Abstract

Virtue Epistemology, as developed over the last 43 years by Ernest Sosa (1980, 2007, 2009, 2015, 2021), known as virtue reliabilism, has proven to be a highly explanatory account. This model posits that knowledge should be understood as, not mere true belief, but apt belief, to the extent that it is attained through the manifestation of epistemic virtues or competencies of the agent. However, it faces challenges when applied to the analysis of irreducibly collective knowledge, that is, the type of knowledge attributed to groups understood as a whole over and above of its members, as described by non-summativist group epistemology (Gilbert, 1987, 1989, 2013, 2023; Tollefsen, 2004, 2015; Lackey, 2021). These problems can be summarized in what Jesper Kallestrup has identified as a crucial disanalogy (2020): groups, unlike individuals, lack their own seat, in Sosa’s terms, upon which cognitive competence is based. In this work, I develop a solution to the problem posed by this disanalogy, focusing on the relationship between the concept of virtue and the sources of normativity that provide judgments with substantial content, both moral and practical, and epistemic. My strategy at this point consists of two steps. The first is to analyze the family of constitutivist strategies within metaethical constructivism. Despite the virtues of the models analyzed, none seem to offer conceptual tools that comprehensively resolve the relationship between the manifestation of virtue and the normative content open to evaluation. Therefore, secondly, I develop, based on the structure that underpins the constitutivist strategy presented in the previous section, an original model, virtue constitutivism drawn on Spinoza, whose result is promising for the proposed task. Thus, after applying the conceptual framework of my virtue constitutivism to virtue reliabilism, we find that the latter retains its explanatory power, despite revising the conceptual structure of the notion of epistemic virtue on which it is based. Having done this, I apply the obtained result to the problem of the crucial disanalogy to resolve it, thereby showing that non-summativist group epistemology is open to future developments.