The epistemology of stupidity

Résumé En

It is strange, although not completely surprising, that epistemologists-unlike satirists, novelists, moralists, and essayists-have devoted so little thinking to the phenomenon of stupidity. Here I first examine the intellectualist conception according to which stupidity is a kind of cognitive defect and its difficulties. But my problem will be here orthogonal to the one which occupies most writers on virtue epistemology, which is the problem of whether virtues—either in the sense of reliable dispositions or in the sense of acquired character traits—can define knowledge or be constitutive of it. I shall assume that we can define knowledge as a form of safe belief based on certain kinds of competences and which can be apt, accurate, and adroit. I reject the idea that stupidity is only the absence of knowledge so defined. I shall envisage the alternative hypothesis that stupidity—or at least a distinct species of stupidity lies elsewhere: in a failure to appreciate our epistemic goals. This will lead us towards the view that there is a kind of epistemic vice which consists in a failure to respect intellectual values, which is more appropriately called folly, foolishness, or the lack of wisdom. I suggest that there is more continuity between the two kinds—stupidity and folly—than first appears.