Attitude Psychology and Virtue Epistemology

Virtue ethicists and epistemologists have generally presumed that virtue and vices are real psychological states or traits amenable to empirical study. There is, however, no agreement on the psychological constructs that may play this role. This chapter introduces the apparatus of attitude psychology that, in the author’s view, supplies a theoretical framework suitable to understand those intellectual vices which in Chapter 2 have been described as defects in epistemic agency. The approach throws light on the affective, motivational, and cognitive dimensions of the vices which are under scrutiny in this book. The chapter provides an overview of key concepts in attitude psychology including that of an attitude as a summary evaluation of its object. It makes a case that attitudes are the causal bases of intellectual virtues and vices. It concludes by addressing various objections to the framework and briefly addresses the questions raised by the situationist criticism of virtue epistemology.