Philosophy 305                                                                                                                                                        W. Lycan
Spring, 2002

VE and lost justification

    I leave to you each of the two projects I suggested last week (constructing epistemologies by fairly strict analogy to existing ethical theories, and verifying whether the standard objections to virtue ethics do not lose much of their force when applied against strong VE).
     Here I want to raise the question of how strong VE treats one of the Reliabilist's two favorite cases, that of lost justification.  I know that the speed of light in a vacuum is (rounded to) 186,000 mps, but I don't remember where I learned it, and I couldn't give you any justification or evidence for my belief.  (I'm confident that if you went to a physics textbook, the book would back me up, but that's only because I'm confident that I'm right.)  Bad news for internalism generally.
     Fairweather says (p. 68) that "a belief will count as knowledge only if it is properly connected to an epistemic motivation," an epistemic motivation being defined by (EM*) on p. 72.  Audi disagrees, arguing (p. 89) that, contra strong VE, "it would seem possible to have a justified belief when no associated trait deserving the name 'virtue' is present."  Does my belief about the speed of light satisfy the virtue requirement?
     Well, it is not guided by an ulterior motive such as Conrad the Conformist's.  And I am not like Robotic Robert in having no motivational states at all; I do have "a desire...for truth or for states whose value is derived from truth" (even though philosophically I deny that truth is the ultimate goal of cognition).  The question is whether that desire "effectively directs and controls" the formation of my belief.
     I guess that it did, at the time I did form the belief, because probably I was taking a class or reading for information.  Does the desire persist and now control the present persisting of my belief?  I don't know how to answer that question.
     By the way, internalists have some things they can say about lost justification.  "All right, I don't remember where I learned that the speed of light in a vacuum is (rounded to) 186,000 mps, but I wouldn't be believing it if I hadn't read or heard it somewhere and from a source I considered reliable at the time.  Since I am believing it, it follows that I did read or hear it somewhere and from a source I considered reliable at the time.  Almost every source of general information that I consider reliable is reliable.  Therefore, probably, the speed of light in a vacuum is indeed (rounded to) 186,000 mps."  How plausible this is, I leave to you to judge.