David Horst “On Being Good at Judging”

Human agents can be good at all sorts of things. Some are good at archery, other at chess, still others at masonry. In any domain with a standard of success, people can be better or worse at meeting this standard and thus possess different degrees of excellence in that domain. In this talk, I focus on the question of what makes people good at judging—at meeting epistemic standards by way of forming and changing beliefs. According to a popular approach in epistemology (i.e., virtue epistemology), we can shed light on this question by viewing epistemic excellence as a species of a more general kind of excellence, one with instances also outside of epistemology. I argue that, for this strategy to succeed, we need to carefully distinguish between different kinds of human excellences, and that prominent versions of virtue epistemology have misidentified the genus of which epistemic excellence is plausibly a species.

David Horst (University of Lisbon)

To join the session on Zoom, please get in touch with Gloria Andrada at gandrada@fcsh.unl.pt for the details.

This event is part of the ArgLab Research Colloquium organised by Maria Grazia Rossi, Giulia Terzian and Gloria Andrada at the Laboratory of Argumentation, Cognition and Language of the NOVA Institute of Philosophy. For any inquiries, please contact Maria Grazia, Giulia, or Gloria.