 Hi, I'm Mark Alfano, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. My research focuses on moral psychology broadly construed. This is a field in philosophy that draws on empirical research in psychology, including social and personality psychology, as well as philosophical theories about virtues, emotions, and so on. The topic of my discussion today is Epistemic Virtues and Vices in Science and Religion. Philosophy as you may know comes in several branches. One of the first branches that was ever investigated is called Metaphysics. This is the field of philosophy where we ask what there is and what it's like. The second branch is called Epistemology. That's just a fancy word that has to do with the study of knowledge. In this area, we ask what can we know and how do we know it? Value theory is the third main branch of philosophy. In this part of philosophy we ask what's good and bad and how can we be good or bad? And then finally, there's Logic, which holds the whole thing together. Virtues and Vices combine Epistemology and Value Theory. These are dispositions of character that have to do with either the moral domain, the aesthetic domain, which is related to beauty and ugliness, and the epistemic domain, which has to do with knowledge, ignorance, doubt, and skepticism. We're going to be talking specifically about Epistemic Virtues and Vices today. A virtue for our purposes can be defined as a disposition of character that is excellent or admirable, whereas a vice can be defined as a disposition of character that is ignoble or deplorable. An exemplar is a specific person who exemplifies some particular virtue or vice. This is related to the theory of Abelard, pictured here, who was a medieval philosopher who came up with what's known as exemplarist virtue theory. He specifically focused on the example of Jesus Christ, whom he said was a moral exemplar and who showed us what it meant to live a moral life. Now, virtues and vices are dispositions of character, and that means that they last a certain period of time in someone's life, maybe years or even decades. There's also manifestations of particular virtues and vices. So, for instance, a person might be honest, but they're not talking right now and so they're not lying or telling the truth. A success and a failure in the context of virtue theory can be described as or defined as a manifestation of a virtue or a vice, or at least a typical manifestation of a virtue or a vice, respectively. Here's the outline for my discussion. I'm going to start by introducing epistemic virtues and vices and dividing them into four main types. The first are source virtues and vices. The second are receiver virtues and vices. Then we turn to conduit and echo virtues and vices. Each of these will be defined later. Next, we turn to the topic of science and the epistemic virtues and vices that crop up in science. We'll use two main case studies to discover this. Case study one has to do with scientific collaborations, whereas case study two deals with trust and distrust in science by laypeople. The third main section of the discussion has to do with religion. We'll use two case studies here as well. The first has to do with seeing and reporting and reporting that someone reported a miracle. And the second has to do with the transmission of revelation from a divine or human source through other people and potentially to the present day.