 Okay, so the other thing I want to talk about in this first part of the lecture is some advantages of virtual epistemology. So in order to do that, consider one of the main questions of epistemology, which is what is knowledge? What does knowledge consist in? And then consider the standard virtual epistemology approach to that question. So first the question is what is knowledge? And really behind that question is a question like what is the difference between knowledge and mere opinion? Or what's the difference between knowledge and even mere true opinion? Because sometimes opinions are true, but they don't amount to knowledge. So we're trying to get at what makes the difference. Now a standard approach to this question in virtual epistemology is to say the following. In cases of knowledge, you've got three things. One, your belief is true because you can't know something unless you're right about it, that you've got it, you're thinking about it correctly. So your belief has to be true. Secondly, your belief is virtuously formed. So it wasn't just a lucky guess. It wasn't just wishful thinking or something like that, but it was virtuously formed. You formed it in the right way. And then thirdly, in cases of knowledge, it's going to be the case that your belief is true because it's virtuously formed. So the idea is that it's true and it's virtuously formed, but those aren't just sort of two accidental features. It's that you got it right because you were virtuous in the way you approached the question in the way that you formed your belief. So in this sense, knowledge is the product, so to speak, of intellectual virtue. And again, there are variations on this theme, but that sort of standard approach. Even this very general approach already has some pretty significant advantages. One advantage is that it gives you a very clear understanding of the way that knowledge is opposed to, say, something like a lucky guess or otherwise just mere luckily true belief. It's just the same distinction as the difference between virtuous success and mere lucky success in general. So very generally, we make a distinction between success that is the result of virtue, the success that is the result of virtuous or excellent agency, and success which is just mere lucky success. Basically, the virtue epistemologist is going to say that knowledge just fits into that framework. It's an example of virtuous success, and it's in that sense that it's opposed to mere lucky success. In this case, mere lucky true belief. Now this same approach also explains what's known as the value problem in epistemology. It gives you a nice answer to the value problem. So the value problem goes back to Plato's Maino, where Plato is assuming that knowledge is different from mere lucky truth. But now the question raises, the question he raises is, well, why do we value knowledge over mere true belief or luckily true belief? From a certain perspective, really what you want is to have true belief. So what does it matter whether you got it through knowledge or you got it through luck? So the value problem is why do we value knowledge over mere true belief or why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? For example, in sports, you'd rather win the game through skill and succeed that way through an exercise of your own skills as an athlete than to win the game because you just got lucky. Maybe your opponent's just made terrible mistakes or your opponent got sick and had to concede defeat. I mean, that's not as valuable. We're not going to value that sort of success like we value it when we win the game due to our own skills or abilities. So this very general approach that human beings take is that we value success due to our own excellent agency over success that we get some other way. We can now explain the value of knowledge just in exactly those terms. Knowledge is a kind of success from intellectual excellence, success from intellectual ability or agency, and that's better than just getting it right by luck. A third advantage of virtual epistemology, I think, is that it is psychologically realistic. What I mean by that is that it accords well with what our cognitive sciences tell us is the way that the human mind works and the way that human thinking works. So maybe one of the most important ways in which that comes out is that from a virtue theoretic perspective, there are many sources of knowledge because there are many intellectual virtues. And different kinds of knowledge, say moral knowledge, perceptual knowledge, scientific knowledge, all these different knowledge over the person, that's another important one. All these different kinds of knowledge, we can say, require different kinds of virtues. Another way to put it is that there are different sources of these different kinds of knowledge and a virtue theoretic framework can accommodate that very well. And as it turns out, cognitive science tells us that perceptual processing and the way we get at perceptual truths is very different from, say, mathematical reasoning and the way that we prove mathematical theorems. It's just a different kind of thing going on. So if you're going to understand the excellence or what excellent perception looks like, you don't want to use a model for what excellent mathematical reasoning looks like. And so a virtue theoretic approach allows us to accommodate that idea very nicely. Okay, another advantage of virtue epistemology would be very much related to this last one we were talking about. And that is that we get nice answers to traditional skeptical worries. Now, I'm not going to talk a lot about that, but I just want to give you a feel for how this might work. So now plausibly, many of the skeptical arguments in the history of philosophy, in other words, arguments that try to push us to the conclusion that we don't know some things. So we don't know the external world of physical objects, so we can't know other people's minds. Some skeptical arguments argue that we can't know anything at all. But what drives a lot of those skeptical arguments is this one model fits all notion that all knowledge is based on a kind of reasoning analogous to, say, the reasoning involved in mathematical proof. And once you're in that mode and you're saying, look, you have knowledge only if you have a proof that looks like this, now when you don't find a proof that looks like that, you're going to be driven to the skeptical conclusion. So when you broaden out and get a more psychologically realistic understanding about how the human mind works, and you reject that model that tries to fit everything into the mathematical reasoning box, for example, that's going to rob the skeptical arguments of what was driving them in the first place. It's going to rob them of this first assumption, which is that you have knowledge only if it looks like this. Once you say, well, knowledge can look all different kinds of ways, now you just don't have the burden of showing that your knowledge looks like this, and a lot of the skeptical words just evaporate at this point. A lot more to be said there, but that's sort of the general spirit of the kind of anti-skeptical spirit of virtual epistemology.