Must the Intellectual Virtues be Reliable?

Heather D. Battaly

California State University Fullerton

Contemporary virtue epistemologists disagree about the role of truth in the intellectual virtues. Ernest Sosa has claimed that the intellectual virtues are stable reliable faculties, while James Montmarquet has argued that the virtues are characterized by a motivation for truth, but need not be reliable. Here, I argue that reliability is not required for the virtue of open-mindedness. In so doing, I evaluate four of Montmarquet’s arguments for the claim that the intellectual virtues are dispositions to desire truth but not necessarily dispositions to attain true beliefs. I conclude that though three of his arguments fail, the last succeeds.