Linda Zagzebski faults reliabilist and internalist theories of knowledge that analyse

knowledge as true belief plus something else. She faults them on two grounds: i) they
are vulnerable to Gettier cases; ii) they do not explain why knowledge is more
valuable than mere true belief. Zagzebski claims her virtue epistemology does not
suffer these problems. First I look at i), followed by Zagzebskis own solution to
Gettier cases. Then I look at ii), followed by her solution to the value problem. Next I
offer a critique of Zagzebskis account of knowledge, arguing that it is insufficient.
Finally I point forward to why virtue epistemology, nonetheless, may deserve special
attention.

Internalism, presented by Zagzebski, analyses knowledge as justified true belief,

where justification is wholly internal to the believers mind (1994, 65-66). That is, the
grounds of justification rest on mental content, and we infer our beliefs from this;
everything needed for justification is accessible to the believer. My belief that my
teacup is on my desk is justified because I have a clear and distinct impression of it
being there. When my justified belief is true, then I have knowledge. When
considering how strong justification would need to be for knowledge, Zagzebski says
it need not entail the truth of your belief: this would make the truth element of the
account of knowledge superfluous, and anyway runs the danger of making knowledge
far too restricted than what we ordinarily take it to be, so that nothing is known,
strictly speaking, but the cogito and its ilk (ibid, 70, 72; Levin 2004, 409). Here we
encounter our first Gettier case. Imagine Smith drives a Ford to work. He shows you
his papers of ownership and presents a lot of evidence that he owns a Ford. You weigh
the evidence and believe he owns a Ford. From this you infer, Smith owns a Ford or
Brown is in Barcelona, and you have no reason to believe that Brown is in
Barcelona. Ordinarily this is all the justification we need for our beliefs, and if Smith

does own a Ford then your belief in the disjunction is justified and true you know it.
Unfortunately Smith lied; he does not own a Ford. Your justification is defeated by a
fact inaccessible to you. However, Brown just happens to be in Barcelona, so your
belief that Smith owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona is true. Not only this, but it is
justified. However, your justified true belief is not knowledge, for it is by sheer luck
that you happened to form a true belief. Justified true belief, then, is insufficient for
knowledge.
The next theory looked at is reliabilism. Reliabilism, as presented by
Zagzebski, analyses knowledge as reliably produced true belief (1994, 66).
Reliabilists emphasise the role of reliable processes in belief-formation. A process is
reliable just to the extent that it is truth-conducive (Audi 1999, 224). So my eyesight
is a reliable source of true beliefs if it produces them sufficiently often, so and sos
testimony is a reliable source of true beliefs if it produces them sufficiently often, and
so on. The reliable process need not entail the truth of the produced belief, but only
make it likely (ibid; Zagzebski 1994, 66). This keeps some independence between the
reliability component and truth component of knowledge, which as we saw, mutatis
mutandis, with justification, would implausibly restrict the number of beliefs that
count as knowledge. But this account also falls victim to Gettier cases. Zagzebski
gives the fake barn case (ibid). Imagine you are driving through the countryside,
admiring the barns from the side of the road. Your eyesight is reliable enough to spot a
barn from this distance in normal circumstances. Unknown to you, the inhabitants
have erected three fake barns for every real barn, and these are indistinguishable from
real barns at this distance. You happen to pick out a real barn and form the belief, that
is a fine barn. Your belief is true and reliably produces, but you do not have
knowledge; it is sheer accident that your belief is true.

Zagzebski diagnoses the same problem with both internalist and reliabilist
accounts. When knowledge is analysed as true belief plus something else, and the
something else conceived as a means of producing true belief without entailment,
there is always an element of luck involved (ibid, 69). This element of luck allows
Gettier cases to pose a problem, for the luck can turn bad and then good again, leaving
us with justified/reliably produced beliefs that do not count as knowledge. Both
analyses of knowledge, then, are found insufficient.
Zagzebskis solution to Gettier problems is to offer a version of virtue
epistemology. She conceives of beliefs as parts of agents, analogous with acts. In the
same way that acts receive evaluative properties from agents, so do beliefs. The
properties she has in mind are motives. She defines a motive as an affective state that
initiates and directs action (2003, 17). My act of giving up my seat on the train to a
pregnant woman is motivated by my concern for the welfare of others. But how might
a belief be motivated? Let us say that I believe my blood-iron level is within a normal
range. Citing motives to explain why I hold this belief, we might begin by noting that
I am both vegan and particularly stubborn, so stubborn that I refuse to recognise that
my veganism may be unhealthy. My belief, in this case, is motivated by stubbornness.
On the other hand, perhaps I am particularly honest, and in the interest of finding out
whether my veganism is a viable long-term lifestyle choice have regular blood tests,
which all show that my blood-iron level is fine. In this case we may say that my belief
is motivated by my love of truth. Notice that in these cases the motive and belief are
part of the agent, so I am in a state of motivated belief.
There is one more step before we can present Zagzebskis formula for
knowledge. If believing is like acting, sot that it is part of the agent and can be
motivated, then it can be virtuous or vicious (ibid). A motive disposition, she says, is a

component of virtue: A virtuous act is an act motivated by the motive of some virtue
V and is characteristic of acts motivated by V in the circumstances in question (ibid).
My offer to give up my seat on the train was motivated by my concern for the welfare
of others, which is the motive of the virtue care, and is characteristic of acts of care in
the same circumstances. We may apply this formula to belief, taking my honesty,
above, as an example: my belief that my blood-iron level is fine is motivated by my
love of truth, which is the motive of the virtue (intellectual) honesty, and is
characteristic of beliefs motivated by honesty in the same circumstances. Thus my
belief, like my act, is virtuous.
We can now present Zagzebskis formula for knowledge. Beliefs are like acts:
they are part of agents, so they can be motivated, and since motives are components
of virtues, they can be virtuous. Carrying the analogy with acts further, Zagzebski
says that just as an agent receives credit for certain features of an act because of
features of that act that derive directly from the agent, so, mutatis mutandis, does an
agent receive credit for certain features of beliefs (ibid, 16). Let us unpack the idea
that an agent receives credit for an act. My act of giving up my seat seems
uncontroversially good. I receive credit for the good of this act insofar as it is good
because of my virtue, which derives from my motives. However, if I were not
motivated by concern for the welfare of others, but, say, by my desire to impress
others, or to move away from a foul-smelling passenger, then my act would not be
virtuous and I would not receive credit for the good of the act. Credit, then, is an
evaluative term, one that Zagzebski uses interchangeably with praise (ibid, 19). I
receive praise for the good of an act insofar as this good is due to the virtuousness of
the act, which derives from my motives.

Knowledge, for Zagzebski, is credited true belief. That is, when our beliefs are
true because of our virtues we do not merely believe truly: we know (Greco and Turri
2011, 25-26). I do not receive credit for my true belief that my blood-iron level is fine
if I believe out of stubbornness, for the truth of my belief is purely accidental. But the
truth of my belief is not accidental when it is due to my love of truth. In this case, my
belief is true because of something about me, so I receive credit (Zagzebski 2003, 15).
Let us see how this account stands up to Gettier cases. Zagzebski gives the following:
Mary looks into the living room, seeing a familiar figure sitting in her husbands chair.
She forms the belief, my husband is sitting in the living room. Unfortunately the
man sitting in the chair is not her husband but his twin brother, who she has no reason
to believe is in the country. However, her husband is sitting in the living room, but out
of sight. Zagzebskis solution is to claim that, while Mary exhibits all the relevant
intellectual virtues and no intellectual vices in the process of forming the beliefshe
does not have the truth because of her virtues (Zagzebski, quoted in Greco and Turri
2011, 26). In this case, Marys virtues have nothing to do with the truth of her belief;
it is true by sheer luck. So Mary is not credited: she does not have knowledge. This is
Zagzebskis solution to Gettier problems. Before critiquing her position, I will look at
another result that seems to make her account of knowledge more advantageous than
internalism and reliabilism: it accounts for why knowledge is more valuable than
mere true belief.
Zagzebski faults reliabilist accounts of knowledge for following a machineproduct model (2003, 13-15). The reliabilist analyses knowledge as true belief that is
the product, or output, of reliable belief-forming processes. Zagzebski likens the
reliable process to a reliably functioning espresso machine, and true beliefs to a cup of
espresso produced by the machine (ibid). While the machine may have produced a

good cup of espresso, this espresso is no more valuable than an equally delicious
espresso produced by a highly unreliable machine. Similarly, true belief produced by
reliable belief-producing processes is no more valuable than mere true belief. In fact,
the value of true beliefs explains the value of reliable belief-forming process, not the
other way around. Still, even if our reliable processes were independently valuable,
this value does not transfer automatically to our true beliefs, any more than a gold
espresso machine makes the espresso produced any better than mere espresso. Thus so
long as knowledge is identified with true belief that is the output of a reliable process,
its value is left unexplained.
Internalist theories need not appeal to a machine-product model, yet they
suffer similar problems. This occurs when justification is analysed so that its value is
explained by its truth-conducivenes. As a means of forming true beliefs, it is valuable
insofar as true belief is valuable; so true belief explains the value of justification, not
the other way around. So if knowledge is identified as true belief arrived at by the
right means - justification - then its value is left unexplained (ibid, 16).
Zagzebski claims her account of knowledge does explain its value. If, she
insists, knowing p is better than merely truly believing p, then there must be
something other than the truth of p that makes believing it better (ibid, 17). Her
candidate for what makes believing it better is motive. Recall her formula for
knowledge as belief that is true because of your intellectual virtues, which express
your motives. If motives (or virtues - the distinction does not matter for the argument)
are valuable, then this value can transfer to our beliefs, since our beliefs are part of us
(ibid). Knowledge, then, would be valuable, for to the value of truth is added the
value the belief receives from our motives.

But how can motives make believing better? Zagzebski claims that love of
truth is the primary intellectual motive, that the motivational components of the
intellectual virtues are based on a love of truth (ibid, 18). So as long as love of truth is
valuable, then virtuous beliefs will also be valuable to that extent. She emphasises the
importance of moral motives in valuing love of truth: "When something of moral
importance is at stake when someone performs an act S, then if S is a case of acting on
a belief B, it is morally important that B be true. It is, therefore, impermissible for the
agent to believe in a way that fails to respect the importance of the truth of B" (ibid,
18-19). What Zagzebski is insisting on here is that our epistemic motives play a role
in moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Imagine a judge convicts someone
for murder. The conviction is a case of acting on the belief that the accused is guilty.
The accused, in this case, is guilty. The judge receives praise for the verdict when her
belief is motivated by love of truth - she has weighed the evidence carefully and
reasoned scrupulously well. But if she fails to respect the importance of the truth of
her belief, say she believes because she 'does not like the look of the accused' and has
ignored the evidence, she receives no moral praise. Properly respecting the truth of
morally important beliefs amounts to believing because of love of truth (ibid). Our
motives can make believing better because they ground moral praiseworthiness:
insofar as we wish to live moral lives, love of truth is valuable; and insofar as love of
truth is valuable, the beliefs it motivates are valuable. When these beliefs receive the
added value of being true, we see why knowledge is more valuable than mere true
belief. Thus we see how Zagzebski accounts for the value of knowledge.

Zagzebski's account of knowledge is problematic, and here I focus on the 'because of'
relation in her claim that we have knowledge when our beliefs are true because of our

intellectual virtues. What does it mean to say that my belief is true 'because of' my
intellectual virtue? It does not mean that my virtues causally entail the truth, since, as
we saw with the Mary case, I can hold a virtuous belief that is accidentally true. The
solution to Gettier cases requires that our virtues do not entail the truth of the beliefs
they motivate. Zagzebski admits she knows no adequate account of the 'because of'
relation (Levin 2004, 401). Michael Levin argues there is no notion of explanation
that could fill this gap. He says that someone attempting to explain a belief might
have one of two explananda in mind (ibid). The first he calls 'presence-explanation',
and this is intended to explain the presence of the belief. These explanations are
causal and may cite motives: my love of truth (or my stubbornness) causes me to
believe that my blood-iron level is fine. But this does not explain why my belief is
true; it only explains how I come to hold it.
This leads to the second form of explanation Levin says is available. This is
not concerned with the cause of my belief, but with what makes it true (ibid, 403).
This seems to be what Zagzebski is after - a way that our motives can explain why our
true beliefs are true. This makes sense of her insistence that we can receive credit for
our true beliefs: we receive credit because something about us (our motives) explains
why our belief is true. Recall her solution to the Mary case: while her virtuous belief
was true, it was not true because of her virtues - her virtues had nothing to do with the
truth of her belief. Unfortunately, it is unclear how virtues could ever explain what
makes a belief true (except in trivial cases where our beliefs are about our virtues).
My belief that my blood-iron level is fine is true because my blood-iron level is fine:
this is what makes it true. We can say that what explains the truth of our true beliefs is
the fact that they hit the right target, they register a state of affairs that obtains in the
world. Why do they hit the right target? If we say, 'because of our virtues', we slip into

making the 'because of' relation entail the truth, which we have seen is not what
Zagzebski claims the relation to be. So if the 'because of' relation is not intended to
explain why I hold a belief, and it cannot explain what makes it true, then what is its
purpose? I do not know, and neither does Levin, and, apparently, neither does
Zagzebski. So it is unclear why Zagzebski's virtue epistemology is better than the
reliabilist and internalist theories she criticises.

From the above considerations we can see the role that luck plays in our accounts of
knowledge. Since virtues do not entail truth, no matter how virtuous I am in forming
my beliefs I am still at the mercy of the world when it comes to truth. The world has
to be a certain way and (usually) I cannot control it. This is also the case for
reliabilism and internalism, so long as reliable processes and justification do not entail
truth. But where does this leave these three accounts of knowledge, and virtue
epistemology in particular? We have already seen that to conceive virtues or reliable
processes or justification as entailing the truth implausibly restricts what counts as
knowledge. Yet if we admit a strong luck component we run the risk of counting
Gettier cases as instances of knowledge, since it is by luck that a Gettier victim holds
a true belief. And as we have seen with Zagzebski's 'because of' relation, finding an
'in-between' proves to be difficult, and it is not clear that one can be found at all. We
are still left without a sufficient account of knowledge.
Yet there is still hope for virtue epistemology. It is beyond the scope of this
paper to lay out in detail the many current projects of virtue epistemologists, but here
I briefly mention some of the reasons why this field is particularly appealing. Axtell
and Carter (2008) argue that the focus on analyzing knowledge and justification in
contemporary analytic epistemology is unwarranted. This prejudice, they insist, is the

result of the assumption that truth is the only, or ultimate, epistemic value (ibid, 415416). But this assumption is unwarranted: there are other equally valuable epistemic
ends, such as states of theoretical understanding (where the theory need not be true);
wisdom; rational inquiry. Our epistemic lives are geared towards meeting the
demands of living in this world, and to a significant extent these must be met with
problem solving, rational deliberation and lines of inquiry extending over time (ibid,
423-424). These epistemic tasks are broader than synchronic belief-formation, which
is the traditional focus of the analysis of knowledge. These demands, say Axtell and
Carter, require a focus on epistemic virtues as models that we may use to meet the
epistemic tasks at hand (ibid). If they are correct, virtues may deserve a special place
in epistemology. However, the analysis of knowledge cannot simply be ignored. It is
still an important epistemic concept, and our dissatisfaction with current accounts will
not go away if we sweep it aside.

In this essay I have examined Linda Zagzebskis virtue epistemology against the
background of her criticisms of reliabilism and internalism. Reliabilists and
internalists do not offer sufficient accounts of knowledge, since they both fall victim
to Gettier cases and neither can account for the value of knowledge. Zagzebski insists
that beliefs are part of agents, analogous to acts, and can be motivated. When a belief
is virtuously motivated, and it is true because of these motives, then the agent receives
credit for the truth: she has knowledge. This, she claims, solves Gettier cases, and it
accounts for the value of knowledge since the virtues that motivate our beliefs are
valuable. However, the because of relation is obscure it is unclear how it can be
used to explain why a belief is true. So Zagzebskis account seems just as insufficient
as reliabilist and internalist accounts of knowledge. Virtue epistemology may still be

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worthwhile in illuminating epistemic concepts other than knowledge, but we are still
left without a sufficient account of knowledge.

Reference:

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Audi, Robert. 1999. The Analysis of Knowledge. In Epistemology, 214-247. London:

Routledge.

Axtell, Guy, and Carter, Adam J. 2008. Just the Right Thickness: A Defense of
Second-Wave Virtue Epistemology. In Philosophical Papers, vol. 37, no. 3: 413-434.

Greco, John and Turri, John. 2011. Virtue Epistemology. In Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/epistemology-virtue/

Levin, Michael. 2004 Virtue Epistemology: No New Cures. In Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research, vol. 69, no. 2: 397-410.

Zagzebski, Linda. 1994. The Inescapability of Gettier Problems. In The Philosophical

Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 174: 65-73.

Zagzebski, Linda. 2003. The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good. In
Metaphilosophy, vol. 34, nos. 1/2: 12-28.

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