Maria has reliable color vision. Looking at a barn, she forms the true belief 'that's a barn.' Unknown to her, she is in Fake Barn County, where most apparent barns are facades. By pure chance, she's looking at the one real barn. Does virtue epistemology count this as knowledge?
AYes — her color vision is reliable and her belief is true, satisfying reliabilist conditions.
BYes — she has genuine intellectual virtues of perception and attention that produced a true belief.
CNo — though her belief is true, its truth is due to lucky circumstance rather than her intellectual virtue, so no credit is owed.
DNo — virtue epistemology requires not just true belief but also justified belief, and she lacks justification in this environment.
This is the virtue epistemologist's standard move against Gettier cases. The credit condition — the true belief must be attributable to the agent's intellectual virtue, not to luck — is precisely what Gettier cases violate. Maria's belief happens to be true, but the truth is not explained by her competence: she would have formed the same false belief looking at any facade. The virtue epistemologist's verdict is that no achievement occurred, so no knowledge obtains. Simple reliabilism struggles here because her process is reliable; the credit condition adds the explanatory requirement that reliability alone misses.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
What does virtue reliabilism add to simple process reliabilism that enables it to handle Gettier cases?
AIt requires that the agent be aware of the reliability of their cognitive process, adding a metacognitive condition.
BIt requires that the true belief be an 'achievement' — explained by the agent's competence — not merely produced by a process that is reliable in normal conditions.
CIt adds a justification condition: the agent must have a good reason for trusting the cognitive faculty being used.
DIt requires that the cognitive faculty function reliably across all possible environments, not just the actual one.
The explanatory requirement is the key addition. Simple reliabilism says: your belief is knowledge if it's produced by a reliable process. Virtue reliabilism says: your belief is knowledge if it's an achievement — if the fact that it's true is explained by the exercise of your competence. In Gettier cases, a reliable process can produce a true belief that isn't explained by that process in the right way (the truth is accidental relative to the process). The credit condition captures this: you deserve credit for a true belief only when your competence is why you got it right.
Question 3 True / False
Virtue epistemology holds that knowledge is an epistemic achievement — a true belief that is to the agent's credit — rather than merely a true belief that results from a reliable cognitive process.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is the central claim of virtue epistemology across both reliabilist and responsibilist strands. The achievement framing is what distinguishes virtue epistemology from bare reliabilism: it adds the requirement that the truth be attributable to the agent's intellectual virtue in an explanatory sense. This makes knowledge something you earn through competence, not merely something that happens to you through a reliable mechanism. The credit condition is what allows virtue epistemology to handle Gettier cases — in those cases, the truth is accidental relative to the agent's competence, so no achievement and no credit.
Question 4 True / False
Virtue epistemology, particularly virtue responsibilism, holds that primarily morally admirable people — those with strong character and ethical virtues — can possess genuine knowledge.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
This is the most common misconception about virtue epistemology, explicitly flagged in the topic. Even responsibilist accounts (Zagzebski, Roberts and Wood) focus on intellectual virtues — open-mindedness, intellectual courage, thoroughness — not moral virtue in the broad ethical sense. Reliabilist accounts (Sosa, Greco) only require that the belief be produced by a well-functioning cognitive faculty, not that the agent be morally admirable overall. A person of bad moral character can still have knowledge; what matters is whether the true belief is attributable to intellectual competence, not whether the person is ethically praiseworthy.
Question 5 Short Answer
Why does the credit condition solve Gettier problems in a way that simple reliabilism cannot? What is the additional requirement the credit condition imposes?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Simple reliabilism requires only that a belief be produced by a reliable cognitive process — a process that tends to produce true beliefs. Gettier cases show this is insufficient: an agent can use a reliable process to arrive at a true belief where the truth is still accidental relative to that process (e.g., the stopped clock, the barn facade). The credit condition adds an explanatory requirement: not only must the belief be true and produced by a reliable faculty, but the truth must be explained by the agent's competence. In Gettier cases, the agent would have been wrong in a slightly different situation using the same reliable process — they got lucky. No achievement occurred, so no credit is owed, and no knowledge obtains.
The key distinction is between a belief that is reliably produced and a belief that is true because of the agent's competence. These come apart in Gettier cases, where a reliable process happens to deliver truth through an unrelated coincidence. Virtue epistemology captures the intuition that knowledge isn't just accidentally true belief produced by a generally reliable mechanism — it's a cognitive success that the agent has earned through the exercise of their intellectual virtues.