Perspectivism, Deontologism and Epistemic Poverty

Abstract

The epistemic poverty objection is commonly levelled by externalists against deontological conceptions of epistemic justification. This is that an "oughts" based account of epistemic justification together with "ought" implies "can" must lead us to hold to be justified, epistemic agents who are objectively not truth-conducive cognizers. The epistemic poverty objection has led to a common response from deontologists, namely to embrace accounts of bounded (perspectival) rationality-subjective, practical or regulative accounts rather than objective, absolute or theoretical accounts. But the bounds deontological epistemologists and their opponents entertain rarely include cultural limitations. This paper considers neo-Vygotskian (contextualised cognition) arguments that we must consider such cultural limits in defending deontologism, and thus that any deontologically motivated perspectivism must be in part a cultural perspectivism. The dangers of strong relativism are flagged and an attempt is made to steer a middle path between this and a parochial anti-rationalist objectivism.

Virtue Epistemology and the Sources of Epistemic Value

“…Conceptually, these twin dimensions of epistemic assessment are orthogonal. Note also, that many examples of beliefs that are justified but false, or true but without deontic Virtue-reliabilist tendency (emphasizes the importance of this axis of epistemic value) Virtue-responsibilist tendency (emphasizes the importance of this axis of epistemic value) justification, are entirely quotidian, and empirically, these axes of assessment may be really very orthogonal (Lockie 2016a).…”