Tuesday, March 18, 2014

SPR 2014 Lecture Series (No.3): Epistemic grace- a virtue epistemological account


About the theme

     In this paper the speaker argues for a new virtue epistemic account of the nature of knowledge. The account is motivated by the challenges that cases of testimonial knowledge and Barney-type cases (Barn Façade-type cases) present for existing virtue epistemic accounts of knowledge. This attempt was initially based on a non-standard reading of Gettier cases according to which it’s bad epistemic luck that is knowledge undermining. Building on this reading, the speaker argues that thinking of knowledge as requiring what he'd call epistemic grace both yields the right results in standard Gettier-type cases and Barney-type cases, and does so in a well motivated way. (adapted from the article provided below in reading material)


About the speaker

Shane Ryan, Ph.D. at University of Edinburgh under instruction of Prof. D. Pritchard, is currently a visiting scholar at Soochow University whose research is mainly in epistemology.

Reading material

1. Ryan, Shane "Epistemic grace"

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