ABSTRACT
In previous chapters, we have taken challenges to traditional virtue epistemology and used these challenges as opportunities to explore our cognitive dependence on others further. The same will be true in this chapter except that the challenge taken up is one that gets leveled at virtue theories in ethics as well. The first challenge that we will be concerned with here is a challenge to some traditional ways of thinking about the independence of character, or at least of well-formed character, from situational factors. The situationist challenge makes a positive and a negative claim. The positive claim is that intuitively irrelevant features of the environment exercise a significant influence on how we think and what we do. The negative claim is that character traits or virtues do not exercise enough influence on our behavior to justify any theory that depends on them. In this chapter, I will be arguing that a tempered version of the positive claim is likely true, that is, informationally shallow cues in our environment have a significant influence on our behavior. Once properly understood, however, the positive claim does not imply the negative claim and does not threaten the extended credit view.
