VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE GETTIER CHALLENGE

Abstract

Virtue epistemologists keenly argue that the resources of their virtue theories can help to resolve the Gettier problem in epistemology. Edmund Gettier, in his 1963 short essay, had demonstrated the inadequacy of the tripartite conditions for knowledge. Proceeding by way counterexamples, he revealed that the conditions of justification, truth and belief in the traditional account of knowledge as “justified true belief”, were insufficient, because, a justified belief may happen to be true by virtue of mere coincidence or luck. In other words, a believer may happen to hold a justified belief but on the basis of facts irrelevant to the truth of the belief. This shows the possibility of a missing link between truth and knowledge. Known as the Gettier problem, this awareness, which has elicited a series of post-Gettier theories in contemporary epistemology, has, nevertheless, remained a difficult challenge to resolve. Virtue epistemology, a recent approach in epistemology, claims its virtue-theoretic analysis of knowledge has the capacity to resolve the problem. This paper explores the defining features of virtue epistemology and critically examines its attempt to resolve the Gettier problem. It concludes that despite its promising trailblazing quality, virtue epistemology lacks the capacity to adequately address the Gettier problem due to certain epistemic defects inherent in its account of knowledge, predisposing it to the Gettier-style cases. The expository and critical methods are adopted in the paper.