Sosa’s and Zagzebski’s construals o f epistemic virtue each have their ow n distinctive merits. Between them, they set the agenda for subsequent work in virtue
epistemology. As we shall see, the field o f virtue epistemology has also much to offer the project o f education, and the two poles they represent - virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism - contribute to it in different ways.
S osa’s version encourages a target-orientated consequentialist approach, in which the reliable hitting o f true propositions - by using our epistemic skills and faculties - is the ch ief principle. His work would clearly have much appeal for technicists in the field o f education. Its structural features allow an encoding in symbolic logic and, as we
104 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1145a3. 1 have replaced the translator’s version ‘prudence’ with
‘practical wisdom', for the reasons given earlier.
shall see, the making o f links with some recent work in artificial intelligence.
However, this work turns out to raise questions concerning a number o f assumptions underlying village technical rationality. In particular, the means-ends reasoning and the preoccupation with efficiency o f such technicism are seen to lead to an
oversim plified and na'ive model of teaching and learning. I shall later elaborate on this (p. 178) to show that too direct a targeting o f true proposition p can lead to a class o f propositions, ~p, being inadvisedly ignored, and thus to an unvirtuous, non-creditable process o f passive belief-revision with insufficient tethering either to reality or to the rest o f the learner’s doxastic web.
Zagzebksi’s variety o f virtue epistemology contains a fuller description o f the various epistemic virtues and vices and hence is more easily translatable than Sosa’s writings into educational desiderata. Although she still endorses the truth-conduciveness requirement for epistemic virtue that Sosa’s work posits, she places an emphasis on virtuous motivation and not ju st on reliable outcomes.
Tw o groups o f virtues identified by Zagzebski form a starting point for two thesis chapters on aspects o f intellectual virtue which are highly pertinent to teaching and learning. The first concerns the use made by epistemic agents o f testimony, the related virtues being described by her as ‘being able to recognise reliable authority’ (VOM, p. 114), and ‘Trust is a mean between gullibility and suspiciousness’ (VOM, p. 160).
The second group involves what we might term ‘other-regarding intellectual virtue’ -
‘fairness in evaluating the arguments of others’ (VOM, p. 114) - and ‘the teaching virtues - the social virtues o f being communicative, including intellectual candor and know ing your audience and how they respond’ (VOM, p .1 14).
W e are rem inded here o f Sosa’s injunction that we ought to 1 ... give due weight not only to the subject and his intrinsic nature but also to his environm ent and his epistemic com m unity.’105 To do so would involve a consideration o f the contribution that the giving and receiving o f testimony and the presence o f other-regarding epistemic virtue in the social w orld make to the amelioration o f the individual’s epistemic predicament.
G ood testifiers are important in this epistemic ecology: to be ‘know ledgeable’ is to be a reliable source o f information, a creditable attribute, indicating the desirability o f such epistem ic trustworthiness to the highly social species Homo sapiens. I shall elaborate tos Sosa (1980) op. cit., p. 160.
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from these clues o f Zagzebski and Sosa - which they themselves leave largely
undeveloped - in the following chapters on ‘Testim ony’ and ‘Other-regarding V irtue’:
two epistemic features which are clearly crucial to education.
Chapter 2 - Knowledge and Testimony
Introduction
Testimony is an important source o f beliefs in a large number o f contexts, including that o f education (even though the word does not often appear during educational discussions).106 Since much that is believed by individuals has come to them not from direct experience but by accepting the accounts o f others, the trustworthiness o f their interlocutors’ testimonies, whether these be spoken, textual or electronic in form, is an important factor in determining whether or not they acquire true, justified beliefs.
Testimonial trustworthiness is a combination o f competence and sincerity, and both of these tend to be high when a teacher testifies in her area o f expertise. Because, in the world beyond the classroom, there are situations in which the competence or sincerity o f the testifier is low, however, it is important that the learner acquires an
epistemically-virtuous, well-attuned disposition towards testimony. In this chapter, I consider ways in which untrustworthy testifying can lead the epistemic agent astray, and also defend testimony’s role as an important source o f knowledge.
O ur knowledge is testimony-saturated to a considerable degree, including such apparently personal knowledge as our own name and date o f birth, factual knowledge such as the heliocentric solar system and everyday knowledge such as the current US President being Barack Obama. Neither is apparently ‘direct’ experience free o f testim onial influence, for experience rarely comes to us unmediated by theory (in the loose sense o f the word) but is filtered and coloured by w hat we have already heard and read about similar things, events and phenomena. Even the most solitary scientist, gathering data in the laboratory, relies on the labels on the reagent bottles, the
graduations on the meters and the periodic table o f the elements on the wall. As Hume puts it:
... there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful and even necessary to human life than that which is derived from the testimony of men and the reports
100 The notion of teaching as testifying is an under-explored one, to say the least. In the literature, the only significant discussion of the concept relates to Holocaust education, in which the testifier is a survivor of genocide rather than the regular teacher. One analysis draws on Levinas’ distinction between a ‘saying’ and a ‘said’: ‘Contemplating the accuracy and historical significance of a testimony is a response to its “said”. Attending to the translative, performative moment of testimony is a response to its
“saying”’. Roger Simon & Claudia Eppert (1997) ‘Remembering Obligation: Pedagogy and the Witnessing of Testimony of Historical Trauma’, Canadian Journal o f Education, 22, 2, pp. 175-191,
P-179.
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However, this view is at odds with much o f the Western philosophical tradition, and Hume him self places several restrictions on the legitimate use o f testimony, as we shall later see (p.75).
Be that as it may, this dependence on testimony is exceptionally marked during childhood and other periods o f new learning, so an analysis o f testifying and auditing is, I feel, particularly relevant to the virtue epistemology o f education. In this chapter, I conduct such an analysis and show that attacks on testimony as a legitimate source o f knowledge are ultimately self-defeating, leaving testimony in its rightful place
alongside perception, memory and reasoning. Doing this shifts the centre o f gravity o f epistemology away from the individual knower and towards the epistemic community at large: the place where both Sosa, and particularly Zagzebski, would locate him. A picture emerges o f a social ly-enwebbed epistemic agent, rather than an autonomous knower, with a Quinean web of belief which does not reduce to a list o f individual propositions. To identify some links with virtue epistemology and education, I view testim ony through the lenses o f Zagzebski’s and Sosa’s versions o f virtue epistemology and carry out an initial examination of the relationship between testimony and one aspect o f learning: acquiring a first language.