Connecting the previous post about claims made on behalf of the uniqueness of virtue ethics to claims made on behalf of the uniqueness of virtue epistemology, one should definately read Robert Lockie's interesting paper "Problems for Virtue Theories in Epistemology." Lockie directly connects the "mixed theory" characterization that most virtue epistemologists accept as indicating a 'third force' alternative to (pure) internalism and externalism, to the similar 'third force' claim made by proponents of virtue ethics--and then goes on to criticize both in tandem. Here is Lockie's full abstract:

"This paper identifies and criticizes certain fundamental commitments of virtue theories in epistemology. A basic question for virtues approaches is whether they represent a ‘third force’––a different source of normativity to internalism and externalism. Virtues approaches so-conceived are opposed. It is argued that virtues theories offer us nothing that can unify the internalist and externalist sub-components of their preferred success-state. Claims that character can unify a virtues-based axiology are overturned. Problems with the pluralism of virtues theories are identified––problems with pluralism and the nature of the self; and problems with pluralism and the goals of epistemology. Moral objections to virtue theory are identified––specifically, both the idea that there can be a radical axiological priority to character and the anti-enlightenment tendencies in virtues approaches. Finally, some strengths to virtue theory are conceded, while the role of epistemic luck is identified as an important topic for future work."
Keywords Virtue epistemology - Virtue ethics - Internalism - Externalism - Third force - Phronesis - Axiology - Pluralism - Anti-enlightenment - Universalizability - Eudaimonia

Lockie's paper is available at through Springerlink at http://www.springerlink.com/content/y64210h15713u611/

Is epistemology bound to become as divided between ‘friends of entanglement” and “friends of reduction—between epistemological thickies and thinnies—as ethical thickies and thinnies have been divided over the last few decades?

No, I am not claiming that--not claiming that the Janus-faced nature of thick epistemic is likely to prove as challenging to received conceptions of epistemology’s central tasks, as “thick affective concepts” like lewd, rude, dangerous, were for non-cognitivists in the academic mileau in which Anscombe and Foot wrote their influential essays 50 years ago.

But we're in the ballpark. There are theoretical obstructions to recognition of the import of thick evaluative concepts like those focused on in character epistemology. There are those who advocate the view that epistemology is only the theory of knowledge; and this narrow conception of epistemology is one a thickie is right to reject. It is because they are epistemic compatabilists or proponents of “mixed theory,” that they reject it. Compatibilists must worry anytime inquiry is shoved out to the margins of epistemology: they worry first when internalists want to conceive notions like rationality and justificcation as conformity with conciously-held standards, making demands on epistemic responsibility unrealistically high. David Owens writes, “[D]ependence on others is indispensabile to our intellectual lives and so must be consistent with our intellectual responsibility. The more we can relax the over-strenuous conception of our intellectual responsibilities bequethed to us by the Enlightenment, the less tempted we shall be to follow the externalist and renounce them altogether” (2000, 164; compare M. Williams, 2008).

But epistemic compatibilists may also worry about forms of externalism that are incompatibilist—those that fall prey to what Robert Brandom call the ‘naturalistic temptation,’ “the temptation to suppose that the concept of reliability of belief-forming processes can simply replace the concept of having good reasons for belief—that all the explanatory work for which we have been accustomed to call upon the latter can be performed as well or better by the former (1998, 373). Compatibilists worry that treating virtues as belief-forming processes seems to problematize our ability to uniting high-level and low-level virtues (Lepock 2007). For us to be able to resituate epistemic normativity within a broader and more varied class of social practices, intellectual virtues must not be conceived "virtue epistemologists must not conceive of the value of intellectual virtue as "restricted to its usefulness in clarifying the concepts of knowledge and its justification" (Olson, 2007).