Formal epistemology, virtue epistemology, and internalism.

Here's an excerpt from an email from someone who asked me how I think of the relationship of formal epistemology to virtue epistemology, and why I think internalists are better situated to handle the Meno Problem.

 

A main concern of formal epistemology are various kinds of coherence and various norms for belief (the probability calculus is taken to be normative in some sense or other).  When a belief system has one of these properties, and more importantly when one follows the rules one thinks will get these properties, it represents an agent exercising her characteristic function, which manifests a value that doesn't depend on any kind of contingent feature.  I think both reliabilist virtue theory and responsibilist virtue theory depend on contingent features.  That this is so is obvious in the case of reliability (demonic diagonals notwithstanding), but it is also the case with respect to responsibility. No amount of openmindedness, diligence, inquisitiveness, or scrupulosity offers any guarantee of truth conduciveness.  Whether they are truth-conductive is just as dependent on the environment as our eyesight.  The intuition here is *something* like the following (though it'll surely need some Chisholming): a feature which is essentially valuable is more valuable than something that is valuable only contingently.