Epistemic Radicals and the Vice of Arrogance as a Counterfeit to the Virtue of Assured Epistemic Ambition

Epistemic radicals play key roles in conceptual revolutions, technological innovation and everyday transformation. These are tied up with aspects of an agent’s epistemic character including epistemic ambition, unconventionality, resoluteness in the face of disagreement and resilience in the face of set-backs. However, as the chapter outlines, characteristic features of epistemic radicals are associated with epistemic vice, in particular arrogance. These features set up a tension given that epistemic virtue should tend toward epistemic goods, vice toward failings, epistemic radicalism is good, and yet the vice of arrogance tends toward epistemic radicalism (while virtue impedes such). The rest of the chapter is devoted toward solving this puzzle. First, it is shown that the major characterizations of arrogance in the literature explain tendencies toward key epistemic strengths and weaknesses. Second, it is argued in detail that there is a nearby counterpart virtue of assured epistemic ambition that is insulated from the epistemic weaknesses that the arrogant tend toward. The virtue is epistemically better placed than the vice to realize valuable epistemic goals. Nonetheless, in many cases people who possess the virtue of assured epistemic ambition and the epistemically arrogant share apparently similar, overlapping behavioral profiles. Hence, the following section argues that arrogance is best conceived of as a counterfeit virtue. This captures the complex relations arrogance has in relation to genuine virtue and explains why virtuous assured ambition is often misattributed to the arrogant (and vice versa). It follows that epistemic radicals can be heroes or villains, i.e., epistemically virtuous or vicious. Conceptualizing arrogance as an epistemic vice standing in a counterfeit relation to the true epistemic virtue of assured epistemic ambition shows how and why this is so.