Intellectual virtue, extended cognition, and the epistemology of education

Virtue epistemology puts the cognitive character of the subject center-stage, this means the interconnected web of the subject's integrated cognitive faculties, cognitive abilities, and intellectual virtues. A virtue-theoretic account of the epistemic goal of education treats the development of the student's cognitive character as central to the educational enterprise. Virtue epistemology, and indeed epistemology tends to be wedded to epistemic individualism, whereby a subject's cognitive processes are to be understood as being entirely "internal" to the subject, i.e., the natural processes that take place in the brain of the subject. Even proponents of epistemic anti-individualism, i.e., an "extended" epistemology, would agree that sometimes an agent's use of an instrument is just that, in that it doesn't constitute an extended cognitive process. With an anti-individualist conception of virtue epistemology in play, one that retains the central role of the intellectual virtues, consider now the putative tension between virtue-theoretic accounts of the epistemic goal of education and our reliance on technology.