1 Acquiring Epistemic Virtue: Emotions, Situations, and Education Heather Battaly This is a penultimate draft. The final draft appears in Abrol Fairweather and Owen Flanagan (eds.), Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Knowledge is a fine thing quite capable of ruling a man…if he can distinguish good from evil, nothing will force him to act otherwise than as knowledge dictates. Plato, Protagoras Ability to train thought is not achieved merely by knowledge of the best forms of thought. Possession of this information is no guarantee for ability to think well. John Dewey, How We Think Do we acquire epistemic virtues, like open-mindedness, simply by acquiring knowledge? If, not, why not? This paper uses empirical work in cognitive and social psychology to argue that acquiring knowledge is not always sufficient for acquiring epistemic virtue. It addresses two recent empirical challenges to the acquisition of moral virtue—non-cognitive emotion; and situationism—and applies them to epistemic virtue. It argues that to possess epistemic virtues, one must perform epistemically virtuous acts. For instance, to be open-minded, one must consider alternative perspectives appropriately. But, knowing which acts are epistemically virtuous does not always cause one to perform those acts. A public speaker can know that it is virtuous to consider reasonable objections to her views, and yet fail to consider them. The factors that prevent knowledge from causing action can be internal to one’s psychology, or externally located in the environment or ‘situation’. Accordingly, our public speaker can fail to do what she knows she should because her emotions influence her actions, e.g., she may be too angry to consider the objections. Alternatively, she can fail to do what she knows she should because features of her situation influence her actions, e.g., she may be in an environment in which others unanimously dismiss the objections. Philosophers and psychologists have argued that emotions and features of situations can prevent us from performing acts that we know to be morally