This is the introductory chapter of the book, which aims to launch a powerful and largely unexplored position in epistemology, naturalized virtue epistemology. Many of the chapters in the book examines empirical findings on the nature of cognitive dispositions and personality traits (Alfano, Battaly, Miller, Pritchard), and this is clearly one direction for naturalized virtue epistemology to take. The book also examines two significant worries for a would-be naturalized virtue epistemology. One problem a naturalistic turn might create for virtue epistemology is the persistent worry about normativity in naturalistic theories. A second worry is that the relevant results from the sciences will signal bad news for virtue epistemology. The book addresses a wide range of issues relevant to the project of developing a naturalized virtue epistemology. Virtue epistemology should be informed by an important development in personality psychology called the Big Five personality traits or Five- Factor Model of traits.

The situated cognition movement in the cognitive sciences, like those sciences themselves, is a loose-knit family of approaches to understanding the mind and cognition. Cognition both stems from and generates the activities of physical individuals located in particular kinds of environments. Cognitive extensions, like house extensions, come in a surprising variety of forms. Some are truly, massively, staggeringly transformative, and others are content to project a previously existing theme. The first dimension concerns the nature of the non-neural resources that are incorporated into extended cognitive behaviors, dispositions, and activities. Such resources may be natural, technological, or sociocultural in nature. The second dimension concerns the durability and reliability of the larger (extended) system. Human agents exhibit both a metabolic and a cognitive organization. But whereas the former depends heavily on expensively maintained and policed organismic boundaries, the latter looks prone to repeated bouts of seepage.