Educating for Intellectual Virtue: a critique from action guidance

Virtue epistemology is among the dominant influences in mainstream epistemology today. An important commitment of one strand of virtue epistemology – responsibilist virtue epistemology (e.g., Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996; Battaly 2006; Baehr 2011) – is that it must provide regulative normative guidance for good thinking. Recently, a number of virtue epistemologists (most notably Baehr, 2013) have held that virtue epistemology not only can provide regulative normative guidance, but moreover that we should reconceive the primary epistemic aim of all education as the inculcation of the intellectual virtues. Baehr’s picture contrasts with another well-known position – that the primary aim of education is the promotion of critical thinking (Scheffler 1989; Siegel 1988; 1997; 2017). In this paper – that we hold makes a contribution to both philosophy of education and epistemology and, a fortiori, epistemology of education – we challenge this picture. We outline three criteria that any putative aim of education must meet and hold that it is the aim of critical thinking, rather than the aim of instilling intellectual virtue, that best meets these criteria. On this basis, we propose a new challenge for intellectual virtue epistemology, next to the well-known empirically-driven ‘situationist challenge’. What we call the ‘pedagogical challenge’ maintains that the intellectual virtues approach does not have available a suitably effective pedagogy to qualify the acquisition of intellectual virtue as the primary aim of education. This is because the pedagogic model of the intellectual virtues approach (borrowed largely from exemplarist thinking) is not properly action-guiding. Instead, we hold that, without much further development in virtue-based theory, logic and critical thinking must still play the primary role in the epistemology of education

INKLING: ONE PREDICTION MARKET PLATFORM PROVIDER’S EXPERIENCE

This article presents a prediction market vendor’s experience in providing publicly available and private play-money prediction market services to international corporations and other organizations. We describe why our experiences as IT and management consultants drove us to start the company and give an overview of the successes and pitfalls our clients have encountered during their prediction market trials. We also discuss several lessons learned we share with our clients in the areas of participation, incentives, communications, and appropriate questions to ask and explore why some prediction market pilots fail while others succeed

Just say No! The U.S. Navy and Arms Control: A Misguided Policy?

The U.S. Navy has traditionally been circumspect with regard to the application of arms control to the maritime environment, a stance that has frustrated arms control proponents. The navy consensus seems to be that the best answer to arms control is to Just Say No

Set and Drift—II. Naval Forces in Support of International Sanctions: The Deira Patrol

In August 1990, as the United States, in concert with other nations, moved toward the use of naval forces to cut off Iraq\u27s trade flow, the U.S. government shied away from referring to a blockade of Iraqi ports due to the connotations this word carries

Set and Drift—Enforcing Sanctions: A Growth Industry

While the United States had only limited experience with such non-wartime interdiction operations prior to August 1990—and none under UN sanction—there have been many previous cases involving other navies from which to draw insights