Abstract

According to virtue epistemology, knowledge is a special kind of performance that a subject achieves through her cognitive capacity or virtue. On this view, what differentiates knowledge from beliefs that merely happen to be true is that the former mainly comes from the subject’s intellectual virtues, so that it is the subject herself who deserves credit for true beliefs. But Jennifer Lackey claims that testimonial knowledge raises a problem against virtue epistemology, because in the case of testimonial knowledge, it is not the subject, but the person who gives testimony, who deserves credit. In this paper, I defend virtue epistemology against Lackey’s objections. The main idea is that even in the case of testimonial knowledge, the subject’s virtue is the most salient part of the causal explanation of the acquisition of the knowledge, when the normal condition of sincerity is presupposed.