Abstract

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS STUDY of contemporary epistemology, Alvin Plantinga asserts that the “ahistoricism” of analytic philosophy has proven an impediment to progress in epistemology; what we need, he urges, is “history and hermeneutics.” In its turning to history, epistemology is beginning to resemble recent ethical theory, which has readily availed itself of the history of philosophy as a means of enriching its discourse and circumventing seemingly insoluble debates. There are other similarities between contemporary epistemology and recent ethical theory. The standard division in contemporary epistemology pits internalism against externalism. The former demands that individuals have cognitive access to the justifying conditions of their belief and that the belief be formed in accord with appropriate rules. The latter drops the requirement of internal access but demands that a belief be formed by a process, reliably aimed at the production of truth. Internalism’s accentuation of epistemic rights and duties calls to mind ethical deontology, while the externalist emphasis on the production of true beliefs is akin to moral consequentialism. Lately, virtue epistemology has emerged to counter the two dominant theories of knowledge, just as virtue ethics arose as an alternative to deontology and utilitarianism.