Main goals
Work towards a general and flexible conceptual framework for studying epistemic virtues and vices, which could be common ground between philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and education scientists.
Put the enhanced framework to work by analysing a few case studies.
Promoting effectiveness in inquiry and epistemic literacy at both the individual and the group/organization levels.
Epistemic virtues in philosophy
Broadly speaking, epistemic virtues are traits, dispositions and faculties that promote success in inquiry, such as open mindedness, consistency, intellectual humility, epistemic tolerance, and sensitivity to evidence. Epistemic vices, in contrast, are features that impair or demote success in inquiry, such as negligence, dogmatism, proneness to bias and prejudice, and indifference to truth. Recently, epistemic virtues (vices) have been at the centre of many debates in philosophy, with the rise of virtue epistemology as a novel paradigm in epistemology. From a methodological perspective, in virtue epistemology the focus is primarily on agency (agents/groups and their features) and only derivatively on events of epistemic success/unsuccess (e.g., sound reasonings, biases, fallacies). Moreover, the evaluative dimension is deemed important, and there is no restriction to a purely descriptive vocabulary.
Connections with other human and social sciences
Focus on agency, and sensitivity to the evaluative dimension are common in other areas of research outside philosophy, including psychology, sociology and education. Moreover, there is growing attention within these research areas towards epistemically relevant features of individuals and groups, including, for instance, polarization of opinions in the public debate, credulity in the social media, the emergence and dynamics of epistemic bubbles and echo-chambers, etc. In this respect, we conjecture that virtue epistemology has a unifying potential within the field of human and social sciences. There is, however, an important question whether the characterization of virtues and vices that has been given by epistemologists can be straightforwardly imported/employed within psychology, sociology, and education studies, or whether some important twisting or reconceptualising is called for. Virtue epistemology has a unifying potential also within philosophy, and more specifically between epistemology and (virtue) ethics; if anything, because some key notions of virtue epistemology, including those of virtue, vice, and normativity, have been long debated in ethics.