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BOOK REVIEWS 485 Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. By LINDA ZAGZEBSKI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi + 365. $64.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-521-57060-3 (cloth), 0-521-57826-4 (paper). The standard division in contemporary epistemology pits internalism against externalism. The former demands that individuals have cognitive access to the justifying conditions of their belief and that the belief be formed in accord with appropriate rules. The latter eschews the need for internal access but requires that a belief be formed by a process, reliably aimed at the production of truth. With its emphasis upon epistemic rights and duties, internalism is similar to deontology in ethics; in its emphasis on the production and maximization of true beliefs, externalism resembles consequentialism (for a remarkably lucid classification and exposition of the welter of positions in contemporary epistemology, see Alvin Plantinga's Warrant: The Current Debate [Oxford, 1993]). Given the recent revival of virtue ethics, it was perhaps only a matter of time before virtue epistemology would emerge as an alternative to deontological and consequentialist epistemology. Linda Zagzebski's Virtues ofthe Mind is the first extensive description of what that alternative might look like. Zagzebski defines a virtue as "a deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end" (137). The definition includes both externalist and internalist elements. The externalist emphasis on beliefs being formed through a reliable process is part of a virtue account of knowledge. Externalists fail, however, to give "due regard to the place of motives and governing virtues" in knowledge. In their exclusion of internal elements, they risk conflating understanding with a superficial grasp. The virtue approach, by contrast, identifies the pinnacle of knowledge with an ability to give a non-rule-governed account of reality. Unlike the rigorous internalism of the Enlightenment, a virtue approach can flexibly adopt different degrees of rigor. It also captures the many motives operative in our cognitive activity and avoids reducing all justifiable motives to that of duty. In her criticisms of the dominant contemporary approaches to epistemology, Zagzebski goes so far as to put into question the very depiction of knowledge as true belief. Late in the book, she substitutes the notion of "cognitive contact with reality" for that of true belief, because the former is holistic and refers to one's "entire doxastic structure" not just to isolated propositions (316). On the true belief model, intellectual progress is the accumulation of more true propositions. This atomistic approach omits any consideration of the integration of knowledge or the role of our habitual cognitive dispositions. While knowing fewer individual propositions, one's "doxastic structure" 486 BOOK REVIEWS could be at a "higher level" because of the sorts of things one knows and the way one holds the knowledge. A final difficulty with contemporary epistemology is its depiction of the influence of desire on reason as suspect, even irrational. But this ignores the myriad ways in which our dispositions and inclinations impede or assist our intellectual development. A virtue approach to epistemology is thus much richer and more capacious than the existing models. Zagzebski considers two possible bases for her approach to the virtues: one grounded in a notion of happiness, the other in the self-evident motives at the root of particular virtues. Although she never completely rejects the former possibility, admits that it has some advantages over a motive-based view, and even at times seems to prefer it, she avoids a eudaimonistic basis because of the desuetude into which teleology has fallen. To ground the virtues in motives, she appeals directly to "experience," to the value of the motives that "shines forth" in human actions (83). As she is aware, the approach is not without difficulties of its own. Many of our contemporaries are indeed suspicious of teleology, but are not an equal number suspicious of intuitionism? In her discussion of why knowledge is valuable, for example, Zagzebski is reduced to saying that it "just is," that we simply acknowledge its value in many ways (336...

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