The virtue responsibilists reject an identification of virtue with either Sosa's broad range of truth-conducive faculties, or with the "natural or native processes" that comprise for Goldman "the domain for primary individual epistemics" (LI, p.
Epistemologies today are often characterized by terms such as aretaic, deontological, and consequentialist (specifically, 'epistemic rule-utilitarian').[1] This language has moved into epistemology rather swiftly, given initial impetus by several influential articles on different aspects of the epistemology/ethics analogy by William Alston (1978), Roderick Firth (1978, 1981), Jonathan Dancy (1982), Richard Feldman (1988) and Matthias Steup (1988).
The most developed accounts of virtue epistemology are Ernest Sosa's virtue perspectivism, developed in articles many of which are collected in his Knowledge in Perspective (1991; hereafter KIP), and Alvin Goldman's historical reliabilism, the VE version of which is developed primarily in "Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology," contained in Liaisons (1992; hereafter LI).
In Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge, he uses his theorizing on argument fields to critique liberalism and propose a "new rhetoric for modern democracy." This "new rhetoric" is "a move away from one discourse, liberalism, to a different discourse, epistemics" (p.
As the action proceeds, however, these disparate actors find a political Esperanto, the discourse of epistemics. In the end, the babble of tongues becomes translatable as these travelers from various different knowledge fields begin to talk reasonably to one another.
Epistemics is a boundary-crossing discourse that facilitates expert-to-expert discussion and expert-to-policymaker communication and, thereby, mitigates incompetence.
Goldman, Alvin (1987) "The Foundations of Social Epistemics," Synthese, vol.
(1) Historically, sociology has had problems justifying its own epistemic practices.
(3) "Social epistemology" sounds too much like Auguste Comte's original definition of "sociology" as a political program to discover the laws of epistemic progress so as to enable a more rational basis for authority in society.