Becoming a Better Knower

Date

January 19, 2012

author

The current period in the West has been called “The Information Age.” We are inundated daily with data, some of which we have a responsibility to synthesize, understand, and do something with. As information and access to it grows at an inconsumable rate, what we would claim to know doesn’t necessarily grow with it and so few would want to say we live in a “Knowledge Age.” Knowledge can be wily, unwieldy, opaque at times, and, at the end of the day elusive. Knowledge is a fundamental practical problem. Each of work hard every day to better understand the world around us and to find solutions to the problems we face so we can get better at life.

Because of this, philosophers have been been trying to better understand how knowledge works for centuries. In fact its been one of the perennial and perhaps defining earmarks of the discipline. Progress has been slow and comes in fits and starts but it does come. Every so often new philosophical innovations shed light on intractable problems and things move forward.

Dr. Jason Baehr of Loyola Marymount University is a philosopher who may be at the cusp of one of those innovations. Professor Baehr has spent the last decade working in the field of virtue epistemology that attempts to focus on the role and attitudes of the knower in the knowledge game rather than on the objects they seek to know. His new book by Oxford University Press, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology is a both a primer on this nascent discipline but also a substantial contribution to the field. We recently recorded a podcast with Dr. Baehr where we talked about his book, his work and the work being done in virtue epistemology in general.

That podcast started out as a written exchange which we’re publishing here. While the podcast goes into more depth on some of the questions you’ll see here, this interview covers more ground and we discuss topics we weren’t able to get to in the audio version. We encourage you to check out the podcast for a deeper exploration of what you read here.

Jason Baehr is Associate Professor of Philosophy at LMU and, in addition to the book, has written numerous papers and articles on virtue epistemology some of which are linked to below. We hope you enjoy our discussion. 

PN: Would you tell us a little about yourself as a philosopher? What are your interests and what was the genesis for the ideas you develop in this book?

Baehr: My interests lie mainly in the fields of epistemology and ethics. I’m especially interested in areas in which the two fields intersect, virtue epistemology being a prime example. Most of my work has been in the area of “responsibilist” or character-based virtue epistemology, which is an approach to epistemology that gives a central and fundamental role to the notion of intellectual virtue and where intellectual virtues are understood as excellences of intellectual character like curiosity, inquisitiveness, carefulness and thoroughness in inquiry, fair-mindedness, open-mindedness, and intellectual courage, honesty, integrity, humility, rigor, and the like. The main idea for the book began with my dissertation, which was completed in 2002. While the book goes way beyond what was in the dissertation, the dissertation contained the seeds of several chapters.

PN: Linda Zagzebski is probably the most prominent philosopher working in the area of virtue epistemology. You disagree with her assessment of the scope of virtue epistemology as a general epistemology. What kind of feedback did you get from Linda on your thesis and how did she react to your proposal?

Baehr: It’s hard to overstate the importance of Linda’s 1996 book Virtues of the Mind. It put character-based virtue epistemology on the map. And it had and continues to have a major impact on my own work. That said, the book is very ambitious. It purports to offer a satisfactory virtue-based analysis of knowledge that can overcome the Gettier problem, resolve the dispute between internalists and externalists, rebut skepticism, and more. In my book, I take issue with Linda’s main theoretical proposals. In particular, I argue against her virtue-based analysis of knowledge and offer a competing theory of the nature and structure of intellectual character virtues. Over the years, Linda has been extremely generous with her time and conversation. But I have yet to learn what she thinks of the main critical proposals in my book. I may be finding out soon, however, as we’re co-authoring a debate on whether intellectually virtuous motives are required for knowledge that will be published in a revised edition of Blackwell’s Contemporary Debates in Epistemology.

PN: Let’s talk about your book. You define this in your book but can you summarize what virtue epistemology is and how it relates to "standard" epistemology in the analytic tradition?

Baehr: Put simply, virtue epistemology is an approach to epistemology that gives a central and fundamental role to reflection on intellectual virtues. I think of intellectual virtues as good intellectual character traits like the ones mentioned above. Some virtue epistemologists appeal to the concept of an intellectual virtue to address problems and questions within traditional or standard epistemology. I refer to this as Conservative VE. Others adopt a more immediate or direct focus on the concept of intellectual virtue—one that is separate or distinct from most traditional epistemological concerns and debates. In the book, I defend a weak version of Conservative VE. But I also defend Autonomous VE. The latter involves dealing with questions about the nature and structure of an intellectual virtue, the relation between intellectual virtues and various other cognitive and moral excellences, the character of individual virtues like open-mindedness and intellectual courage, and more. One attractive feature of Autonomous VE is that allows for progress in our understanding of some of the more important dimensions of the cognitive life without having to solve or settle various debates in traditional epistemology, at least some of which appear to be intractable.

PN: You claim that your book is largely an “internalist” account of intellectual virtue and that a virtue-based epistemology could complement (though probably not replace) traditional epistemic accounts. If knowledge acquisition is at least in part of product of the practice intellectual virtue and/or internalist, does this prima facie rule out the possibility of knowledge for non-human animals (assuming they have cognitive lives aimed at truth) or knowledge for small children or those with severe cognitive disorders?

Baehr: Yes, if you hold that something like an exercise of intellectual character virtues is necessary for knowledge, then it looks as though you must deny that non-human animals and children are capable of acquiring knowledge. Even worse, you must deny the possibility of what I refer to in Chapter 3 of the book as “passive knowledge,” which is knowledge that is a product of the relatively brute, mechanistic, or untutored functioning of a person’s cognitive faculties. Putative instances of the latter include things like my knowledge that I’m conscious, that I don’t have a splitting headache, that the room I’m in is well lit, and so on. This is knowledge the acquisition of which does not appear to involve any kind of characterological motivation, let alone motivation that could reasonably be thought of as intellectually “virtuous” in any robust sense. For these and other reasons, in Chapter 3 of the book I argue against the project of trying to define knowledge in terms of intellectual virtue.

While I reject a virtue-based analysis of knowledge, I defend an “internalist” account of intellectual virtue. That is, I argue that the traits in question are intellectual virtues on account of certain qualities that are internal to the agent who possesses them. This includes certain attitudes or motives like a love of knowledge; it also includes certain beliefs. On my view, the relevant traits are not intellectual virtues on account of “external” factors like epistemic reliability. The latter, I argue, are too susceptible to luck to form the basis of intellectual character excellence.

PN: You argue in chapters 4 and 5 that weak conservative virtue epistemology is preferred over other, stronger accounts but does not require an overhaul of traditional epistemology. Can you summarize your view and why you hold it?

Baehr: While I think that the concept of intellectual virtue can’t form the basis of a plausible analysis of knowledge and therefore doesn’t merit “pride of place” within traditional epistemological discussions, it doesn’t follow that this concept is irrelevant to traditional epistemology. Indeed, in Chapters 4 and 5, I argue that the notion of intellectual virtue is importantly related to both reliabilism and evidentialism (two views of the nature of knowledge or epistemic justification), albeit in a relatively secondary or peripheral way. In Chapter 4, I argue that reliabilists need recourse to the concept of an intellectual character virtue in order to make sense of much of the knowledge that we as human beings care about most. In Chapter 5, I raise a problem for evidentialist theories of justification and propose an intellectual virtue “patch” for the problem. In neither case does my conclusion require thinking of an exercise of intellectual character virtues as a requirement for knowledge or justification. But these chapters are meant to show that traditional epistemology can’t do without the notion of intellectual virtue. Accordingly, they represent a defense of a weaker version of Conservative VE.

PN: In chapter 5 you discuss the relationship intellectual virtue to evidentialist theories of justification. You argue that in cases where evidence would seem to be a relevant ground for justification, there are times when evidence alone is not sufficient and would require bolstering by an intellectual virtue. You give an example of two people (George and Gerry) who are aware of some evidence that secondhand smoke is not dangerous but unaware– because of laziness or a lack of curiosity–of the widely available evidence that it is. Because of this, the evidence either does have should not be said to justify his belief. You write, "Despite whatever justiﬁcation the beliefs of George and Gerry may enjoy, there is indeed an additional intuitive and e-relevant sense in which these beliefs are unjustiﬁed. For while these beliefs are well supported by the agents’ evidence, this evidence clearly is not what it should be." (Page 86). But the "ought" in this case seems very squishy. What is the basis for determining what intellectual responsibilities George and Gerry carry in this case?

Baehr: You’re right that I don’t say a whole lot about the relevant notion of “ought”; and in fact I think my usage of that and other deontological terms is dispensable. The important point is that there’s something epistemically defective about how the characters in question inquire and that this defect transfers to their beliefs, such that the beliefs are not epistemically justified in any interesting or significant sense. I think this much is pretty obvious or intuitive. That said, I agree that a more comprehensive reply would include an explanation of what exactly the defect is and why it’s a defect. I offer at least the basis of this kind of reply in other chapters (esp. Chs. 6-9). But it’s not something that comes in Chapter 5 itself. For some further probing of this and related kinds of cases, I refer the reader to the podcast.

PN: Similarly, in analyzing BonJour’s position, you highlight his idea that "a belief appears to be well supported but only because the person in question is suppressing or distorting a potential defeater." (The dogmatism and bias objection). There are some knowledge domains that we seem to be responsible for but the evidence that we may need to make virtuous decisions are not “live options” for us. The evidence we need to consider may be too complex or take too much time to consider or might be beyond our intellectual ken. Yet the evidence we do have might support a false conclusion. Do you see this as a real problem and if so, how does a virtue-epistemic approach treat this issue?

Baehr: I think the case you describe here is importantly different from the George and Gerry cases. I wouldn’t consider a person’s failure to conduct further inquiry based on inability or lack of time or resources as a potential defeater. Failing to conduct further inquiry into a topic because you don’t have the chops required for understanding the literature on the topic is very different from failing to inquiry because you’re close-minded, dogmatic, or the like. It’s the latter sort of defect that threatens to undermine justification and that I’m concerned with in Chapter 5.

Nevertheless, difficult questions remain about the requirements of intellectual virtue. For instance, from a virtue epistemological standpoint, how am I to know which topics or subject matters are most worthy of my (limited) time and epistemic resources? And how am I to determine when I’ve investigated or inquired about a particular subject matter sufficiently? These are indeed difficult questions. My chapters on open-mindedness (Ch. 8) and intellectual courage (Ch. 9) shed some light on how they might be answered, but I don’t have a fully worked out reply. I do think this is one area in which the notion of wisdom is important in epistemology. For it is very plausible to think that a (maximally) intellectually virtuous person will have a sense of which subject matters are most worth learning about and how best to apportion her time and cognitive resources, and that she’ll have this sense on account of a kind of epistemic wisdom. In recent years, a number of epistemologists have begun turning their attention to the concept of wisdom. As this literature develops, I suspect it will shed important light on some of the issues you’re asking about.

PN: You write, "talents differ from intellectual character virtues in essentially the same ways as faculties. For again, talents are largely innate; they are part of our inborn or native cognitive equipment. Intellectual virtues, by contrast, are cultivated…" What is the relation between intellectual virtue (which implies one has a certain amount of control over one’s actions) and natural capacities and developed temperaments (which one has little to no control over)? Many people seem to lack a natural ability or at least a natural disposition to be "studious" and digest deep and complex arguments or analyze complex scenarios and draw reasonable conclusions. Does this have any implications for how intellectually virtuous such a person can be?

Baehr: In Chapter 2 of the book, I distinguish intellectual character virtues from intellectual faculties (e.g. memory and vision), talents (e.g. intelligence or IQ), temperaments (e.g. being “naturally” studious or open-minded), and skills (e.g. technical proficiency in performing mathematical computations or logical proofs). I argue that intellectual virtues are importantly related to and intertwined with these other cognitive excellences but that they are also fundamentally different from them. Intellectual character virtues differ from things like cognitive faculties and talents on the ground that they are acquired rather than innate; they also have a personal normative dimension that talents and faculties lack (one can be very bright and have the memory of an elephant while nevertheless being a rotten person; not so for one who possesses the full range of intellectual character virtues). Intellectual temperaments are like Aristotle’s “natural virtues” and as such bear a closer a resemblance to intellectual character virtues. However, temperaments are also “natural” in way that intellectual character virtues are not; and their possession (unlike that of intellectual character virtues) does not require any kind of reflective endorsement or understanding. Intellectual skills are active in a way that resembles intellectual character virtues; however, they lack a kind of personal or motivational dimension that is central to intellectual virtues. This is, in any case, a very brief (and incomplete) sketch of the argument in Chapter 2.

Concerning the second part of your question, I think you’re right that people often have natural dispositions or temperaments that resemble and make it easier to acquire the corresponding character virtues. This illustrates one form of epistemic luck or one way in which luck figures into the possession of virtuous intellectual character.

PN: There seems to be a bearing of the source of "virtues" on all aspects of the reliabilist account. For example: having good eyesight is not something we have control over. It is at least partially a product of our DNA and not under our direct or even indirect control. Similarly, desiring truth over money may not be a product of character virtue but of our DNA or personality type or whatever frames our dispositions but may not be under our control. In other words, people are diverse and some are disposed to be studious and intellectually curious and careful. Others are not. If a person is not naturally so disposed, should we say that she is epistemically blameworthy? In contrast, if someone isn’t naturally intellectually curious would you want to say of that person that they are intellectually vicious in some way? Are they blameworthy for not being inquisitive particularly if we understand dispositions as being partially outside of our control?

Baehr: The notions of praise and blame don’t enter in a very central way into my accounts of intellectual virtue and vice (I suspect these notions are derivative from what I would consider the real virtue-making features of the relevant traits). But your question seems ultimately to be getting at the role of luck in the acquisition of intellectual character virtues. What if someone has the ill fortune of not being inclined toward curiosity or studiousness? Does this mean that she can’t be intellectually virtuous? I think the answer is no. She may be at a disadvantage or be challenged in a way that a person who is naturally studious and curious is not, but it doesn’t follow that she’ll be incapable of acquiring these virtues at least to some extent. Some might take issue with thinking of intellectual virtue formation as lucky in any sense. I don’t. But this isn’t to say that I think the possession of intellectual virtues can be entirely lucky. For this would, in my view, prevent intellectual virtues from contributing to the “personal intellectual worth” of their possessor. Thus you might say that being intellectually virtuous is more concerned with making good use of your cognitive temperaments and endowment than with what those things are in the first place.

PN: The idea that intellectual virtues contribute to their possessor’s “personal intellectual worth” is central to your account of intellectual virtue. Could you say a bit more about what this notion amounts to and how it differs from other more familiar kinds of epistemic or moral value?

Baehr: On my view, a character trait is an intellectual virtue only if it contributes to its possessor’s “personal intellectual worth,” that is, only if it makes its possessor intellectually good or better qua person. Typically, when we call someone a “good person” we do so in light of the person’s possession of certain moral virtues like generosity or compassion or honesty. However, there’s also an intellectual or epistemic dimension to personal excellence or worth. To get at it, it can be helpful to think first about more familiar forms of epistemic evaluation. I might, for instance, praise a person’s perfect vision or impeccable memory or extremely high IQ. In doing so, however, I would not really be making a judgment about this person qua person. Someone could have perfect vision, an impeccable memory, and an extraordinary IQ but still be a rotten person through and through.

By contrast, consider a person who is open-minded, fair-minded, and intellectually honest, and whose love of knowledge and understanding compels her to think and inquire in ways that careful, thorough, and rigorous. This person would embody a kind of intellectual or epistemic excellence. But it would be a kind of excellence different from the more impersonal or mechanistic form of excellence embodied by good memory or good vision. It likely would make good sense to think of this person as good or better qua person on account her open-mindedness, love of knowledge, intellectual carefulness, and so on. This suggests that there’s a sphere of epistemic excellence or worth that lies between more familiar but impersonal forms of epistemic excellence, on the one hand, and personal but strictly moral forms of excellence, on the other. Unfortunately, this evaluative dimension has largely been ignored by epistemologists and ethicists. But it’s central, I think, to a proper understanding of the basis of intellectual virtue.

PN: You define open mindedness in terms of one’s willingness to consider seriously the cognitive position distinct from the one she presently holds. You say that the open minded person need not consider the distinct cognitive position as a live option for her in many cases but this requirement would hold in others. Can you explain?

Baehr: Assuming that by a “live option” you mean something like a view or position that one is capable of taking seriously or of thinking of as true or possibly true, then, yes, I think the virtue of open-mindedness can require that a person give consideration to views that aren’t live options for him. This is partly because there may be cases in which a position isn’t a live option for a person but should be (e.g. where a position seems “beyond the pale” but only because the person in question is thinking in a dogmatic or narrow-minded way).

But it is also a function of the fact that some subject matters or issues seem to be more epistemically significant than others, such that getting things right relative to these issues is especially important from an epistemic standpoint. The result is that if, relative to one of these subject matters, I’m fully and reasonably convinced that P, it may be incumbent upon me to consider an argument for not-P, even if not-P is presently not a live option for me. Again, getting things right relative to P might be so epistemically momentous that I might need to consider the case for not-P even if at present I don’t see how not-P could be true. This is another case in which it is at least tempting to make an appeal to something like the notion of phronesis or practical wisdom. As such it further underscores the importance of thinking about wisdom and related concepts in epistemology.

PN: Can one be said to be intellectually courageous in defending seemingly outrageous or indefensible claims? For example, some have lampooned a view attributed to Alvin Plantinga: explaining natural evil in terms of the free will of demons in order to place the moral onus of all evil on free will. While such a view may be consistent with an overall philosophy, the defense appears to many to be both unfounded and irrelevant to the nature of the problem and ultimately un-provable. One could argue that such a position threatens the sincerity of any philosopher who holds it (at best, at worst his or her competency). At what point does defending a position become less a matter of intellectual courage simply become intellectual intractability or stubbornness (apparent vices)?

Baehr: In Plantinga’s case, he is (if I’m remembering correctly) just trying to show that the co-existence of God and natural evil is possible. I think the hypothesis in question probably does the work he wants it to. Thus I’m inclined to attribute people’s unease with the hypothesis to the rather low bar he’s trying to clear. (In other words, I think the typical reaction is that while such a hypothesis might be possible, it is overwhelmingly unlikely.) Nevertheless, I think the specific question you ask is a good one. My own view (which I can’t elaborate on or defend here) is that a person’s holding fast to a particular belief in the face of certain challenges becomes stubborn rather than courageous if the person lacks good reason to believe that holding fast to the belief will be helpful for securing or maintaining the truth. This is because I think of intellectual virtues as involving (very roughly) a disposition to engage in certain forms of cognitive activity (e.g. maintaining a belief) out of a reasonable sense that doing so will be helpful for achieving or maintaining a true belief. I elaborate on this in Chapters 7-9 of my book and in a forthcoming paper titled “The Cognitive Demands of Intellectual Virtue.”

PN: There’s a clear resemblance between what you describe as intellectual virtues and what philosophers have typically thought of as moral virtues. This is evident in some of the relevant terminology: for instance you talk a lot about intellectual courage, intellectual honesty, and so on. So, how exactly do you understand the relationship between intellectual character virtues and what we typically think of as moral virtues?

Baehr: This is a very difficult question. I had hoped to defend a fairly straightforward answer to it in the book. But when I got to writing the relevant chapter (which ended up as a lengthy appendix) I found myself losing a grip on the notion of “moral,” which of course made it very difficult to articulate the distinction between intellectual and moral virtues. One could attempt to answer the question by invoking a very broad sense of the moral or morality, with the result that the intellectual virtues turn out to be a subset of moral virtues. But this account fails to do justice to the idea that, say, a knowledge-loving academic who also happens to be abusive toward his spouse, children, and neighbors could be intellectually virtuous but a complete failure morally. In the book, I settle on a conception of the moral according to which “moral” is more or less synonymous with “others-regarding.”

The resulting distinction between intellectual and moral virtues turns out to be fairly complex, since the relevant notion of “intellectual” is not symmetrical with that of “moral.” Intellectual virtues, I argue, are excellences of personal character aimed at distinctively epistemic goods like knowledge, truth, and understanding. Moral virtues are excellences of personal character aimed at others’ well-being. The difficulty is that some intellectual virtues (e.g. intellectual generosity) aim at others’ share in the epistemic goods and thus at others’ well-being, making them intellectual and moral virtues. On my view, then, “moral” is symmetrical with “prudential,” not “intellectual.” And “intellectual” is symmetrical with, say, “aesthetic” or “hedonistic” or “spiritual,” not “moral.” I wish the overall picture were cleaner than it is. But in the end it was the best that I could do.

PN: There is work being done to subsume epistemology under cognitive science and brain science (Dennett’s work is one example among many). Is virtue epistemology in principle tangential to this effort or could virtue epistemology be developed in a way consistent with these research programs?

Baehr: I’m not sure about the relevance of neuroscience to virtue epistemology. But I do think that some work in cognitive psychology is very relevant and useful. The intellectual virtues are robust psychological traits. Empirical studies of these traits can help virtue epistemologists develop and refine their accounts of what intellectual virtues are or involve. I’ve found some of the work in positive psychology to be helpful in just this way. That said, I think that such work will always be driven by a prior conception of what the intellectual virtue or virtues in question amount to (cognitive scientists can begin studying intellectual courage in particular subjects, say, only if they have a prior conception of what intellectual courage is). Some such conceptions are bound to be better than others. And I don’t think the qualitative differences between these conceptions will be capable of being adjudicated on empirical grounds. Thus I think that some kind of conceptual or reasonably a priori philosophical reflection on the matter is indispensable.

PN: In the final chapter of the book, you discuss Jonathan Kvanvig’s suggestion that epistemologists abandon the “modern or Cartesian” epistemic project (traditional epistemology) and move towards a virtue-based approach if they are to fulfill the lofty goals set out by epistemology broadly speaking. What is the essence of his argument and your rejection of it?

Baehr: Kvanvig’s The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind: On the Place of the Virtues in Epistemology (1992) is a very fine and underappreciated book. It’s very sophisticated and comprehensive. I think it probably appeared before its time (it’s out of print now, if I’m not mistaken). In any case, one of Kvanvig’s central claims in the book is that traditional or Cartesian epistemology should be abandoned in favor of an approach that focuses on intellectual character, virtue, and related concepts in a more direct or immediate way (thus he defends a strong version of Autonomous VE). I think this goes too far. While I’m all for Autonomous VE, I think much (though not all) of traditional epistemology is well-motivated. Kvanvig’s main misgiving about traditional epistemology is a bit hard to pin down, but it appears to be that traditional epistemology is not sufficiently action-guiding. He views it as mired in technicality and theoretical dead ends and thus as unhelpful for guiding or regulating our intellectual lives.

In Chapter 10, I raise a couple of objections to Kvanvig’s argument. First, I argue that part of the point of epistemology is simply to provide an accurate explanatory account of important epistemic concepts and that this in turn is likely to result in a fair amount of technical detail and abstraction. While this may, to some extent, detract from the action-guiding force of epistemological theories, it doesn’t follow that these theories should be rejected. Second, I argue that traditional epistemology is not, in fact, bereft of action-guiding power. On the contrary, it sheds significant (if incomplete) light on what is ultimately significant from an epistemic standpoint and on concepts, principles, and criteria a grasp of which can indeed play an important role in guiding or regulating our attempts to achieve the epistemic good.

PN: You state at the end of the book that virtue epistemology may provide insights that can come to the aid of general epistemological problems. Are you seeing a bigger adoption of virtue epistemology by epistemologists in general and do you have further projects you’d like to pursue in this space?

Baehr: I’m not optimistic about the stronger version of Conservative VE. I do hope, however, that traditionally minded epistemologists will continue to explore connections between the concepts of intellectual character and virtue and the subject matter of traditional epistemology. Thus I’m fully supportive of weaker versions of Conservative VE. My main interests lie with Autonomous VE. I think a great deal of work remains to be done concerning the nature and structure of intellectual virtues, their relation to other cognitive and moral excellences, and their role and importance to the life of the mind. One exciting area in this regard is “applied virtue epistemology,” which examines the importance of intellectual virtue possession within certain specific human domains or practices like science, law, and education. I’m especially interested in the importance of intellectual character and virtue to our conception of the aims or goals of education. It seems obvious to me that part of what we want or should want for our students is growth in intellectual character virtues.

Interestingly, however, almost all the talk within educational theory about character or virtue pertains to civic or (narrowly) moral virtue. There is no widely recognized conception of intellectual character or of character as it relates to educational goals like knowledge and understanding. This is very odd, puzzling, and unfortunate. I’d like to see educational theorists and virtue epistemologists begin to converse with each other. As a step in this direction, I’ll soon be writing a paper titled “Intellectual Virtues and the Goals of Education” for special issue of the Journal of the Philosophy of Education.

Other Resources:

Listen to the podcast of our discussion.

Get the book!

The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology
Oxford University Press has made the first chapter of the book available as a sample. You can download that here.
The OUP website for the book.