharing whatever beliefs, concerns, and values give application of the concept its point') provides motivation of action-guidance for the moral agent, then DOES GRASPING THICK EPISTEMIC CONCEPTS/VIRTUES IN AN ENGAGED WAY PROVIDE MOTIVATION AND 'INQUIRY-GUIDANCE'? THAT IS, DOES THE CLAIM OFTEN MADE BY THICKIES IN ETHICS, THAT "ANYONE WHO EMBRACES A THICK ETHICAL CONCEPT THEREBY HAS CERTAIN REASONS FOR DOING THINGS" (Moore, 2006) hold, and if so, does it hold for its EPISTEMIC ANALOGUE as well?
These two questions are interesting to me, because in both ethics and epistemology, to apply a thick concept in a given situation (to see an action as 'lewd,' for instance, or an agent's argument as intellectually 'dishonest', is in part to evaluate the situation; but as Moore (2006) adds, it is also to make a "judgment." Now consider the claim Moore wants to make--what he calls the Basic Proposition: anyone who embraces a thick ethical concept thereby has certain reasons for doing things. Why would or wouldn't we say that this claim is true, first of thick ethical concepts, and second, of thick epistemic ones? If there is an epistemic analogue, what exactly is it? What hangs on the answer we provide?
A few qualifications are in order anyway:
1. Both Moore and Goldie think that its not JUST 'embracing' the thick concept that has motivational force, but embracing it in an 'engaged' way. This point is made by Moore and pressed further by Goldie in his own paper. Moore writes that "Thick ethical concepts can be grasped in two ways, an engaged way and a disengaged way. To grasp a thick ethical concept in the disengaged way is to be able to recognize when the concept would (correctly) be applied, to be able to understand others when they apply it, and so forth. To grasp a thick ethical concept in the engaged way is not only to be able to do these things, but also to feel sufficiently at home with the concept to be prepared to apply it oneself, where being prepared to apply it means being prepared to apply it not just in overt acts of communication but also in how one thinks about the world and in how one conducts one's affairs. What this requires, roughly, is sharing whatever beliefs, concerns, and values give application of the concept its point" (2006, 137). Here, I take it, there need be no significant difference in either the requirements or the description, for holding EPISTEMIC thick concepts in the engaged way.
2. Both Moore and Goldie do not hold that the kind of motivational internalism in questions is indefeasible. Moore writes firstly that "reasons to do something" is understood broadly such that it is meant to include omissions as well as acts" (someone who understands "blasphemy" in the engaged way has a reason not to blaspheme). "Next, 'having' a reason is meant to fall short of acknowledging the reason. If someone has a reason, all sorts of factors, such as insensitivity, selfishness, and simple stupidity, may prevent acknowledging it...Second, a (normative) reason for doing something is indefeasible when it can be overridden by a (normative) reason for doing something else. The Basic Proposition does not require the reasons which someone has by virtue of embracing some thick ethical concept to be indefeasible" (136-7). Goldie agrees: "First, the motivational response need not be one on which one in fact acts; one can have stronger reasons not to act as one is motivated to do through an engaged application of the thick ethical concept...And secondly, the motivation is not *necessarily* connected to a fully engaged application of the concept; there must be room for such psychological failings as akrasia." (355) Now here too I don't see grounds for a big discrepancy whether we are dealing with ethical or epistemic thick concepts (and note Hookway's extensive work on 'epistemic akrasia.'
3. The third qualification might bring in more disanalogy, however. In speaking of ethical thick concepts, Goldie very plausibly asserts that they "involve emotional dispositions--dispositions to have the right emotions over a complex range of situations and actions, both actual and non-actual." This relates to the "recognition-response tie" that Goldie finds so important: When we have an emotional experience, there is a kind of connection between recognition and response--between the way we take in the world and the way we respond to it, not only emotionally but also with motivation." Following up point (2), Goldie says that "If my account of the recognition-response tie is to be understood as a version of motivational internalism, then it is an internalism that is normative, not one that is necessitating...someone who fully embraces a thick ethical concept *ought* to 'conduct his affairs' accordingly. What I say is intended to be neutral about the role of desire in motivation" But the main point here is that for Goldie, this 'recognition-response tie' is usefully explicated by attention to thick ETHICAL concepts. But the question for us here would be whether the same can be said with respect to those who "embrace" a thick epistemic concept, i.e., who grasp such a concept in the engaged way?
Finally here, I might mention that Moore's and Goldie's accounts are both versions of "normative motivational internalism" as well as defeasible motivational internalism. Moore explains this will, I think: Concerning 'reasons' as they feature in the Basic Proposition, he asserts both their normative nature and their defeasiblity. To focus just on the first, normativity contrasts with explanatoriness. But "reasons can be of either kind. An explanatory reason is a matter of why someone actually does something...a normative reason is a matter of why someone *ought* to do something. So the Basic Proposition as Moore understands it, and "normative motivational internalism" as Goldie develops it, are both restricted to claiming that anyone who embraces a thick ethical concept thereby *ought* to do certain things. So I have followed Moore and Goldie in this primarily to explicate the previous questions: 1) Is ethical normative motivational internalism sound, and 2) what should we say of the plausibility or implausibility of its epistemic analogue, focusing as it would on the "recognition-response" tie for one who "embraces" a thick epistemic concept like "inquisitiveness" or "open-mindedness"?
[4. Do particular debates within epistemology (e.g., internalism vs. externalism, foundationalism vs. coherentism) or more general approaches to epistemology favour one kind of concept over the other?]
Reply: The problem with the state of debate with respect to the kinds of issues about explanation and evaluation that character virtues, qua epistemic thick concepts, raise, is partly our undue focus on 'internalism versus externalism,' and the in-house internalist foundationalist/coherentist dispute. Virtue epistemology is "mixed theory," and in mixed theory is precisely what is needed in order for us to properly understand the complex interplay of emotion and other motivating factors in 'engaged response' to those descriptive but also richly evaluative terms that include the intellectual (including the more strictly epistemic) virtues.
The most pertinent debate regarding the role of the character virtues in epistemology, is not the internalist/externalist debate. Mixed theory effects its reconciliation. Mixed theory can stay neutral to many debates about the "primacy" of thick over thin or thin over thick concepts, and others. Remaining neutral to more of these debates allows us to focus more on the 'logic' of T/T trait-ascriptions. "Casual" and "Intentional" state two equally legitimate interests in explanation with respect to act/belief evaluation and agent appraisal.
Now what is the most pertinent debate--that over which we (and especially the responsibilists) had better to focus on to bring out the role of thick/thin trait ascriptions? I think the 'second wavers' should ride with the situationist challenge to virtue theory. For that challenge is by no means limited to theories dependent of 'global' and 'robust' traits of *ethical* character. As I highlight in another JB discussion thread, John Doris (author of Lack of Character) explicitly says that empirical social psychology about cross-situational and cross-temporal behavior should be taken as challenging to at least some (Zagzebski's neo-Aristotelian in particular), versions of virtue epistemology. More specifically he says that "situationism does not suggest reductivism about evaluative discourse, it merely suggests caution in applying thick ethical concepts with certain Aristotelian psychological associations," and clearly this concern might surface with respect to applying thick epistemic concepts as well. Here, for Doris, “characterological psychology, empirical inadequacy” is going to hold for ‘common-sense’ or ‘folk’ ascriptions of global traits, as well. That's why this argument can't be ignored, and why it partly revolves around thick or characterological trait-ascriptions and their Janus-headed role as terms both descriptive and evaluative. Foot and Williams are both associable with the view that the Greeks, in part because equipped with an aretaic language of thick concepts “may have more to offer” than modern philosophy (Williams 1985: 16-17, 128-9, 140-1, 148, 198). In “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics” Doris writes,
“I won’t try to assess Williams’ characterization of contemporary moral philosophy, or the prospects of ‘reductive’ treatments for ethical concepts, but I am concerned with the thought that thick evaluative concepts may ground more engaging and productive ethical reflection than reflection couched in thin terms, because my position might be thought to problematize important thick concepts…” (and impoverish our evaluative discourse; 514).
Much of Doris’ book and his papers that came after it are concerned with the NORMATIVE implications of situationism, and thus in answering this charge. In this paper he replies “first that a non-characterological moral psychology does not require that we eschew a normative vocabulary involving hybrid evaluative/descriptive ‘thick’ ethical terms”; but second that “I do insist that such terms are problematic when they employ certain suppositions in Aristotelian moral psychology, as when used in highly general character associations.”
I will end my comments on the useful and thought-provoking questions that the guest-editors for this forthcoming PP issue give us. Since in my published work I identify with a Deweyan, "inquiry-focused" form of responsibilism (zetetic responsibilism) in contrast to the "motivation-based" neo-Aristotelianism of Slote and Zagzebski. I accordingly would give a neo Deweyan (or zetetic responsibilist's) response to the situationist challenge; the situationist challenge is serious, and do cast doubt on particular versions of virtue epistemology just as on particular versions of virtue ethics. It is only a prescription of my own, because I intend certainly to include both zetetic and phronomic strands of virtue responsibilism in my desciption of ‘second-wave’ virtue epistemology. But I do argue the what the second-wavers should want to do is to follow the seriousness with the Deweyans took psychology, and to ‘ride’ with the more Deweyan response to situationism (as highlighted, for instance in the post on Matt Pamental’s contribution to this debate. This is not nearly as concessive, I think, as Thomas Hurka’s “occurentist” arguments against “dispositionalist” virtue ethics, but that is something that is certainly pertinent as well. The comments of Doris on thick and thin concepts and Hurka’s work that bear on this deserve discussion, but I'll start a new post for that, as it would constitute a digression here. These are some of my thoughts about the 'through thick and thin' questions. Now let me hear some of yours!
[1. What is the best way to understand the distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts? Are there problems with the analogy from the case of ethics?]
Reply: There are probably many ways to understand the T/T distinction and its importance in epistemology. I suggest we try to understand it in ways that help illuminate rather than obfuscate the differences between evaluating particular beliefs and appraising agents. The T/T distinction is deeply enmeshed with the differences between act/belief and agent evaluation. Now there are very many "primacy" issues that arise with this thought. Are thick concepts conceptually prior, or vice versa? Is agent or belief/act evaluation primary, and the other derivative? These are interesting debates, but if our goal is to be able to 'put the T/T distinction to work' for us as I think we should, then I suggest trying to be neutral to the primacy issues, and working instead first on the 'logic' of T/T concepts and the explanations that can be couched in terms of them. We may come to evaluation with an interest either in the agent or the particular belief and its truth. Or the case and the kind of information we are presented with by it may dictate whether belief or agent evaluation is most pertinent. So whether we invoke/ascribe thinner or broader characterological traits to an agent can depend in some ways simply on our explanatory interests--whether we are more concerned with particular beliefs or holistic character, explanation or justification in the sense of conformity with norms, etc.
[Are there problems with the analogy from the case of ethics?]
Reply: Certainly Dewey, Anscombe, Williams, McDowell and various others think that approaches or traditions the tend to feature or focus around thick ETHICAL concepts have quite a different flavor that those that focus, as Anscombe held of the Church-influenced “law conception of ethics.” “In consequence of Christianity for many centuries, the concepts of being bound, permitted, or excused became deeply embedded in our language and thought.” This deontological mode of talking was “already associated with ‘culpa’—‘guilt—a juridical term. The blanket term ‘illicit’, ‘unlawful,’ meaning much the same as our blanket term ‘wrong,’ explains itself. It is interesting that Aristotle didn’t have such a blanket term” (1958, 30). I would hold that epistemology does not escape this technique—that its ‘law conception’ is equally suspect and for some of the same historical or developmental reasons.
But of course there are some important disanalogies as well. Moreover, Williams did note, and rightly so, that ‘thin’ concepts serve at least one very useful and even indispensable role: As enabling “criticism”; without this, the view is surely open to the charge of ‘quietism.’ So I would want to retain and indeed develop this important continuing function of thin concepts. A central question we should be aware of is whether we are interested in beliefs/act or agents, or again, in explanation or evaluation in terms of conformity with norms. These are questions we must ask both in ethical and epistemic evaluation—they are points about the use of T/T concepts that hold generally across ethics and epistemology (some points about T/T concepts hold for aesthetics as well). I don’t think of the epistemic analogue of the particularist strain in virtue ethics being especially helpful. Rather, I hold that second-wave virtue epistemologists are 'thickies' in some obvious senses, but not necessarily in others, and that they shouldn’t overplay the shift ‘from’ thin to thick concepts. Let’s look at some of the specific interests that qualify second-wavers as ‘Thickies’:
--their approach bids epistemologists to get up out of their armchairs and engage empirical date about human cognition from social psychology: for instance, the rich literatures on "metacognitive control" and "need for cognition" that Lepock and Lahroodi have respectively written on.
--their approach parallels the considerably shift from first-wave to second wave virtue ethics, by its current growing interest in "thick" descriptions of particular intellectual virtues. For instance, self-trust, conscientiousness, open-mindedness have each been given increasing interest.
Common among 'we thickies,' then, has been the sense of a needed shift from 'virtue epistemology' to 'theory of epistemic virtues' (as Lahroodi puts it), or again from the traditionalists' concern with 'thin' concepts of "justification," "warrant," etc., to what Baehr calls "character epistemology."
But the shift needn't be and shouldn't be seen as exclusionary, as I see it, but rather as an 'enabling' self-limitation: the 'thicker' and more demanding understanding of intellectual virtues that the thickies typically work with needn't be taken to exclude the 'conservative' interests of first wave virtue epistemology in concerns about scepticism and in the analysis of propositional knowledge ('knowing that') and justification.
In summary of this approach to how to understand the distinction, we are best-prepared to navigate the terrain and avoid unmotivated debates if we allow that as philosophers we have there are a plurality of legitimate interests in the thick as well as the thin and that these interests typically shape the form of the explanations/evaluations we seek and the concepts we invoke to pursue them. We will have a
lot more commonality in our approaches this way, than if our discussions of thick and thin concepts are deeply colored by theory-driven commitments to the primacy of the one kind of concept over the other.
Accordingly, the basic theme in my approach (see 'Expanding Epistemology') is that we don't so much need a 'move from thin to thick" in epistemology, as a clarification of the role thick and thin characterological ascriptions EACH plays in the fulfillment of the various but equally legitimate explanatory and evaluative tasks we set ourselves.
2. Would the move from a thick to thin epistemology lead to significant changes in how we do epistemology? If so, is this desirable?
Reply: Given the paragraph's introducing "Epistemology Through Thick and Thin," it would seem more straightforward to ask about a move from thin to thick rather than from thick to thin. No matter, as my thesis has been that we don't need so much a shift from the one to the other, but to understand the interconnection of T/T concepts to our explanatory and evaluative interests. But clearly epistemologists during the post-Gettier era has focused on 'thin' epistemic concepts such as justification and knowledge. This goes together with that orientation within virtue epistemology itself that Jason calls "Conservative," and the project of conceptual analysis of knowledge more generally. Second-wave V epistemology--'Thickies' as I call them--do likely find a strong parallel between this unbalanced focus on thin epistemic concepts in epistemology, and the focus on thin concepts like 'right' and 'good' in ethics.
It is Anscombe's influential article of a half century ago (1958) "Modern Moral Philosophy" which is often cited as a locus classicus for the re-consideration of virtue-centered ethics," and where thick concepts (though she didn't use the term) are taken are used in counter-examples to the popular non-cognitivist metaethics of the period in Ayer, Stevenson, Hare, etc. To follow the British end leads to Foot's influential paper of 1978, and to B. Williams' argument building on Foot's in emphasizing that virtue and other thick terms undermine the fact/value dichotomy that underlay the emotivist account of meaning and the thesis of the reducibility of thick concepts into independent descriptive (non-evaluative) and evaluative aspects. The particularist form of virtue ethics the Williams developed and Dancy pushed further in recent years, is thus rather hostile to the 'Thinnie' establishment it challenged. I won't follow this further at present since the point is to assess the plausibility of an epistemological analogue. I don't see epistemological thickies as analogous to particularists in ethics (though others might?), but I do want to argue that:
--Virtue epistemology is generally following a pattern seen in virtue ethics, in terms of dissatisfaction with the analysis of knowledge and the thin-concept focus it invokes, and a 'turning away'.
--Interest in epistemic responsibility and the particular character virtues and their interaction with practical reasoning and ethical traits, sentiments, etc. is very desirable as an alternative topic from the perspective of a thickie.
--the focus on thick character traits like the reflective virtues are also desirable as a way of retaining the importance of "personal" justification in the achievement of our various virtue-pertinent goals: not just true belief and propositional knowledge but understanding, etc.
--the focus on thick concepts also tends to support considerations of credit, key concerns in the credit account of knowing, so it can actually aid rather than merely 'replace' traditional focus on thin terms like 'justification' and 'knowledge.'
--the focus on thick concepts is also desirable for leading away from singular concern with belief acquisition, and on to belief change, maintenance, etc., and from focus on atomistic pieces of knowledge to more (moderately!) holistic approaches that evaluate the agent and the quality of her actions in inquiry (zetetic activity).
Heather's paper "Thin Concepts to the Rescue" I think is consistent with most of this, though the language of thick/thin can be confusing. But her basic claims I take it were that justification is not quite the "family relations concept" that Alston took it to be (with NO agreement over which among a various "list" of possible application are necessary and/or sufficient for its application). But internalists and externalists shared LITTLE in common over it (they shared, as Riggs alternatively put it, only a basic sense of 'what justification is for,' but disagreed about much else. The debate was in this way according to Heather largely under-motivated, as epistemologists were typically talking past one another by implicitly using 'thickened' (internalist and externalist) accounts of what should have all along been seen as a thin concept--i.e., one with multiple and quite varied conditions of application. The proposal for 'thin concept analysis' as saving philosophers in this and similar debates from stalemate and stagnation, suggests essentially that we see justification as a range or spectrum. If we don't, then we will continue to have the kinds of debate where externalists assert as sufficient for knowledge a set of conditions that internalists (rightly) don't take as sufficient for distinctively human 'of high-end' knowledge, and internalists assert as necessary for knowledge a set of conditions that externalists (rightly) don't take as necessary for knowledge at the low end of the range ('animal,' 'children's' or 'brute externalist' knowledge. (That's just nuts, and I've described the 'paradox of general sufficiency' that analytical philosophers fall into when they try to give 'reductive definitions' of range concepts and family relations concepts (see Adam Carter's "A Happy Triumvirate" on criticism of me on this, though).
Anyway, this, then, that the language of Heather in calling for 'thin concept analysis' doesn't on my view run deeply counter to the conception of 2nd-wave virtue epistemology as "thick-oriented," but actually is compatible with and supports it because it moves debates over justification out of the limelight and makes room for the responsibilists interests in a research program into the character virtues--into 'character epistemology' to end with Jason's preferred term again.
[3. How are particular thick concepts to be understood?] Williams understood thick concepts including the terms of moral virtue as world-guided (because of their greater descriptive content vis-a-vis thin evaluative terms like right and good) and action-guiding (perhaps a thesis of motivational internalism. Others like Peter Goldie today more explicitly endorse a motivational internalism build on the manner in which thick concepts are "embraced." When embraced in a robust way, they provide the agent with "reasons" for action. (Such an account is recognizably Aristotelian and non-Humean, one might say). I will explain this more fully, but the question that initially arises with the possibility of a viable epistemic analogue. That is, if the notion of grasping thick ethical concepts/virtue in an engaged way (roughly, 'sharing whatever beliefs, concerns, and values give application of the concept its point') provides motivation of action-guidance for the moral agent, then DOES GRASPING THICK EPISTEMIC CONCEPTS/VIRTUES IN AN ENGAGED WAY PROVIDE MOTIVATION AND 'INQUIRY-GUIDANCE'? THAT IS, DOES THE CLAIM OFTEN MADE BY THICKIES IN ETHICS, THAT "ANYONE WHO EMBRACES A THICK ETHICAL CONCEPT THEREBY HAS CERTAIN REASONS FOR DOING THINGS" (Moore, 2006) hold, and if so, does it hold for its EPISTEMIC ANALOGUE as well?
These two questions are interesting to me, because in both ethics and epistemology, to apply a thick concept in a given situation (to see an action as 'lewd,' for instance, or an agent's argument as intellectually 'dishonest', is in part to evaluate the situation; but as Moore (2006) adds, it is also to make a "judgment." Now consider the claim Moore wants to make--what he calls the Basic Proposition: anyone who embraces a thick ethical concept thereby has certain reasons for doing things. Why would or wouldn't we say that this claim is true, first of thick ethical concepts, and second, of thick epistemic ones? If there is an epistemic analogue, what exactly is it? What hangs on the answer we provide?
A few qualifications are in order anyway:
1. Both Moore and Goldie think that its not JUST 'embracing' the thick concept that has motivational force, but embracing it in an 'engaged' way. This point is made by Moore and pressed further by Goldie in his own paper. Moore writes that "Thick ethical concepts can be grasped in two ways, an engaged way and a disengaged way. To grasp a thick ethical concept in the disengaged way is to be able to recognize when the concept would (correctly) be applied, to be able to understand others when they apply it, and so forth. To grasp a thick ethical concept in the engaged way is not only to be able to do these things, but also to feel sufficiently at home with the concept to be prepared to apply it oneself, where being prepared to apply it means being prepared to apply it not just in overt acts of communication but also in how one thinks about the world and in how one conducts one's affairs. What this requires, roughly, is sharing whatever beliefs, concerns, and values give application of the concept its point" (2006, 137). Here, I take it, there need be no significant difference in either the requirements or the description, for holding EPISTEMIC thick concepts in the engaged way.
2. Both Moore and Goldie do not hold that the kind of motivational internalism in questions is indefeasible. Moore writes firstly that "reasons to do something" is understood broadly such that it is meant to include omissions as well as acts" (someone who understands "blasphemy" in the engaged way has a reason not to blaspheme). "Next, 'having' a reason is meant to fall short of acknowledging the reason. If someone has a reason, all sorts of factors, such as insensitivity, selfishness, and simple stupidity, may prevent acknowledging it...Second, a (normative) reason for doing something is indefeasible when it can be overridden by a (normative) reason for doing something else. The Basic Proposition does not require the reasons which someone has by virtue of embracing some thick ethical concept to be indefeasible" (136-7). Goldie agrees: "First, the motivational response need not be one on which one in fact acts; one can have stronger reasons not to act as one is motivated to do through an engaged application of the thick ethical concept...And secondly, the motivation is not *necessarily* connected to a fully engaged application of the concept; there must be room for such psychological failings as akrasia." (355) Now here too I don't see grounds for a big discrepancy whether we are dealing with ethical or epistemic thick concepts (and note Hookway's extensive work on 'epistemic akrasia.'
3. The third qualification might bring in more disanalogy, however. In speaking of ethical thick concepts, Goldie very plausibly asserts that they "involve emotional dispositions--dispositions to have the right emotions over a complex range of situations and actions, both actual and non-actual." This relates to the "recognition-response tie" that Goldie finds so important: When we have an emotional experience, there is a kind of connection between recognition and response--between the way we take in the world and the way we respond to it, not only emotionally but also with motivation." Following up point (2), Goldie says that "If my account of the recognition-response tie is to be understood as a version of motivational internalism, then it is an internalism that is normative, not one that is necessitating...someone who fully embraces a thick ethical concept *ought* to 'conduct his affairs' accordingly. What I say is intended to be neutral about the role of desire in motivation" But the main point here is that for Goldie, this 'recognition-response tie' is usefully explicated by attention to thick ETHICAL concepts. But the question for us here would be whether the same can be said with respect to those who "embrace" a thick epistemic concept, i.e., who grasp such a concept in the engaged way?
Finally here, I might mention that Moore's and Goldie's accounts are both versions of "normative motivational internalism" as well as defeasible motivational internalism. Moore explains this will, I think: Concerning 'reasons' as they feature in the Basic Proposition, he asserts both their normative nature and their defeasiblity. To focus just on the first, normativity contrasts with explanatoriness. But "reasons can be of either kind. An explanatory reason is a matter of why someone actually does something...a normative reason is a matter of why someone *ought* to do something. So the Basic Proposition as Moore understands it, and "normative motivational internalism" as Goldie develops it, are both restricted to claiming that anyone who embraces a thick ethical concept thereby *ought* to do certain things. So I have followed Moore and Goldie in this primarily to explicate the previous questions: 1) Is ethical normative motivational internalism sound, and 2) what should we say of the plausibility or implausibility of its epistemic analogue, focusing as it would on the "recognition-response" tie for one who "embraces" a thick epistemic concept like "inquisitiveness" or "open-mindedness"?
[4. Do particular debates within epistemology (e.g., internalism vs. externalism, foundationalism vs. coherentism) or more general approaches to epistemology favour one kind of concept over the other?]
Reply: The problem with the state of debate with respect to the kinds of issues about explanation and evaluation that character virtues, qua epistemic thick concepts, raise, is partly our undue focus on 'internalism versus externalism,' and the in-house internalist foundationalist/coherentist dispute. Virtue epistemology is "mixed theory," and in mixed theory is precisely what is needed in order for us to properly understand the complex interplay of emotion and other motivating factors in 'engaged response' to those descriptive but also richly evaluative terms that include the intellectual (including the more strictly epistemic) virtues.
The most pertinent debate regarding the role of the character virtues in epistemology, is not the internalist/externalist debate. Mixed theory effects its reconciliation. Mixed theory can stay neutral to many debates about the "primacy" of thick over thin or thin over thick concepts, and others. Remaining neutral to more of these debates allows us to focus more on the 'logic' of T/T trait-ascriptions. "Casual" and "Intentional" state two equally legitimate interests in explanation with respect to act/belief evaluation and agent appraisal.
Now what is the most pertinent debate--that over which we (and especially the responsibilists) had better to focus on to bring out the role of thick/thin trait ascriptions? I think the 'second wavers' should ride with the situationist challenge to virtue theory. For that challenge is by no means limited to theories dependent of 'global' and 'robust' traits of *ethical* character. As I highlight in another JB discussion thread, John Doris (author of Lack of Character) explicitly says that empirical social psychology about cross-situational and cross-temporal behavior should be taken as challenging to at least some (Zagzebski's neo-Aristotelian in particular), versions of virtue epistemology. More specifically he says that "situationism does not suggest reductivism about evaluative discourse, it merely suggests caution in applying thick ethical concepts with certain Aristotelian psychological associations," and clearly this concern might surface with respect to applying thick epistemic concepts as well. Here, for Doris, “characterological psychology, empirical inadequacy” is going to hold for ‘common-sense’ or ‘folk’ ascriptions of global traits, as well. That's why this argument can't be ignored, and why it partly revolves around thick or characterological trait-ascriptions and their Janus-headed role as terms both descriptive and evaluative. Foot and Williams are both associable with the view that the Greeks, in part because equipped with an aretaic language of thick concepts “may have more to offer” than modern philosophy (Williams 1985: 16-17, 128-9, 140-1, 148, 198). In “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics” Doris writes,
“I won’t try to assess Williams’ characterization of contemporary moral philosophy, or the prospects of ‘reductive’ treatments for ethical concepts, but I am concerned with the thought that thick evaluative concepts may ground more engaging and productive ethical reflection than reflection couched in thin terms, because my position might be thought to problematize important thick concepts…” (and impoverish our evaluative discourse; 514).
Much of Doris’ book and his papers that came after it are concerned with the NORMATIVE implications of situationism, and thus in answering this charge. In this paper he replies “first that a non-characterological moral psychology does not require that we eschew a normative vocabulary involving hybrid evaluative/descriptive ‘thick’ ethical terms”; but second that “I do insist that such terms are problematic when they employ certain suppositions in Aristotelian moral psychology, as when used in highly general character associations.”
I will end my comments on the useful and thought-provoking questions that the guest-editors for this forthcoming PP issue give us. Since in my published work I identify with a Deweyan, "inquiry-focused" form of responsibilism (zetetic responsibilism) in contrast to the "motivation-based" neo-Aristotelianism of Slote and Zagzebski. I accordingly would give a neo Deweyan (or zetetic responsibilist's) response to the situationist challenge; the situationist challenge is serious, and do cast doubt on particular versions of virtue epistemology just as on particular versions of virtue ethics. It is only a prescription of my own, because I intend certainly to include both zetetic and phronomic strands of virtue responsibilism in my desciption of ‘second-wave’ virtue epistemology. But I do argue the what the second-wavers should want to do is to follow the seriousness with the Deweyans took psychology, and to ‘ride’ with the more Deweyan response to situationism (as highlighted, for instance in the post on Matt Pamental’s contribution to this debate. This is not nearly as concessive, I think, as Thomas Hurka’s “occurentist” arguments against “dispositionalist” virtue ethics, but that is something that is certainly pertinent as well. The comments of Doris on thick and thin concepts and Hurka’s work that bear on this deserve discussion, but I'll start a new post for that, as it would constitute a digression here. These are some of my thoughts about the 'through thick and thin' questions. Now let me hear some of yours!
January 10, 2008 |
Guy Axtell
Guy Axtell
With many of us having been engrossed in writing for the *Philosophical Papers* "Epistemology Through Thick and Thin" call for papers, I might ask again your thoughts on some of the four Questions for Discussion that Ben Kotzee and Jeremy Wanderer posed:
1. What is the best way to understand the distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts? Are there problems with the analogy from the case of ethics?
2. Would the move from a thick to thin epistemology lead to significant changes in how we do epistemology? If so, is this desirable?
3. How should particular examples of thick epistemic concepts be understood?
4. Do particular debates within epistemology (e.g., internalism vs. externalism, foundationalism vs. coherentism) or more general approaches to epistemology favour one kind of concept over the other?
1. What is the best way to understand the distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts? Are there problems with the analogy from the case of ethics?
2. Would the move from a thick to thin epistemology lead to significant changes in how we do epistemology? If so, is this desirable?
3. How should particular examples of thick epistemic concepts be understood?
4. Do particular debates within epistemology (e.g., internalism vs. externalism, foundationalism vs. coherentism) or more general approaches to epistemology favour one kind of concept over the other?
July 1, 2008 |
Guy Axtell
Guy Axtell
Special edition of *Philosophical Papers*
Guest editors: Ben Kotzee & Jeremy Wanderer (U. of Cape Town)
The distinction between thick concepts (e.g., ‘deceit’, ‘gratitude’) and thin concepts (e.g., ‘good’, ‘wrong’), and their relevant importance to philosophical research, has been central to recent ethical theory. Metaethical discussion traditionally focuses on the thin, leading some to contend that moving from considering thin concepts to thick concepts leads to a very different, and preferable, conception of ethics.
A similar distinction suggests itself within epistemology. ‘Justification’ and ‘knowledge’ seem to be thin epistemic concepts, whilst ‘intellectual curiosity’, ‘trust’ and ‘gullibility’ seem to be thick ones. Like metaethicists, epistemologists have focused on the thin, raising the question whether a move from thin to thick would lead to an alternative and/or preferable conception of epistemology.
Only those approaching epistemology from the point of view of virtue ethics and those interested in ethno-epistemology have tended to recognize a distinction between a thick and thin epistemology. The aim of this special issue *Philosophical Papers* is to consider the distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts both within and without specific conceptions of epistemology, as well as providing a forum for discussion of specific thick epistemic concepts.
Possible Questions for Discussion:
1. What is the best way to understand the distinction between thick and thin epistemic concepts? Are there problems with the analogy from the case of ethics?
2. Would the move from a thick to thin epistemology lead to significant changes in how we do epistemology? If so, is this desirable?
3. How should particular examples of thick epistemic concepts be understood?
4. Do particular debates within epistemology (e.g., internalism vs. externalism, foundationalism vs. coherentism) or more general approaches to epistemology favour one kind of concept over the other?
The deadline for receipt of submissions is 30 June 2008. This issue of *Philosophical Papers*, comprising both invited and submitted articles, will appear in November 2008.
Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts electronically, as a pdf- or word-document attachment, to <Philosophical.Papers@ru.ac.za>. Authors should include their full name, affiliation, and address for e-mail correspondence with their submission.
Further enquiries may be addressed to Ben Kotzee (philosophy@uct.ac.za) or Ward Jones, Editor, *Philosophical Papers* (w.jones@ru.ac.za).