Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue Epistemology

In recent years, traditional epistemology, and especially its focus on the analysis of the concept of knowledge, has come under attack from two competing currents in the subject, social epistemology and virtue epistemology. According to the comparatively new enterprise of social epistemology, traditional epistemology that focuses on the individual knower needs to be supplemented – or even replaced – by study of the role of the social in furthering knowledge; according to the enterprise of virtue epistemology, a contemporary re–working of an ancient tradition stretching back to Aristotle, traditional epistemology’s focus on the knowledge of the individual needs to be replaced by a focus on the intellectual character of the knower – the person who knows things. In this collection aimed at an educational and a philosophical audience, a group of eminent philosophers and philosophers of education detail the implications of advances in contemporary epistemology for education. This collection reveals that a reconsideration of epistemology in the light of ideas from social and virtue epistemology will in turn re–invigorate the links between the fields of epistemology and education.

Notes on Contributors vii Introduction Education, Social Epistemology and Virtue Epistemology Ben Kotzee 1 1 Epistemic Dependence in Testimonial Belief, in the Classroom and Beyond Sanford Goldberg 14 2 Learning from Others David Bakhurst 36 3 Anscombe’s ‘Teachers’ Jeremy Wanderer 55 4 Can Inferentialism Contribute to Social Epistemology? Jan Derry 76 5 Epistemic Virtue and the Epistemology of Education Duncan Pritchard 92 6 Educating for Intellectual Virtues: From Theory to Practice Jason Baehr 106 7 Detecting Epistemic Vice in Higher Education Policy: Epistemic Insensibility in the Seven Solutions and the REF Heather Battaly 124 8 Three Different Conceptions of Know–How and Their Relevance to Professional and Vocational Education Christopher Winch 145 9 The Epistemic Value of Diversity Emily Robertson 166 Index 179

Ben Kotzee is lecturer in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values at the University of Birmingham. He specializes in applying insights from contemporary epistemology to questions in the philosophy of education. Dr Kotzee has previously written on the nature and development of expertise, educational justice and the constructivism/realism debate. He takes an active interest in professional education and is currently engaged in a study of character and values in the professions with a special focus on the legal profession.