ABSTRACT
Classrooms demand an 'epistemological presence.' This chapter outlines discussion of knowledge and virtue by examining the unsatisfactory undergraduate intellectual condition, illustrating how this analysis of knowledge and virtue applies to teaching in general. It also outlines the differences between public and personal knowledge and then deal only with those virtues necessary to public knowledge, leaving personal knowledge. The chapter examines epistemological questions of objectivity and subjectivity in science, and finally the apparent relativism of the epistemological viewpoint present in literature on multi-cultural education. If James Banks is to persuade us, he must specify beliefs and provide warrant for their truth as does Michelle Alexander in her brilliant work on mass incarceration, grounded in methodologies of history and social science research, not in some different radical rejection of truth as a regulative ideal. The major disciplines of our intellectual, social and political life both challenge the idea of the right answer and any quest for objective certainty, for instance in History.
