iep - epistemic value

10/29/2015 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy » Value, EpistemicInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy » Print

http://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-value/print 1/26

Epistemic ValueEpistemic value is a kind of value which attaches to cognitive successes such as true beliefs, justified beliefs,knowledge, and understanding. These kinds of cognitive success do of course often have practical value.True beliefs about local geography help us get to work on time; knowledge of mechanics allows us to buildvehicles; understanding of general annual weather patterns helps us to plant our fields at the right time ofyear to ensure a good harvest. By contrast, false beliefs about the existence of weapons of mass destructioncan lead nations to fight hugely expensive wars that are ultimately both destructive and useless.

It is fairly uncontroversial that we tend to care about having various cognitive or epistemic goods, at leastfor their practical value, and perhaps also for their own sakes as cognitive successes. But thisuncontroversial point raises a number of important questions. For example: it’s natural to wonder whetherthere really are all these different kinds of things (true beliefs, knowledge, and so on) which have distinctvalue from an epistemic point of view, or whether the value of some of them is reducible to, or depends on,the value of others.

It’s also natural to think that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, but it has proven to be noeasy task explaining where the extra value of knowledge comes from. Similarly, it’s natural to think thatunderstanding is more valuable than any other epistemic state which falls short of understanding, such astrue belief or knowledge. But there is disagreement about what makes understanding the highest epistemicvalue, or what makes it distinctly valuable, or even whether it is distinctly valuable.

Indeed, it’s no easy task saying just what makes something an epistemic value in the first place. Doepistemic values just exist on their own, independent of other kinds of value? Or are cognitive goodsvaluable because we care about having them for their own sakes? Or are they are valuable because they helpus to achieve other things which we care about for their own sakes?

Furthermore, if we accept that there are things which are epistemically valuable, then we might be temptedto accept what is sometimes called the instrumental (or consequentialist, or teleological) conception ofepistemic rationality or justification, which is the view that a belief is epistemically rational just in case itappropriately promotes the achievement of an epistemic goal. If this idea is correct, then we need to knowwhich epistemic values to include in the formulation of the epistemic goal, where the “epistemic goal” is anepistemically valuable goal in light of which we evaluate beliefs as epistemically rational or irrational.

Table of Contents

1. Claims about Value

a. Instrumental and Final Valueb. Subjective and Objective Valuec. Pro Tanto and AllThingsConsidered Value

2. The Value Problem

a. The Primary Value Problem

i. Knowledge as Mere True Beliefii. Stability

iii. Virtues



iv. Reliabilismv. Contingent Features of Knowledge

b. The Secondary Value Problem

i. No Extra Valueii. Virtues

iii. Knowledge and Factive Mental Statesiv. Internalism

c. The Tertiary Value Problem

3. Truth and other Epistemic Values

a. Truth Gets Us What We Wantb. What People Ought to Care aboutc. Proper Functionsd. Assuming an Epistemic Value/Critical Domains of Evaluatione. Antirealismf. Why the Focus on Truth?

4. Understanding

a. Understanding: Propositions and Domains; Subjective and Objectiveb. The Location of the Special Value of Understandingc. The Value of Understandingd. Alternatives to the Natural Picture of the Value of Understanding

5. Instrumentalism and Epistemic Goals

a. The Epistemic Goal as a Subset of the Epistemic Valuesb. Common Formulations of the Epistemic Goalc. Differences between the Goals: Interest and Importanced. Differences between the Goals: Synchronic and Diachronic Formulations

6. Conclusion7. References and Further Reading

1. Claims about Value

Philosophers working on questions of value typically draw a number of distinctions which are good to keepin mind when thinking about particular kinds of value claims. We’ll look at three particularly usefuldistinctions before getting into the debates about epistemic value.

a. Instrumental and Final Value

The first important distinction to keep in mind is the distinction between instrumental and final value. Anobject (or state, property, etc.) is instrumentally valuable if and only if it brings about something else thatis valuable. An object is finally valuable if and only if it’s valuable for its own sake.

For example, it’s valuable to have a hidden pile of cash in your mattress: when you have a pile of cashreadily accessible, you have the means to acquire things which are valuable, such as clothing, food, and soon. And, depending on the kind of person you are, it might give you peace of mind to sleep on a pile of cash.But of course piles of cash aren’t valuable for their own sake – money is obviously only good for what it canget you. So money is only instrumentally valuable.

By contrast, being healthy is something we typically think of as finally valuable. Although being healthy isinstrumentally good because it enables us to do other valuable things, we also care about being healthy justbecause it’s good to be healthy, whether or not our state of health allows us to achieve other goods.

The existence of instrumental value depends on the existence of final value. But it’s possible for final valueto exist without any instrumental value. There are possible worlds where there simply are no causal



relations at all, for example. In worlds like that, there could exist some final value (for instance, there couldbe sentient beings who feel great pleasure), but nothing would ever count as a means for bringing aboutanything else, so there would be no instrumental value. In the actual world, though, it’s pretty clear thatthere is both instrumental and final value.

b. Subjective and Objective Value

The second distinction is between subjective and objective value. Subjective value is a matter of thesatisfaction of people’s desires (or the fulfillment of their plans, intentions, etc.). Objective value is a kind ofvalue which doesn’t depend on what people desire, care about, plan to do, etc. (Of course, to say that anobject or event O is subjectively valuable for a subject S isn’t to say anything about why S thinks that O isvaluable; O can be subjectively valuable in virtue of S’s desiring to bring O about, even if the reason Sdesires to bring O about is precisely because S thinks that O is objectively valuable. In a case like that, if O isobjectively valuable, then it is both objectively and subjectively valuable; but if S is mistaken, and O is notobjectively valuable, then O is only subjectively valuable.)

Some philosophers think that there is really only subjective value (and correspondingly, subjective reasons,obligations, and so on); others think that there is only objective value, and that there is value in achievingone’s actual desires only when the desires are themselves objectively good. Still other philosophers allowboth kinds of value. Many of the views which we’ll see below can be articulated in terms of either subjectiveor objective value, and when a view is committed to allowing only one type of value, the context will usuallymake it clear whether it’s subjective or objective. So, to keep things simple, except when it needs to be madeexplicit, claims about value will not be qualified as subjective or objective.

c. Pro Tanto and All-Things-Considered Value

Suppose that God declares that it is maximally valuable, always and everywhere, to feed the hungry.Assuming that God is omniscient and doesn’t lie, it necessarily follows that it’s true that it’s maximallyvaluable, always and everywhere, to feed the hungry. So there’s nothing that could ever outweigh the valueof feeding the hungry. This would be an indefeasible kind of value: it is a kind of value that cannot bedefeated by any contrary values or considerations.

Most value, however, is defeasible: it can be defeated, either by being overridden by contrary value-considerations, or else by being undermined. For an example of undermining: it’s instrumentally valuableto have a policy of getting an annual physical exam done, because that’s the kind of thing that normallyhelps catch medical issues before they become serious. But suppose that Sylvia visits the doctor for herannual physical, and it turns out that the doctor discovers that she has a terminal case of cancer, and thatshe has only days to live. In this case, nothing medically valuable comes about as a result of Sylvia’s policyof getting her physical done. The instrumental medical value which that policy would have enjoyed isundermined by the fact that annual physicals are no longer able to help keep Sylvia in good health.

By contrast, imagine that Roger goes to the emergency room for a dislocated shoulder. The doctors fix hisshoulder, but while sitting in the waiting room, Roger inhales droplets from another patient’s sneeze, andhe contracts meningitis as a result, which ends up causing him brain damage. In this case, there is somemedical value which resulted from Roger’s visit to the emergency room: his shoulder was fixed. But becausebrain damage is more disvaluable than a fixed shoulder is valuable, the value of having a fixed should isoutweighed, or overridden, by the disvalue of having brain damage. So all things considered, Roger’s visit tothe emergency room is disvaluable. But at least there is still something positive to be said for it.

In cases where some value V1 of an object O (or action, event, etc.) is overridden by some contrary value V2,but where V1 still at least counts in favour of O’s being valuable, we can say that V1 is a pro tanto kind ofvalue (literally, this means value “so far as it goes”). So the value of Roger’s fixed shoulder is pro tanto: itcounts in favour of the value of his visit to the emergency room, even though it is outweighed by thedisvalue of his resulting brain damage. The disvalue of getting brain damage is also pro tanto: although



brain damage outweighs a dislocated shoulder, there can be contrary values which would outweigh it So wecan say that, all things considered, Roger’s visit to the emergency room is disvaluable.

2. The Value Problem

a. The Primary Value Problem

Knowledge and true belief both tend to be things we want to have, but all else being equal, we tend to preferto have knowledge over mere true belief. The Primary Value Problem is the problem of explaining why thatshould be the case. Many epistemologists think that we should take it as a criterion of adequacy for theoriesof knowledge that they be able to explain the fact that we prefer knowledge to mere true belief, or at leastthat they be consistent with a good explanation of why that should be the case.

To illustrate: suppose that Steve believes that the Yankees are a good baseball team, because he thinks thattheir pinstriped uniforms are so sharp-looking. Steve’s belief is true—the Yankees always field a good team—but he holds his belief for such a terrible reason that we are very reluctant to think of it as an item ofknowledge.

Cases like Steve’s motivate the view that knowledge consists of more than just true belief. In order to countas knowledge, a belief has to be well justified in some suitable sense, and it should also meet a suitableGettier-avoidance condition (see Gettier Problems). But not only do beliefs like Steve’s motivate the view thatknowledge consists of more than mere true belief: they also motivate the view that knowledge is better tohave than true belief. For suppose that Yolanda knows the Yankees’ stats, and on that basis she believesthat the Yankees are a good team. It seems that Yolanda’s belief counts as an item of knowledge. And if wecompare Steve and Yolanda, it seems that Yolanda is doing better than Steve; we’d prefer to be in Yolanda’sepistemic position rather than in Steve’s. This seems to indicate that we prefer knowledge over mere truebelief.

The challenge of the Primary Value Problem is to explain why that should be the case. Why should we careabout whether we have knowledge instead of mere true belief? After all, as is often pointed out, true beliefsseem to bring us the very same practical benefits as knowledge. (Steve would do just as well as Yolandabetting on the Yankees, for example.) Socrates makes this point in the Meno, arguing that if someone wantsto get to Larisa, and he has a true belief but not knowledge about which road to take, then he will get toLarisa just as surely as if he had knowledge of which road to take. In response to Socrates’s argument,Meno is moved to wonder why anyone should care about having knowledge instead of mere true belief.(Hence, the Primary Value Problem is sometimes called the Meno Problem.)

So in short, the problem is that mere true beliefs seem to be just as likely as knowledge to guide us well inour actions. But we still seem to have the persistent intuition that any given item of knowledge is morevaluable than the corresponding item of mere true belief. The challenge is to explain this intuition.Strategies for addressing this problem can either try to show that knowledge really is always more valuablethan corresponding items of mere true belief, or else they can allow that knowledge is sometimes (or evenalways) no more valuable than mere true belief. If we adopt the latter kind of response to the problem, it isincumbent on us to explain why we should have the intuition that knowledge is more valuable than meretrue belief, in cases where it turns out that knowledge isn’t in fact more valuable. Following Pritchard(2008; 2009), we can call strategies of the first kind vindicating, and we can call strategies of the secondkind revisionary.

There isn’t a received view among epistemologists about how we ought to respond to the Primary ValueProblem, so the most useful thing to do at this point is to consider a number of the more interestingproposals from the literature, and to look at their problems and prospects.

i. Knowledge as Mere True Belief

http://www.iep.utm.edu/gettier/



A very straightforward way to respond to the problem is to deny one of the intuitions on which the problemdepends, the intuition that knowledge is distinct from true belief. Meno toys with this idea in the Meno,though Socrates disabuses him of the idea. (Somewhat more recently, Sartwell (1991; 1992) has defendedthis approach to knowledge.) If knowledge is identical with true belief, then we can simply reject the valueproblem as resting on a mistaken view of knowledge. If knowledge is true belief, then there’s nodiscrepancy in value to explain.

The view that knowledge is just true belief is almost universally rejected, however, and with good reason.Cases where subjects have true beliefs but lack knowledge are so easy to construct and so intuitivelyobvious that identifying knowledge with true belief represents an extreme departure from what mostepistemologists and laypeople think of knowledge. Consider once again Steve’s belief that the Yankees are agood baseball team, which he holds because he thinks their pinstriped uniforms are so sharp. It seems likean abuse of language to call Steve’s belief an item of knowledge. At the very least, we should be hesitant toaccept such an extreme view until we’ve exhausted all other theoretical options.

Of course it could still be the case that knowledge is no more valuable than mere true belief, even thoughknowledge is not identical with true belief. But, as we’ve seen, there is a widespread and resilient intuitionthat knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief (recall, for instance, that we tend to think thatYolanda’s epistemic state is better than Steve’s). If knowledge were identical with true belief, then we wouldhave to take that intuition to be mistaken; but, since we can see that knowledge is more than mere truebelief, we can continue looking for an acceptable account which would explain why knowledge is morevaluable than mere true belief.

ii. Stability

Most attempts to explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief proceed by identifyingsome condition which must be added to true belief in order to yield knowledge, and then explaining whythat further condition is valuable. Socrates’s own view, at least as presented in the Meno, is that knowledgeis true opinion plus an account of why the opinion is true (where the account of why it is true is itselfalready present in the soul; it must only be recalled from memory). So, Socrates proposes, a known truebelief will be more stable than a mere true belief, because having an account of why a belief is true helps tokeep us from losing it. If you don’t have an account of why a proposition is true, you might easily forget it,or abandon your belief in it when you come across some reason for doubting it. But if you do have anaccount of why a proposition is true, you likely have a greater chance of remembering it, and if you comeacross some reason for doubting it, you’ll have a reason available to you for continuing to believe it.

A worry for this solution is that it seems to be entirely possible for a subject S to have some entirelyunsupported beliefs, which do not count as knowledge, but where S clings to these beliefs dogmatically,even in the face of good counterevidence. S’s belief in a case like this can be just as stable as many items ofknowledge—indeed, dogmatically held beliefs can even be more stable than knowledge. For if you knowthat p, then presumably your belief is a response to some sort of good reason for believing that p. But ifyour belief is a response to good reasons, then you’d likely be inclined to revise your belief that p, if youwere to come across some good evidence for thinking that p is false, or for thinking that you didn’t have anygood reason for believing that p in the first place. On the other hand, if p is something you cling todogmatically (contrary evidence be damned), then you’ll likely retain p even when you get good reason fordoubting it. So, even though having stable true beliefs is no doubt a good thing, knowledge isn’t alwaysmore stable than mere true belief, and an appeal to stability does not seem to give us an adequateexplanation of the extra value of knowledge over mere true belief.

One way to defend the stability response to the value problem is to hold that knowledge is more stable thanmere true beliefs, but only for people whose cognitive faculties are in good working order, and to deny thatthe cognitive faculties of people who cling dogmatically to evidentially unsupported beliefs are in goodworking order (Williamson 2000). This solution invites the objection, however, that our cognitive faculties



are not all geared to the production of true beliefs. Some cognitive faculties are geared towards ensuringour survival, and the outputs of these latter faculties might be held very firmly even if they are not wellsupported by evidence. For example, there could be subjects with cognitive mechanisms which take asinput sudden sounds and generate as output the belief that there’s a predator nearby. Mechanisms likethese might very well generate a strong conviction that there’s a predator nearby. Such mechanisms wouldlikely yield many more false positive predator-identifications than they would yield correct identifications,but their poor true-to-false output-ratio doesn’t prevent mechanisms of this kind from having a very highsurvival value, as long as they do correctly identify predators when they are present. So it’s not really clearthat knowledge is more stable than mere true beliefs, even for mere true beliefs which have been producedby cognitive systems which are in good working order, because it’s possible for beliefs to be evidentiallyunsupported, and very stable, and produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties, all at the sametime. (See Kvanvig 2003, ch1. for a critical discussion of Williamson’s appeal to stability.)

iii. Virtues

Virtue epistemologists are, roughly, those who think that knowledge is true belief which is the product ofintellectual virtues. (See Virtue Epistemology.) They seem to have a plausible solution to the Primary (and, aswe’ll see, to the Secondary) Value Problem.

According to a prominent strand of virtue epistemology, knowledge is true belief for which we give thesubject credit (Greco 2003), or true belief which is a cognitive success because of the subject’s exercise ofher relevant cognitive ability (Greco 2008; Sosa 2007). For example (to adapt Sosa’s analogy): an archer, infiring at a target, might shoot well or poorly. If she shoots poorly but hits the target anyway (say, she takesaim very poorly but sneezes at the moment of firing, and luckily happens to hit the target), her shot doesn’tdisplay skill, and her hitting the target doesn’t reflect well on her. If she shoots well, on the other hand, thenshe might hit the target or miss the target. If she shoots well and misses the target, we will still credit herwith having made a good shot, because her shot manifests skill. If she shoots well and hits the target, thenwe will credit her success to her having made a good shot—unless there were intervening factors whichmade it the case that the shot hit the mark just as a matter of luck. For example: if a trickster moves thetarget while the arrow is in mid-flight, but a sudden gust of wind moves the arrow to the target’s newlocation, then in spite of the fact that the archer makes a good shot, and she hits the target, she doesn’t hitthe target because she made a good shot. She was just lucky, even though she was skillful. But when strangefactors don’t intervene, and the archer hits the target because she made a good shot, we give her credit forhaving hit the target, since we think that performances which succeed because they are competent are thebest kind of performances. And, similarly, when it comes to belief-formation, we give people credit forgetting things right as a result of the exercise of their intellectual virtues: we think it’s an achievement to getthings right as the result of one’s cognitive competence, and so we tend to think that there’s a sense inwhich people who get things right because of their intellectual competence deserve credit for getting thingsright.

According to another strand of virtue epistemology (Zagzebski 2003), we don’t think of knowledge as truebelief which meets some further condition. Rather, we should think of knowledge as a state which a subjectcan be in, which involves having the propositional attitude of belief, but which also includes themotivations for which the subject has the belief. Virtuous motivations might include things like diligence,integrity, and a love of truth. And, just as we think that, in ethics, virtuous motives make actions better(saving a drowning child because you don’t want children to suffer and die is better than saving a drowningchild because you don’t want to have to give testimony to the police, for example), we should also think thatthe state of believing because of a virtuous motive is better than believing for some other reason.

Some concerns have been raised for both strands of virtue epistemology, however. Briefly, a worry for theSosa/Greco type of virtue epistemology is that (as we’ll see in section 3) knowledge might not after all ingeneral be an achievement—it might be something we can come by in a relatively easy or even lazy fashion.A worry for Zagzebski’s type of virtue epistemology is that there seem to be possible cases where subjects

http://www.iep.utm.edu/virtueep/



can acquire knowledge even though they lack virtuous intellectual motives. Indeed, it seems possible toacquire knowledge even if one has only the darkest of motives: if a torturer is motivated by the desire towaterboard people until they go insane, for example, he can thereby gain knowledge of how long it takes tobreak a person by waterboarding.

Still, the idea that knowledge can be analyzed as true belief which is somehow virtuously produced andcreditable to the agent seems to be worth pursuing. Because the virtue-approach seems to be able to handlemost of the Gettier-style problems which plague previous analyses of knowledge, and because it canprovide what is on the face of it a plausible solution to the Primary Value Problem, virtue epistemologyrepresents a promising research program, and its problems and prospects deserve careful exploration.

iv. Reliabilism

The Primary Value Problem is sometimes thought to be especially bad for reliabilists about knowledge.Reliabilism in its simplest form is the view that beliefs are justified if and only if they’re produced byreliable processes, and they count as knowledge if and only if they’re produced by reliable processes andthey’re not Gettiered. (See, for example, Goldman and Olsson (2009, p. 22), as well as the article onReliabilism.) The apparent trouble for reliabilism is that reliability only seems to be valuable as a means totruth—so, in any given case where we have a true belief, it’s not clear that the reliability of the processwhich produced the belief is able to add anything to the value that the belief already has in virtue of beingtrue. The value which true beliefs have in virtue of being true completely “swamps” the value of thereliability of their source, if reliability is only valuable as a means to truth. (Hence the Primary ValueProblem for reliabilism has often been called the “swamping problem.”)

To illustrate with an example borrowed from Zagzebski (2003): the value of a cup of coffee seems to be amatter of how good the coffee tastes. And we value reliable coffeemakers because we value good cups ofcoffee. But when it comes to the value of any particular cup of coffee, its value is just a matter of how good ittastes; whether the coffee was produced by a reliable coffeemaker doesn’t add to or detract from the valueof the cup of coffee. Similarly, we value true beliefs, and we value reliable belief-forming processes becausewe care about getting true beliefs. So we have reason to prefer reliable processes over unreliable ones. Butwhether a particular belief was reliably or unreliably produced doesn’t seem to add to or detract from thevalue of the belief itself.

Responses have been offered on behalf of reliabilism. Brogaard (2006) points out that critics of reliabilismseem to have been presupposing a Moorean conception of value, according to which the value of an object(or state, condition, and so forth) is entirely a function of the internal properties of the object. (The value ofthe cup of coffee is determined entirely by its internal properties, not by the reliability of its production, orby the fineness of a particular morning when you enjoy your coffee.) But this is a mistaken view about valuein general. External features can add value to objects. We value a genuine Picasso painting more than aflawless counterfeit, for example. If that’s correct, then extra value can be conferred on an object, if it has avaluable source, and perhaps the value of reliable processes can transfer to the beliefs which they produce.

(That is a negative response to the value problem for reliabilism, in the sense that its aim is to show thatcritics of reliabilism haven’t shown that reliabilists can’t account for the value of knowledge.)

Goldman and Olsson (2009) offer two further responses on behalf of reliabilism. Their first response is thatwe can hold that true belief is always valuable, and that reliability is only valuable as a means to true belief,but that it is still more valuable to have knowledge (understood as reliabilists understand knowledge, thatis, as reliably-produced and unGettiered true belief) than a mere true belief. For if S knows that p incircumstances C, then S has formed the belief that p through some reliable process in C. So S has somereliable process available to her, and it generated a belief in C. This makes it more likely that S will have areliable process available to her in future similar circumstances, than it would be if S had an unreliablyproduced true belief in C. So, when we’re thinking about how valuable it is to be in circumstances C, it

http://www.iep.utm.edu/reliabil/



seems to be better for S to be in C if S has knowledge in C than if she has mere true belief in C, becausehaving knowledge in C makes it likelier that she’ll get more true beliefs in future similar circumstances.

This response, Goldman and Olsson think, accounts for the extra value which knowledge has in many cases.But there will still be cases where S’s having knowledge in C doesn’t make it likelier that she’ll get more truebeliefs in the future. For example, C might be a unique set of circumstances which is unlikely to come upagain. Or S might be employing a reliable process which is available to her in C, but which is likely tobecome unavailable to her very soon. Or S might be on her deathbed. So this response isn’t a completelyvalidating solution to the value problem, and it’s incumbent on Goldman and Olsson to explain why weshould tend to think that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief in those cases when it’s not.

So Goldman and Olsson offer a second response to the Primary Value Problem: when it comes to ourintuitions about the value of knowledge, they argue, it’s plausible that these intuitions began long ago withthe recognition that true belief is always valuable in some sense to have, and that knowledge is usuallyvaluable because it involves both true belief and the probability of getting more true beliefs; and then, overtime, we have come to simply think that knowledge is valuable, even in cases when having knowledgedoesn’t make it more probable that the subject will get more true beliefs in the future.

v. Contingent Features of Knowledge

An approach similar to Goldman and Olsson’s is to consider the values of contingent features of knowledge,rather than the value of its necessary and/or sufficient conditions. Although we might think that the naturalway to account for the value of some state or condition S1, which is composed of other states or conditionsS2-Sn, is in terms of the values of S2-Sn, perhaps S1 can be valuable in virtue of some other conditionswhich typically (but not always) accompany S1, or in terms of some valuable result which S1 is typically (butnot always) able to get us. For example: it’s normal to think that air travel is valuable, because it typicallyenables people to cover great distances safely and quickly. Of course, sometimes airplanes are diverted, andslow travellers down, and sometimes airplanes crash. But even so, we might continue to think, air travel istypically a valuable thing, because in ordinary cases, it gets us something good.

Similarly, we might think that knowledge is valuable because we need to rely on the information whichpeople give us in order to accomplish just about anything in this life, and being able to identify people ashaving knowledge means being able to rely on them as informants. And we also might think that there’svalue in being able to track whether our own beliefs are held on the basis of good reasons, and we typicallyhave good reasons available to us for believing p when we know that p. Of course we aren’t always in aposition to identify when other people have knowledge, and if externalists about knowledge are right, thenwe don’t always have good reasons available to us when we have knowledge ourselves. Nevertheless, we cantypically identify people as knowers, and we can typically identify good reasons for the things we know.These things are valuable, so they make typical cases of knowledge valuable, too. (See Craig (1990) for anaccount of the value of knowledge in terms of the characteristic function of knowledge-attribution. Jones(1997) further develops the view.)

Like Goldman and Olsson’s responses, this strategy for responding to the value problem doesn’t give us anaccount of why knowledge is always more valuable than mere true belief. For those who think thatknowledge is always preferable to mere true belief, and who therefore seek a validating solution to thePrimary Value Problem, this strategy will not be satisfactory. But for those who are willing to accept asomewhat revisionist response, according to which knowledge is only usually or characteristicallypreferable to mere true belief, this strategy seems promising.

b. The Secondary Value Problem

Suppose you’ve applied for a new position in your company, but your boss tells you that your co-workerJones is going to get the job. Frustrated, you glance over at Jones, and see that he has ten coins on his desk,



and you then watch him put the coins in his pocket. So you form the belief that the person who will get thejob has at least ten coins in his or her pocket (call this belief “B”). But it turns out that your boss was justtoying with you; he just wanted to see how you would react to bad news. He’s going to give you the job. Andit turns out that you also have at least ten coins in your pocket.

So you have a justified true belief, B, which has been Gettiered. In cases like this, once you’ve found out thatyou were Gettiered, it’s natural to react with annoyance or intellectual embarrassment: even though you gotthings right (about the coins, though not about who would get the job), and even though you had goodreason to think you had things right, you were just lucky in getting things right.

If this is correct—if we do tend to prefer to have knowledge over Gettiered justified true beliefs—then thissuggests that there’s a second value problem to be addressed. We seem to prefer having knowledge overhaving any proper subset of the parts of knowledge. But why should that be the case? What value is addedto justified true beliefs, when they meet a suitable anti-Gettier condition?

i. No Extra Value

An initial response is to deny that knowledge is more valuable than mere justified true belief. If we’ve gottrue beliefs, and good reasons for them, of course we might be Gettiered, if for some reason it turns out thatwe’re just lucky in having true beliefs. When we inquire into whether p, we want to get to the truthregarding p, and we want to do so in a rationally defensible way. If it turns out that we get to the truth in arationally defensible way, but strange factors of the case undermine our claim to knowing the truth about p,perhaps it just doesn’t matter that we don’t have knowledge.

Few epistemologists have defended this view, however (though Kaplan (1985) is an exception). We do afterall find it irritating when we find out that we’ve been Gettiered; and when we are consideringcorresponding cases of knowledge and of Gettiered justified true belief, we tend to think that the subjectwho has knowledge is better off than the subject who is Gettiered. Of course we might be mistaken; theremight be nothing better in knowledge than in mere justified true belief. But the presumption seems to bethat knowledge is more valuable, and we should try to explain why that is so. Skepticism about the extravalue of knowledge over mere justified true belief might be acceptable if we fail to find an adequateexplanation, but we shouldn’t accept skepticism before searching for a good explanation.

ii. Virtues

We saw above that some virtue epistemologists think of knowledge in terms of the achievement of truebeliefs as a result of the exercise of cognitive skills or virtues. And we do generally seem to value successthat results from our efforts and skills (that is, we value success that’s been achieved rather than stumbledinto (for example, Sosa (2003; 2007) and Pritchard (2009)). So, because we have a cognitive aim of gettingto the truth, and we can achieve that aim either as a result of luck or as a result of our skillful cognitiveperformance, it seems that the value of achieving our aims as a result of a skillful performance can helpexplain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

That line of thought works just as well as a response to the Secondary Value Problem as to the PrimaryValue Problem. For in a Gettier case, the subject has a justified true belief, but it’s just as a result of luckthat she arrived at a true belief rather than a false one. By contrast, when a subject arrives at a true beliefbecause she has exercised a cognitive virtue, it’s plausible to think that it’s not just lucky that she’s arrivedat a true belief; she gets credit for succeeding in the aim of getting to the truth as a result of her skillfulperformance. So cases of knowledge do, but Gettier cases do not, exemplify the value of succeeding inachieving our aims as a result of a skillful performance.

iii. Knowledge and Factive Mental States



Williamson (2000) is at the forefront of “knowledge-first” epistemology. This is the approach toepistemology that does not attempt to analyze knowledge in terms of other more basic concepts; rather, ittakes knowledge to be fundamental, and it analyzes other concepts in terms of knowledge. Of courseknowledge-first epistemologists still want to say informative things about what knowledge is, but they don’taccept the traditional idea that knowledge can be analyzed in terms of informative necessary and sufficientconditions.

Williamson thinks that knowledge is the most general factive mental state. At least some mental states havepropositional contents (the belief that p has the content p; the desire that p has the content p; and so on).Factive mental states are mental states which you can only be in when their contents are true. Belief isn’t afactive mental state, because you can believe p even if p is false. By contrast, knowledge is a factive mentalstate, because you can only know that p if p is true. Other factive mental states include seeing that (forexample, you can only see that the sun is up, if the sun really is up) and remembering that. Knowledge isthe most general factive mental state, for Williamson, because any time you are in a factive mental statewith the content that p, you must know that p. If you see that it’s raining outside, then you know that it’sraining outside. Otherwise—say, if you have a mere true belief that it’s raining, or if your true belief that it’sraining is justified but Gettiered—you only seem to see that it’s raining outside.

Williamson’s view is of course controversial. But if he is right, and knowledge really is the most generalfactive mental state, then it is easy enough to explain the value of knowledge over mere justified true belief.We care, for one thing, about having true beliefs, and we dislike being duped. We would especially dislike itif we found out that we were victims of widespread deception. (Imagine your outrage and intellectualembarrassment, for example, if you were to discover that you were living in your own version of TheTruman Show!) But not only that: we also care about being in the mental states we think we’re in (we careabout really remembering what we think we remember, for example), and we would certainly dislike beingduped about our own mental states, including when we take ourselves to be in factive mental states. So ifhaving a justified true belief that p which is Gettiered prevents us from being in the factive mental states wethink we’re in, but having knowledge enables us to be in these factive mental states, then it seems that weshould care about having knowledge.

iv. Internalism

Finally, internalists about knowledge have an interesting response to offer to the Secondary Value Problem.Internalism about knowledge is the view that a necessary condition on S’s knowing that p is that S musthave good reasons available for believing that p (where this is usually taken to mean that S must be able tobecome aware of those reasons, just by reflecting on what reasons she has). Internalists will normally holdthat you have to have good reasons available to you, and you have to hold your belief on the basis of thosereasons, in order to have knowledge.

Brogaard (2006) argues that the fact that beliefs must be held on the basis of good reasons gives theinternalist her answer to the Secondary Value Problem. Roughly, the idea is that, if you hold the belief thatp on the basis of a reason q, then you must believe (at least dispositionally) that in your currentcircumstances, q is a reliable indicator of p’s truth. So you have a first-order belief, p, and you have a reasonfor believing p, which is q, and you have a second-order belief, r, to the effect that q is a reliable indicator ofp’s truth. And when your belief that p counts as knowledge, your reason q must in fact be a reliableindicator of p’s truth in your current circumstances—which means that your second-order belief r is true.So, assuming that the extra-belief requirement for basing beliefs on reasons is correct, it follows that whenyou have knowledge, you also have a correct picture of how things stand more broadly speaking.

When you are in a Gettier situation, by contrast, there is some feature of the situation which makes it thecase that your belief that q is not a reliable indicator of the truth of p. That means that your second-orderbelief r is false. So, even though you’ve got a true first-order belief, you have an incorrect picture of howthings stand more broadly speaking. Assuming that it’s better to have a correct picture of how things stand,



including a correct picture of what reasons are reliable indicators of the truth of our beliefs, knowledgeunderstood in an internalist sense is more valuable than Gettiered justified true belief.

c. The Tertiary Value Problem

Pritchard (2007; 2010) suggests that there’s a third value problem to address (compare also Zagzebski2003). We often think of knowledge as distinctively valuable—that it’s a valuable kind of thing to have, andthat its value isn’t the same kind of value as (for example) the value of true belief. If that’s correct, thensimply identifying a kind of value which true beliefs have, and showing that knowledge has that same kindof value but to a greater degree, does not yield a satisfactory solution to this value problem.

By analogy, think of two distinct kinds of value: moral and financial. Suppose that both murders andmediocre investments are typically financially disvaluable, and suppose that murders are typically morefinancially disvaluable than mediocre investments. Even if we understand the greater financial disvalue ofmurders over the financial disvalue of mediocre investments, if we do not also understand that murders aredisvaluable in a distinctively moral sense, then we will fail to grasp something fundamental about thedisvalue of murder.

If knowledge is valuable in a way that is distinct from the way that true beliefs are valuable, then the kind ofsolution to the Primary Value Problem offered by Goldman and Olsson which we saw above isn’tsatisfactory, because the extra value they identify is just the extra value of having more true beliefs. Bycontrast, as Pritchard suggests, if knowledge represents a cognitive achievement, in the way that virtuetheorists often suggest, then because we do seem to think of achievements as being valuable just insofar asthey are achievements (we value the overcoming of obstacles, and we value success which is attributable toa subject’s exercise of her skills or abilities), it follows that thinking of knowledge as an achievementprovides a way to solve the Tertiary Value Problem. (Though, as we’ll see in section 3, Pritchard doesn’tthink that knowledge in general represents an achievement.)

However, it’s not entirely clear that the Tertiary Value Problem is a real problem which needs to beaddressed. (Haddock (2010) explicitly denies it, and Carter, Jarvis, and Rubin (2013) also register a certainskepticism before going on to argue that if there is a Tertiary Value Problem, it’s easy to solve.) Certainlymost epistemologists who have attempted to solve the value problem have not worried about whether theextra value they were identifying in knowledge was different in kind from the value of mere true belief, or ofmere justified true belief. Perhaps it is fair to say that it would be an interesting result if knowledge turnedout to have a distinctive kind of value; maybe that would even be a mark in favour of an epistemologicaltheory which had that result. But the consensus seems to be that, if we can identify extra value inknowledge, then that is enough to solve the value problem, even if the extra value is just a greater degree ofthe same kind of value which we find in the proper parts of knowledge such as true belief.

3. Truth and other Epistemic Values

We have been considering ways to try to explain why knowledge is more valuable than its proper parts.More generally though, we might wonder what sorts of things are epistemically valuable, and just whatmakes something an epistemic value in the first place.

The most natural way of proceeding is simply to identify some state which epistemologists havetraditionally been interested in, or which seems like it could or should be important for a flourishingcognitive life—such as the states of having knowledge, true belief, justification, wisdom, empiricallyadequate theories, and so on—and try to give some reason for thinking that it’s valuable to be in such astate.

Epistemologists who work on epistemic value usually want to explain either why true beliefs are valuable,or why knowledge is valuable, or both. Some also seek to explain the value of other states, such asunderstanding, and some seek to show that true beliefs and knowledge are not always as valuable as we



might think.

Sustained arguments for the value of knowledge are easy to come by; the foregoing discussion of the ValueProblem was a short survey of such arguments. Sustained arguments for the value of true belief, on theother hand, are not quite so plentiful. But it is especially important that we be able to show that true beliefis valuable, if we are going to allow true belief to play a central role in epistemological theories. It is, afterall, very easy to come up with apparently trivial true propositions, which no one is or ever will be interestedin. Truths about how many grains of sand there are on some random beach, for example, seem to beentirely uninteresting. Piller suggests that “the string of letters we get, when we combine the third letters ofthe first ten passenger’s family names who fly on FR2462 to Bydgoszcz no more than seventeen weeks aftertheir birthday with untied shoe laces” is an uninteresting truth, which no one would care about (2009,p.415). (Though see Treanor (2014) for an objection to arguments that proceed by comparing what appearto be more and less interesting truths.) What is perhaps even worse, it is easy to construct cases wherehaving a true belief is positively disvaluable. For example, if someone tells you how a movie will end beforeyou see it, you will probably not enjoy the movie very much when you do get around to seeing it (Kelly2003). Now, maybe these apparently trivial or disvaluable truths are after all at least a little bit valuable, inan epistemic sense—but on the face of them, these truths don’t seem valuable, so the claim that they arevaluable needs to be argued for. We’ll see some such arguments shortly.

Keep in mind that although epistemologists often talk about the value of having true beliefs, this is usuallytaken to be short for the value of having true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. These two aspects of what isusually referred to as a truth-goal are clearly related, but they are distinct, and sometimes they can pull inopposite directions. An extreme desire to avoid false beliefs can lead us to adopt some form of skepticism,for example, where we abandon all or nearly all of our beliefs, if we’re not careful. But in giving up all of ourbeliefs, we do not only avoid having false beliefs; we also lose all of the true beliefs we would have had.When the goals of truth-achievement and error-avoidance pull in opposite directions, we need to weigh theimportance of getting true beliefs against the importance of avoiding false ones, and decide how muchepistemic risk we’re willing to take on in our body of beliefs (compare James 1949, Riggs 2003).

Still, because the twin goals of achieving true beliefs and avoiding errors are so closely related, and becausethey are so often counted as a single truth-goal, we can continue to refer to them collectively as a truth-goal.We just need to be careful to keep the twin aspects of the goal in mind.

a. Truth Gets Us What We Want

One argument for thinking that true beliefs are valuable is that without true beliefs, we cannot succeed inany of our projects. Since even the most unambitious of us care about succeeding in a great many things(even making breakfast is a kind of success, which requires a great many true beliefs), we should all thinkthat it’s important to have true beliefs, at least when it comes to subjects that we care about.

An objection to this argument for the value of true beliefs is that, as we’ve already seen, there are many truepropositions which seem not to be worth caring about, and some which can be positively harmful. Soalthough true beliefs are good when they can get us things we want, that is not always the case. So thisargument doesn’t establish that we should always care about the truth.

A response to this worry is that we will all be faced with new situations in the future, and we will need tohave a broad range of true beliefs, and as few false beliefs mixed in with the true ones as we can, in order tohave a greater chance of succeeding when such situations come up (Foley 1993, ch.1). So it’s a good idea totry to get as many true beliefs as we can. This line of argument gives us a reason to think that it’s always atleast pro tanto valuable to have true beliefs (that is, there’s always something positive to be said for truebeliefs, even if that pro tanto value can sometimes be overridden by other considerations).

This is a naturalistically acceptable kind of value for true beliefs to enjoy. Although it doesn’t ground thevalue of true beliefs in the fact that people always desire to have true beliefs, it does ground their value in



their instrumental usefulness for getting us other things which we do in fact desire. The main drawback forthis approach, however, is that when someone positively desires not to have a given true belief—say,because it will cause him pain, or prevent him from having an enjoyable experience at the movies—itdoesn’t seem like his desires can make it at all valuable for him to have the true belief in question. The ideahere was to try to ground the value of truths in their instrumental usefulness, in the way that they are goodfor getting us what we want. But if there are true beliefs which we know will not be useful in that way(indeed, if there are true beliefs which we know will be harmful to us), then those beliefs don’t seem to haveanything to be said in favour of them—which is to say that they aren’t even pro tanto valuable.

Whether we think that this is a serious problem will depend on whether we think that the claim that truebeliefs are valuable entails that true beliefs must always have at least pro tanto value. Sometimesepistemologists (for example, White 2007) explicitly claim that true beliefs are not always valuable in anyreal sense, since we just don’t always care about having them. But, just as money is valuable even though itisn’t something that we always care about having, so too, true beliefs are still valuable, in a hypotheticalsense: when we do want to have true beliefs, or when true beliefs are necessary for getting us what we want,they are valuable. So we can always say that they have value; it’s just that the kind of value in question isonly hypothetical in nature. (One might worry, however, that “hypothetical” seems to be only a fancy way tosay “not real.”)

b. What People Ought to Care about

A similar way to motivate the claim that true beliefs are valuable is to say that there are some things that wemorally ought to care about, and we need to have true beliefs in order to achieve those things (Zagzebski2003; 2009). For example, I ought to care about whether my choices as a consumer contribute to painfuland degrading living and working conditions for people who produce what I’m consuming. (Of course I docare about that, but even if I didn’t, surely, I ought to care about it.) But in order to buy responsibly, andavoid supporting corporations that abuse their workers, I need to have true beliefs about the practices ofvarious corporations.

So, since there are things we should care about, and since we need true beliefs to successfully deal withthings which we should care about, it follows that we should care about having true beliefs.

This line of argument is unavailable to anyone who wants to avoid positing the existence of objective valueswhich exist independently of what people actually desire or care about, and of course it doesn’t generateany value for true beliefs which aren’t relevant to things we ought to care about. But if there are thingswhich we ought to care about, then it seems correct to say that at least in many cases, true beliefs arevaluable, or worth caring about.

Lynch (2004) gives a related argument for the objective value of truth. Although he doesn’t ground thevalue of true beliefs in things that we morally ought to care about, his central argument is that it’simportant to care about the truth for its own sake, because caring for the truth for its own sake is part ofwhat it is to have intellectual integrity, and intellectual integrity is an essential part of a healthy, flourishinglife. (He also argues that a concern for the truth for its own sake is essential for a healthy democracy.)Whether this argument gets us the result that all true beliefs are at least pro tanto valuable is still an openquestion.

c. Proper Functions

Some epistemologists (for example, Plantinga 1993; Bergmann 2006; Graham 2011) invoke the properfunctions of our cognitive systems in order to argue for (or to explain) the value of truth, and to explain theconnection between truth and justification or warrant. Proper functions are usually given a selected-effectsgloss, following Millikan (1984). The basic idea is that an organ or a trait (T), which produces an effect (E),has the production of effects of type E as its proper function just in case the ancestors of T also producedeffects of type E, and the fact that they produced effects of type E is part of a correct explanation of why the



Ts (or the organisms which have Ts) survived and exist today. For example, hearts have the proper functionof pumping blood because hearts were selected for their ability to pump blood—the fact that our ancestorshad hearts that pumped blood is part of a correct explanation of why they survived, reproduced, and whywe exist today and have hearts that pump blood.

Similarly, the idea goes, we have cognitive systems which have been selected for producing true beliefs. Andif that’s right, then our cognitive systems have the proper function of producing true beliefs, which seems tomean that there is always at least some value in having true beliefs.

It’s not clear whether selected-effect functions are in fact normative, however (in the sense of being able bythemselves to generate reasons or value). Millikan, at least, thought that proper functions are normative.Others disagree (for example, Godfrey-Smith 1998). Whether we can accept this line of argument for thevalue of true beliefs will depend on whether we think that selected-effects functions are capable ofgenerating value by themselves, or whether they only generate value when taken in a broader context whichincludes reference to the desires and the wellbeing of agents.

A further potential worry with the proper-function explanation of the value of true beliefs is that there do infact seem to be cognitive mechanisms which have been selected for, and which systematically produce, falsebeliefs. (See Hazlett (2013), for example, who considers cognitive biases such as the self-enhancement biasat considerable length.) Plantinga (1993) suggests that we should distinguish truth-directed cognitivemechanisms from others, and say that it’s only the proper functioning of well-designed, truth-conducivemechanisms that yield warranted beliefs. But if this response works, it’s only because there’s some way toexplain why truth is valuable, other than saying that our cognitive mechanisms have been selected forproducing true beliefs; otherwise there would be no reason to suggest that it’s only the truth-directedmechanisms that are relevant to warranted and epistemically valuable beliefs.

d. Assuming an Epistemic Value/Critical Domains of Evaluation

Many epistemologists don’t think that we need to argue that truth is a valuable thing to have (for example,BonJour 1985, Alston 1985; 2005, Leplin 2009, Sosa 2007). They argue that all we need to do is to assumethat there is a standpoint which we take when we are doing epistemology, or when we’re thinking about ourcognitive lives, and stipulate that the goal of achieving true beliefs and avoiding errors is definitive of thatstandpoint. We can simply assume that truth is a real and fundamental epistemic value, and proceed fromthere.

Proponents of this approach still sometimes argue for the claim that achieving the truth and avoiding erroris the fundamental epistemic value. But when they do, their strategy is to assume that there must be somedistinctively epistemic value which is fundamental (that is, which orients our theories of justification andknowledge, and which explains why we value other things from an epistemic standpoint), and then to arguethat achieving true beliefs does a better job as a fundamental epistemic value than other candidate valuesdo.

The strategy here isn’t to argue that true beliefs are always valuable, all things considered. The strategy is toargue only that true belief is of fundamental value insofar as we are concerned with evaluating beliefs (orbelief-forming processes, practices, institutions, and so forth) from an epistemic point of view. True beliefsare indeed sometimes bad to have, all things considered (as when you know how a movie will end), and noteveryone always cares about having true beliefs. But enough of us care about having true beliefs in a broadenough range of cases that a critical domain of evaluation has arisen, which takes true belief as itsfundamental value.

In support of this picture of epistemology and epistemic value, Sosa (2007) compares epistemology to thecritical domain of evaluation which centers on good coffee. That domain takes the production andconsumption of good cups of coffee as its fundamental value, and it has a set of evaluative practices in lightof that goal. Many people take that goal seriously, and we have enormous institutional structures in place



which exist entirely for the purpose of achieving the goal of producing good cups of coffee. But of coursethere are people who detest coffee, and perhaps coffee isn’t really valuable at all. (Perhaps…) But even so,enough people take the goal of producing good coffee to be valuable that we have generated a criticaldomain of evaluation centering on the value of producing good coffee, and even people who don’t careabout coffee can still recognize good coffee, and they can engage in the practices which go with taking goodcoffee as a fundamental value of a critical domain. And for Sosa, the value of true belief is to epistemologyas the value of good cups of coffee is to the domain of coffee production and evaluation.

One might worry, however, that this sort of move cannot accommodate the apparently non-optional natureof epistemic evaluation. It’s possible to opt out of the practice of making evaluations of products andprocesses in terms of the way that they promote the goal of producing tasty cups of coffee, but ourepistemic practices don’t seem to be optional in that way. Even if I were to foreswear any kind ofcommitment to the importance of having epistemically justified beliefs, for example, you couldappropriately level criticism at me if my beliefs were to go out of sync with my evidence.

e. Anti-realism

An important minority approach to epistemic value and epistemic normativity is a kind of anti-realism, orconventionalism. The idea is that there is no sense in which true beliefs are really valuable, nor is there asense in which we ought to try to have true beliefs, except insofar as we (as individuals, or as a community)desire to have true beliefs, or we are willing to endorse the value of having true beliefs.

One reason for being anti-realist about epistemic value is that you might be dissatisfied with all of theavailable attempts to come up with a convincing argument for thinking that truth (or anything else) issomething which we ought to value. Hazlett (2013) argues against the “eudaimonic ideal” of true belief,which is the idea that even though true beliefs can be bad for us in exceptional circumstances, still, as arule, true beliefs systematically promote human flourishing better than false beliefs do. One of Hazlett’smain objections to this idea is that there are types of cases where true beliefs are systematically worse for usthan false beliefs. For example, people who have an accurate sense of what other people think of them tendto be more depressed than people who have an inflated sense of what others think of them. When it comesto beliefs about what others think about us, then, true beliefs are systematically worse for our wellbeingthan corresponding false beliefs would be.

Because Hazlett thinks that the problems facing a realist account of epistemic value and epistemic normsare too serious, he adopts a form of conventionalism, according to which epistemic norms are like clubrules. Just as a club might adopt the rule that they will not eat peas with spoons, so too, we humans haveadopted epistemic rules such as the rule that we should believe only what the evidence supports. Thejustification for this rule isn’t that it’s valuable in any real sense to believe what the evidence supports;rather, the justification is just that the rule of believing in accord with the evidence is in fact a rule that wehave adopted. However, as Bondy (2015) suggests, and as we also saw with Sosa’s appeal to criticaldomains of evaluation, one might worry that epistemic rules seem to be non-optional in a way that clubrules are not. Clubs can change their rules by taking a vote, for example, whereas it doesn’t seem as thoughepistemic agents can do any such thing.

f. Why the Focus on Truth?

We’ve been looking at some of the main approaches to the question of whether and why true beliefs areepistemically valuable. For a wide range of epistemologists, true beliefs play a fundamental role in theirtheories, so it’s important to try to see why we should think that truth is valuable. But, given that we tend tovalue knowledge more than we value true belief, one might wonder why true belief is so often taken to be afundamental value in the epistemic domain. Indeed, not only do many of us think that knowledge is morevaluable than mere true belief; we also think that there are a number of other things which should alsocount as valuable from the epistemic point of view: understanding, justification, simplicity, empirical



adequacy of theories, and many other things too, seem to be important kinds of cognitive successes. Theseseem like prime candidates for counting as epistemically valuable—so why do they so often play such asmaller role in epistemological theories than true belief plays?

There are three main reasons why truth is often invoked as a fundamental epistemic value, and why theseother things are often relegated to secondary roles. The first reason is that, as we saw in section 2(a), truebeliefs do at least often seem to enable us to accomplish our goals and achieve what we want. And theytypically enable us to do so whether or not they count as knowledge, or even whether or not they’rejustified, or whether they represent relatively simple hypotheses. This seems like a reason to care abouthaving true beliefs, which doesn’t depend on taking any other epistemic states to be valuable.

The second reason is that, if we take true belief to be the fundamental epistemic value, we will still be ableto explain why we should think of many other things aside from true beliefs as epistemically valuable. Ifjustified beliefs tend to be true, for example, and having true beliefs is the fundamental epistemic value,then justification will surely also be valuable, as a means to getting true beliefs (this is suggested in awidely-cited and passage in (BonJour 1985, pp.7-8)). Similarly, we might be able to explain the epistemicvalue of simplicity in terms of the value of truth, because the relative simplicity of a hypothesis can beevidence that the hypothesis is more likely than other competing hypotheses to be true. On one commonway of thinking about simplicity, a hypothesis H1 is simpler than another hypothesis H2 if H1 posits fewertheoretical entities. Understanding simplicity in that way, it’s plausible to think that simpler hypotheses arelikelier to be true, because there are fewer ways for them to go wrong (there are fewer entities for them tobe mistaken about).

By contrast, it is not so straightforward to try to explain the value of truth in terms of other candidateepistemic values, such as simplicity or knowledge. If knowledge were the fundamental (as opposed to thehighest, or one of the highest) epistemic value, so that the value of true beliefs would have to be dependenton the value of knowledge, then it seems that it would be difficult to explain why unjustified true beliefsshould be more valuable than unjustified false beliefs, which they seem to be.

And the third reason why other candidate epistemic values are not often invoked in setting out epistemictheories is that, even if there are epistemically valuable things which do not get all of their epistemic valuefrom their connection with true belief, there is a particular theoretical role which many epistemologistswant the central epistemic goal or value to play, and it can only play that role if it’s understood in terms ofachieving true beliefs and avoiding false ones (David 2001; compare Goldman 1979). Briefly, the role inquestion is that of providing a way to explain our epistemic notions, including especially the notions ofknowledge and epistemic rationality, in non-epistemic terms. Since truth is not itself an epistemic term, itcan play this role. But other things which seem to be epistemically valuable, like knowledge and rationality,cannot play this role, because they are themselves epistemic terms. We will come back to the relationbetween the analysis of epistemic rationality and the formulation of the epistemic goal in the final sectionof this article.

4. Understanding

There is growing support among epistemologists for the idea that understanding is the highest epistemicvalue, more valuable even than knowledge. There are various ways of fleshing out this view, depending onwhat kind of understanding we have in mind, and depending on whether we want to remain truth-monistsabout what’s fundamentally epistemically valuable or not.

a. Understanding: Propositions and Domains; Subjective and Objective

If you are a trained mechanic, then you understand how automobiles work. This is an understanding of adomain, or of a kind of object. To have an understanding of a domain, you need to have a significant bodyof beliefs about that domain, which fits together in a coherent way, and which involves beliefs about what



would explain why things happen as they do in that domain. When you have such a body of beliefs, we cansay that you have a subjective understanding of the domain (Grimm 2012). When, in addition, your beliefsabout the domain are mostly correct, we can say that you have an objective understanding of the domain.

In addition to understanding a domain, you might also understand that p—you might understand thatsome proposition is true. There are several varieties of propositional understanding: there is simplyunderstanding that p; there is understanding why p, which involves understanding that p because q; thereis understanding when p, which involves understanding that p happens at time t, and understanding why phappens at time t; and so on, for other wh- terms, such as who and where. In what follows, we’ll talk ingeneral in terms of propositional understanding, or understanding that p, to cover all these cases.

Understanding that p entails having at least some understanding of a domain. To borrow an example ofPritchard’s (2009): imagine that you come home to find your house burnt to the ground. You ask the firechief what caused the fire, and he tells you that it was faulty wiring. Now you know why your house burnt tothe ground (you know that it burnt down because of the faulty wiring), and you also understand why yourhouse burnt to the ground (you know that the house burnt down because of faulty wiring, and you havesome understanding of the kinds of things that tend to start fires, such as sparks, or overheating, both ofwhich can be caused by faulty wiring.) You understand why the house burnt down, in other words, onlybecause you have some understanding of how fires are caused.

As Kvanvig (2003) notes, it’s plausible that you only genuinely understand that p if you have a mostlycorrect (that is, an objective) understanding of the relevant domain. For suppose that you have a broad andcoherent body of beliefs about celestial motion, but which centrally involves the belief that the earth is atthe center of the universe. Because your body of beliefs involves mistaken elements at its core, we wouldnormally say that you misunderstand celestial motions, and you misunderstand why (for example) we canobserve the sun rising every day. In a case like this, where you misunderstand why p (for example, why thesun comes up), we can say that you have a subjective propositional understanding: your belief that the suncomes up every day because the earth is at the center of the Universe, and the celestial bodies all rotatearound it, can be coherent with a broader body of justified beliefs, and it can provide explanations ofcelestial motions. But because your understanding of the domain of celestial motion involves false beliefs atits core, you have an incorrect understanding of the domain, and your explanatory propositionalunderstanding, as a result, is also a misunderstanding.

By contrast, when your body of beliefs about a domain is largely correct, and your understanding of thedomain leads you to believe that p is true because q is true, we can say that you have an objectiveunderstanding of why p is true. In what follows, except where otherwise specified, “understanding” refersto objective propositional understanding.

b. The Location of the Special Value of Understanding

It seems natural to think that understanding that p involves knowing that p, plus something extra, wherethe extra bit is something like having a roughly correct understanding of some relevant domain to do withp: you understand that p when (and only when) you know that p, and your belief that p fits into a broader,coherent, explanatory body of beliefs, where this body of beliefs is largely correct. So the natural place tolook for the special epistemic value of understanding is in the value of this broader body of beliefs.

Now, some authors (Kvanvig 2003, Hills 2009, and Pritchard 2009) have argued that propositionalunderstanding does not require the corresponding propositional knowledge: S can understand that p, theyargue, even if S doesn’t know that p. The main reason for this view is that understanding seems to becompatible with a certain kind of luck, environmental luck, which is incompatible with knowledge. Forexample, think again of the case where you ask the fire chief the cause of the fire, but now imagine thatthere are many pretend fire chiefs all walking around the area in uniform, and it’s just a matter of luck thatyou asked the real fire chief. In this case, it seems fairly clear that you lack knowledge of the cause of the



fire, since you could so easily have asked a fake fire chief, and formed a false belief as a result. But, theargument goes, you do gain understanding of the cause of the fire from the fire chief. After all, you havegained a true belief about what caused the fire, and your belief is justified, and it fits in with your broaderunderstanding of the domain of fire-causing. What we have here is a case of a justified true belief, wherethat belief fits in with your understanding of the relevant domain, but where you have been Gettiered, soyou lack knowledge.

So it’s controversial whether understanding that p really presupposes knowing that p. But when it comes tothe value of understanding, we can set this question aside. For even if there are cases of propositionalunderstanding without the corresponding propositional knowledge, still, most cases of propositionalunderstanding involve the corresponding propositional knowledge, and in those cases, the special value ofunderstanding will lie in what is added to the propositional knowledge to yield understanding. In caseswhere there is Gettierizing environmental luck, so that S has a Gettierized justified true belief which fits inwith her understanding of the relevant domain, the special value of understanding will lie in what is addedto justified true belief. In other words, whether or not propositional understanding presupposes thecorresponding propositional knowledge, the special value of propositional understanding will be located inthe subject’s understanding of the relevant domain.

c. The Value of Understanding

There are a few plausible accounts of why understanding should be thought of as distinctively epistemicallyvaluable, and perhaps even as the highest epistemic value. One suggestion, which would be friendly totruth-monists about epistemic value, is that we can consistently hold both that truth is the fundamentalepistemic value and that understanding is the highest epistemic value. Because understanding that ptypically involves both knowing that p and having a broader body of beliefs, where this body of beliefs iscoherent and largely correct, it follows from the fundamental value of true beliefs that in any case where Sunderstands that p, S’s cognitive state involves greater epistemic value than if S were merely to truly believethat p, because S has many other true beliefs too. Of course, on this picture, understanding doesn’t have adistinctive kind of value, but it does have a greater quantity of value than true belief, or even thanknowledge. But, for a truth-monist about epistemic value, this is just the result that should be desired—otherwise, the view would no longer be monistic.

An alternative suggestion, which does not rely on truth-monism about epistemic value, is that the value ofhaving a broad body of beliefs which provide an explanation for phenomena is to be explained by the factthat whether you have such a body of beliefs is transparent to you: you can always tell whether you haveunderstanding (Zagzebski 2001). Surely, if it’s always transparent to you whether you understandingsomething, that is a source of extra epistemic value for understanding on top of the value of having truebelief or even knowledge, since we can’t in general tell whether we are in those states.

The problem with this suggestion, though, as Grimm (2006; 2012) points out, is that we cannot always tellwhether we have understanding. It often happens that we think we understand something, when in fact wegravely misunderstand it. Of course it might be the case that we can always tell whether we have asubjective understanding—we might always be able to tell whether we have a coherent, explanatory body ofbeliefs—but we are not in general in a position to be able to tell whether our beliefs are largely correct. Thesubjective kind of understanding doesn’t entail the objective kind. Still, it is worth noting that there seemsto be a kind of value in being aware of the coherence and explanatory power of one’s beliefs on a giventopic, even if it’s never transparent whether one’s beliefs are largely correct. (See Kvanvig 2003 for more onthe value of internal awareness and of having coherent bodies of beliefs.)

A third suggestion about the value of understanding, which is also not committed to truth-monism, is thathaving understanding can plausibly be thought of as a kind of success which is properly attributable toone’s exercise of a relevant ability, or in other words, an achievement. As we saw above, a number of virtueepistemologists think that we can explain the distinctive value of knowledge by reference to the fact that



knowledge is a cognitive achievement. But others (notably, Lackey 2006 and 2009) have denied thatsubjects in general deserve credit for their true belief in cases of knowledge. Cases of testimonial knowledgeare popular counterexamples to the view that knowledge is in general an achievement: when S learns somefact about local geography from a random bystander, for example, S can gain knowledge, but if anyonedeserves credit for S’s true belief, it seems to be the bystander. So, if that’s right, then it’s not after allalways much of an achievement to gain knowledge.

Pritchard (2009) also argues that knowledge is not in general an achievement, but he claims thatunderstanding is. For when S gains an understanding that p, it seems that S must bring to bear significantcognitive resources, unlike when S only gains knowledge that p. Suppose, for example, that S asksbystander B where the nearest tourist information booth is, and B tells him. Now let’s compare S’s and B’scognitive states. S has gained knowledge of how to get to the nearest information booth, but S doesn’t havean understanding of the location of the nearest information booth, since S lacks knowledge of the relevantdomain (that is, local geography). B, on the other hand, both knows and understands the location of thenearest booth. And B’s understanding of the local geography, and her consequent understanding of thelocation of the nearest booth, involves an allocation of significant cognitive resources. (Anyone who has hadto quickly memorize the local geography of a new city will appreciate how much cognitive work goes intohaving a satisfactory understanding of this kind of domain.)

d. Alternatives to the Natural Picture of the Value of Understanding

If understanding that p requires both knowing that p (or having a justified true belief that p) and having abroader body of beliefs which is coherent, explanatory, and largely correct, then it’s plausible to think thatthe special value of understanding is in the value of having such a body of beliefs. But it’s possible to resistthis view of the value of understanding in a number of ways. One way to resist it would be to deny thatunderstanding is ever any different from knowing. Reductivists about understanding think that it’s notpossible to have knowledge without having understanding, or understanding without knowledge. Otherphilosophers argue, for example, that when S knows that p, S must understand that p at least to someextent. S has a better understanding that p when S has a better understanding of the relevant domain, inthe form of knowledge of more related propositions, but S knows that p if and only if S has someunderstanding that p.

For reductivists about understanding, there can obviously be no value in understanding beyond the value ofhaving knowledge. There are better and worse understandings, but any genuine (objective) understandinginvolves at least some knowledge, and better understanding just involves more knowledge. If that’s right,then we don’t need to say that understanding has more value than knowledge.

A second way to resist the approach to the value of understanding presented in the previous section is toresist the claim that understanding requires that one’s beliefs about a domain must be mostly correct. Elgin(2007; 2009), for example, points out that in the historical progression of science, there have been stages atwhich scientific understanding, while useful and epistemically good, centrally involved false beliefs aboutthe relevant domains. Perhaps even more importantly, scientists regularly employ abstract or idealizedmodels, which are known to be strictly false—but they use these models to gain a good understanding of thedomain or phenomenon in question. And the resulting understanding is better, rather than worse, becauseof the use of these models, which are strictly speaking false. So the elimination of all falsehoods from ourtheories is not even desirable, on Elgin’s view. (In the language of subjective and objective understanding,we might say that Elgin thinks that subjective understanding can be every bit as good to have as objectiveunderstanding. We need to keep in mind, though, that Elgin would reject the view that subjectiveunderstandings which centrally involve false beliefs are necessarily misunderstandings.)

5. Instrumentalism and Epistemic Goals

The final topic we need to look at now is the relation between epistemic values and the concept of epistemic



rationality or justification. According to one prominent way of analyzing epistemic rationality, theinstrumental conception of epistemic rationality, beliefs are epistemically rational when and just to theextent that they appropriately promote the achievement of a distinctively epistemic goal. The instrumentalconception has been widely endorsed by epistemologists over the past several decades (for example,BonJour 1985; Alston 1985, 2005; Foley 1987, 1993, 2008), though a number of important criticisms of ithave emerged in recent years (for example, Kelly 2003; Littlejohn 2012; Hazlett 2013). Forinstrumentalists, getting the right accounts of epistemic goals and epistemic rationality are projects whichconstrain each other. Whether or not we want to accept instrumentalism in the end, it’s important to seethe way that instrumentalists think of the relation of epistemic goals and epistemic rationality.

a. The Epistemic Goal as a Subset of the Epistemic Values

The first thing to note about the instrumentalist’s notion of an epistemic goal is that it has to do with whatis valuable from an epistemic or cognitive point of view. But instrumentalists typically are not concerned toidentify a set of goals which is exhaustive of what is epistemically valuable. Rather, they are concerned withidentifying an epistemically valuable goal which is capable of generating a plausible, informative, and non-circular account of epistemic rationality in instrumental terms, and it’s clear that not all things that seem tobe epistemically valuable can be included in an epistemic goal which is going to play that role. David (2001)points out that if we take knowledge or rationality (or, we might also add here, understanding) to be part ofthe epistemic goal, then the instrumental account of epistemic rationality becomes circular. This is mostobvious with rationality: rationality is no doubt something we think is epistemically valuable, but if weinclude rationality in the formulation of the epistemic goal, and we think of epistemic rationality in terms ofachieving the epistemic goal, then we’ve analyzed epistemic rationality as the appropriate promotion of thegoal of getting epistemically rational beliefs—an unhelpfully circular analysis, at best. And, becauseknowledge and understanding plausibly presuppose rationality, we also cannot include knowledge orunderstanding in the formulation of the epistemic goal.

This is why most epistemologists take the epistemic goal to be about achieving true beliefs and avoidingfalse ones. That seems to be a goal which is valuable from an epistemic point of view, and it stands a goodchance at grounding a non-circular analysis of epistemic rationality.

David in fact goes a step further, and claims that because true belief is the only thing that is epistemicallyvaluable that is capable of grounding an informative and non-circular analysis of epistemic rationality,truth is the only thing that’s really valuable from an epistemic point of view; knowledge, he thinks, is anextra-epistemic value. But it’s possible for pluralists about epistemic value to appreciate David’s point thatonly some things that are epistemically valuable (such as having true beliefs) are suitable for being taken upin the instrumentalist’s formulation of the epistemic goal. In other words, pluralism about epistemic valuesis consistent with monism about the epistemic goal.

b. Common Formulations of the Epistemic Goal

Now, there are two further important constraints on how to formulate the epistemic goal. First, it must beplausible to take as a goal—that is, as something we do in fact care about, or at least something that seemsto be worth caring about even if people don’t in fact care about it. We might express this constraint bysaying that the epistemic goal must be at least pro tanto valuable in either a subjective or an objectivesense. And second, the goal should enable us to categorize clear cases of epistemically rational andirrational beliefs correctly. We can close this discussion of epistemic values and goals by considering threeoft-invoked formulations of the epistemic goal, and noting the important differences between them.According to these formulations, the epistemic goal is:

(1) “to amass a large body of beliefs with a favorable truth-falsity ratio” (Alston 1985, p.59);

(2) “maximizing true beliefs and minimizing false beliefs about matters of interest and importance”(Alston 2005, p.32); and



(3) “now to believe those propositions that are true and now not to believe those propositions that arefalse” (Foley 1987, p.8).

Each of these formulations of the epistemic goal emphasizes the achievement of true beliefs and theavoidance of false ones. But there are two important dimensions along which they diverge.

c. Differences between the Goals: Interest and Importance

The first difference is with respect to whether the epistemic goal includes all propositions (or, perhaps, allpropositions which a person could conceivably grasp), or whether it includes only propositions aboutmatters of interest or importance. Formulation (2) includes an “interest and importance” clause, whereas(1) and (3) do not. The reason for including a reference to interest and importance is that it makes theepistemic goal much more plausible to take as a goal which is pro tanto valuable. For, as we have seen,there are countless examples of apparently utterly trivial or even harmful true propositions, which onemight think are not worth caring about having. This seems like a reason to restrict the epistemic goal tohaving true beliefs and avoiding false ones about matters of interest and importance: we want to have truebeliefs, but only when it is interesting or important to us to have them.

The drawback of an interest and importance clause in the epistemic goal is that it seems to prevent theinstrumental approach from providing a fully general account of epistemic rationality. For it seems possibleto have epistemically rational or irrational beliefs about utterly trivial or even harmful propositions.Suppose I were to come across excellent evidence about the number times the letter “y” appears in theseventeenth space on all lines in the first three and the last three sections of this article. Even though thatstrikes me as an utterly trivial truth, which I don’t care about believing, I might still come to believe whatmy evidence supports regarding it. And if I do, then it’s plausible to think that my belief will count asepistemically rational, because it’s based on good evidence. If it is not part of the epistemic goal that weshould achieve true beliefs about even trivial or harmful matters, then it doesn’t seem like instrumentalistshave the tools to account for our judgments of epistemic rationality or irrationality in such cases. Thisseems to give us a reason to make the epistemic goal include all true propositions, or at least all truepropositions which people can conceivably grasp. (Such a view might be supported by appeal to thearguments for the general value of truth which we saw above, in section 2.)

d. Differences between the Goals: Synchronic and Diachronic Formulations

The second difference between the three formulations of the epistemic goal is regarding whether the goal issynchronic or diachronic. Formulation (3) is synchronic: it is about now having true beliefs and avoidingfalse ones. (Or, if we are considering a subject S’s beliefs at a time t other than the present, the goal is tobelieve true propositions and not believe false ones, at t.) Formulations (1) and (2) are neutral on thatquestion.

A reason for accepting a diachronic formulation of the epistemic goal is that it is, after all, plausible to thinkthat we do care about having true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs over the long run. Having true beliefsnow is a fine thing, but having true beliefs now and still having them ten minutes from now is surely better.A second reason for adopting a diachronic formulation of the goal, offered by Vahid (2003), is to blockMaitzen’s (1995) argument that instrumentalists who think that the epistemic goal is about having truebeliefs cannot say that there are justified false beliefs, or unjustified true beliefs. Briefly, Maitzen arguesthat false beliefs can never, and true beliefs can never fail to, promote the achievement of the goal of gettingtrue beliefs and avoiding false ones. Vahid replies that if the epistemic goal is about having true beliefs overthe long run, then false beliefs can count as justified, in virtue of their truth-conducive causal histories.

The reason why instrumentalists like Foley formulate the epistemic goal instead in synchronic terms is toavoid the counterintuitive result that the epistemic status of a subject’s beliefs at t can depend on whathappens after t. For example: imagine that you have very strong evidence at time t for thinking that you area terrible student, but you are extremely confident in yourself anyway, and you hold the belief at t that you



are a good student. At t+1, you consider whether to continue your studies or to drop out of school. Becauseof your belief about your abilities as a student, you decide to continue with your studies. And in continuingyour studies, you go on to become a better student, and you learn all sorts of new things.

In this case, your belief at t that you are a good student does promote the achievement of a large body ofbeliefs with a favourable truth-falsity ratio over the long run. But by hypothesis, your belief is held contraryto very strong evidence at time t. The intuitive verdict in such cases seems to be that your belief at t that youare a good student is epistemically irrational. So, since the belief promotes the achievement of a diachronicepistemic goal, but not a synchronic one, we should make the epistemic goal synchronic. Or, if we want tomaintain that the epistemic goal is diachronic, we can do so, as long as we are willing to accept the cost ofadopting a partly revisionary view about what’s epistemically rational to believe in some cases where beliefsare held contrary to good available evidence.

6. Conclusion

We’ve gone through some of the central problems to do with epistemic value. We’ve looked at attempts toexplain why and in what sense knowledge is more valuable than any of its proper parts, and we’ve seenattempts to explain the special epistemic value of understanding. We’ve also looked at some attempts toargue for the fundamental epistemic value of true belief, and the role that the goal of achieving true beliefsand avoiding false ones plays when epistemologists give instrumentalist accounts of the nature of epistemicjustification or rationality. Many of these are fundamental and important topics for epistemologists toaddress, both because they are intrinsically interesting, and also because of the implications that ouraccounts of knowledge and justification have for philosophy and inquiry more generally (for example,implications for norms of assertion, for norms of practical deliberation, and for our conception of ourselvesas inquirers, to name just a few).

7. References and Further Reading

Alston, William (1985). Concepts of Epistemic Justification. The Monist. 68. Reprinted in his Epistemic Justification:Essays in the Theory of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Discusses concepts of epistemic justification. Espouses an instrumentalist account of epistemic evaluation.

Alston, William (2005). Beyond Justification: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress.

Abandons the concept of epistemic justification as too simplistic; embraces the pluralist idea that there are many valuable ways to

evaluate beliefs. Continues to endorse the instrumentalist approach to epistemic evaluations.

Bergmann, Michael (2006). Justification without Awareness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bondy, Patrick (2015). A Luxury of the Understanding: On the Value of True Belief ALLAN HAZLETT. Dialogue. 54: 1,202-204.

BonJour, Laurence (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Develops a coherentist internalist account of justification and knowledge. Gives a widelycited explanation of the connection between

epistemic justification and the epistemic goal.

Brogaard, Berit (2006). Can Virtue Reliabilism Explain the Value of Knowledge? Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 36:3, 335-354.

Defends generic reliabilism from the Primary Value Problem; proposes an internalist response to the Secondary Value Problem.

Carter, J. Adam, Benjamin Jarvis, and Katherine Rubin (2013). Knowledge: Value on the Cheap. Australasian Journalof Philosophy. 91: 2, 249-263.

Presents the promising proposal that because knowledge is a continuing state rather than something that is achieved and then set

aside, there are easy solutions to the Primary, Secondary, and even Tertiary Value Problems for knowledge.

Craig, Edward (1990). Knowledge and the State of Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



David, Marian (2001). Truth as the Epistemic Goal. In Matthias Steup, ed., Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays onEpistemic Justification. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 151-169.

A thorough discussion of how instrumentalists about epistemic rationality or justification ought to formulate the epistemic goal.

David, Marian (2005). Truth as the Primary Epistemic Goal: A Working Hypothesis. In Matthias Steup and ErnestSosa, eds. Contemporary Debates in Epistemology. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 296-312.

Dogramaci, Sinan (2012). Reverse Engineering Epistemic Evaluations. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.84: 3, 513-530.

Accepts the widelyendorsed thought that justification or rationality are only instrumentally valuable for getting us true beliefs. The

paper inquires into what function our epistemic practices could serve, in cases where what’s rational to believe is false, or what’s

irrational to believe is true.

Elgin, Catherine (2007). Understanding and the Facts. Philosophical Studies. 132, 33-42.

Elgin, Catherine (2009). Is Understanding Factive? In A. Haddock, A. Millar, and D. Pritchard, eds. Epistemic Value.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Field, Hartry (2001). Truth and the Absence of Fact. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Among other things, argues that there are no objectively correct epistemic goals which can ground objective judgments of epistemic

reasonableness.

Foley, Richard (1987). The Theory of Epistemic Rationality. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

A very thorough development of an instrumentalist and egocentric account of epistemic rationality.

Foley, Richard (1993). Working Without a Net: A Study of Egocentric Rationality. New York and Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Further develops and defends the instrumental approach to rationality generally and to epistemic rationality in particular.

Foley, Richard (2008). An Epistemology that Matters. In P. Weithman, ed. Liberal Faith: Essays in Honor of PhilipQuinn. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 43-55.

Clear and succinct statement of Foley’s instrumentalism.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter (1998). Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.

Goldman, Alvin (1979). What Is Justification? In George Pappas, ed. Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: D. ReidelPublishing Company, 1-23.

Goldman, Alvin and Olsson, Erik (2009). Reliabilism and the Value of Knowledge. In A. Haddock, A. Millar, and D.Pritchard, eds. Epistemic Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 19-41.

Presents two reliabilist responses to the Primary Value Problem.

Graham, Peter (2011). Epistemic Entitlement. Noûs. 46: 3, 449-482.

Greco, John (2003). Knowledge as Credit for True Belief. In Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski, eds. IntellectualVirtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 111-134.

Sets out the view that attributions of knowledge are attributions of praiseworthiness, when a subject gets credit for getting to the truth

as a result of the exercise of intellectual virtues. Discusses praise, blame, and the pragmatics of causal explanations.

Greco, John (2008). Knowledge and Success from Ability. Philosophical Studies. 142, 17-26.

Further elaboration of ideas in Greco (2003).

Grimm, Stephen (2006). Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 57,515–35.

Grimm, Stephen (2012). The Value of Understanding. Philosophy Compass. 7: 2, 1-3-117.

Good survey article of work on the value of understanding up to 2012.

Haddock, Adrian (2010). Part III: Knowledge and Action. In Duncan Pritchard, Allan Millar, and Adrian Haddock, TheNature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hazlett, Allan (2013). A Luxury of the Understanding: On the Value of True Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

An extended discussion of whether true belief is valuable. Presents a conventionalist account of epistemic normativity.



Hills, Alison (2009). Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology. Ethics. 120: 1, 94-127.

James, William (1949). The Will to Believe. In his Essays in Pragmatism. New York: Hafner. pp. 88-109. Originallypublished in 1896.

Jones, Ward (1997). Why Do We Value Knowledge? American Philosophical Quarterly. 34: 4, 423-439.

Argues that reliabilists and other instrumentalists cannot handle the Primary Value Problem. Proposes that we solve the problem by

appealing to the value of contingent features of knowledge.

Kaplan, Mark (1985). It’s Not What You Know that Counts. The Journal of Philosophy. 82: 7, 350-363.

Denies that knowledge is any more important than justified true belief.

Kelly, Thomas (2003). Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique. Philosophy andPhenomenological Research. 66: 3, 612-640.

Criticizes the instrumental conception of epistemic rationality, largely on the grounds that beliefs can be epistemically rational or

irrational in cases where there is no epistemic goal which the subject desires to achieve.

Kornblith, Hilary (2002). Knowledge and its Place in Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press.

Develops the idea that knowledge is a natural kind which ought to be studied empirically rather than through conceptual analysis.

Grounds epistemic norms, including the truthgoal, in the fact that we desire anything at all.

Kvanvig, Jonathan (2003). The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Considers and rejects various arguments for the value of knowledge. Argues that understanding rather than knowledge is the primary

epistemic value.

Kvanvig, Jonathan (2005). Truth is Not the Primary Epistemic Goal. In Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa, eds.Contemporary Debates in Epistemology. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 285-296.

Criticizes epistemic value monism.

Lackey, Jennifer (2007). Why We Don’t Deserve Credit for Everything We Know. Synthese. 158: 3, 345-361.

Lackey, Jennifer (2009). Knowledge and Credit. Philosophical Studies. 142: 1, 27-42.

Lackey argues against the virtuetheoretic idea that when S knows that p, S’s getting a true belief is always creditable to S.

Leplin, Jarrett (2009). A Theory of Epistemic Justification. Dordrecht: Springer.

Littlejohn, Clayton (2012). Justification and the Truth-Connection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contains an extended discussion of internalism and externalism, and argues against the instrumental conception of epistemic

justification. Also argues that there are no false justified beliefs.

Lynch, Michael (2004). True to Life: Why truth Matters. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Argues for the objective value of true beliefs.

Lynch, Michael (2009). Truth, Value and Epistemic Expressivism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 79: 1,76-97.

Argues against expressivism and antirealism about the value of true beliefs.

Maitzen, Stephen (1995). Our Errant Epistemic Aim. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 55: 4, 869-876.

Argues that if we take the epistemic goal to be achieving true beliefs and avoiding false ones, then all and only true beliefs will count as

justified. Suggests that we need to adopt a different formulation of the goal.

Millikan, Ruth (1984). Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Develops and applies the selectedeffect view of the proper functions of organs and traits.

Piller, Christian (2009). Valuing Knowledge: A Deontological Approach. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. 12, 413-428.

Plantinga, Alvin (1993). Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press.

Develops a proper function analysis of knowledge.

Plato. Meno. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. In Plato, Complete Works. J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutcheson, eds. Indianapolis



and Cambridge: Hackett, 1997. 870-897.

Pritchard, Duncan. (2007). Recent Work on Epistemic Value. American Philosophical Quarterly. 44: 2, 85-110.

Survey article on problems of epistemic value. Distinguishes Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary value problems.

Pritchard, Duncan (2008). Knowing the Answer, Understanding, and Epistemic Value. Grazer Philosophische Studien.77, 325–39.

Pritchard, Duncan (2009). Knowledge, Understanding, and Epistemic Value. Epistemology (Royal Institute ofPhilosophy Lectures). Ed. Anthony O’Hear. New York: Cambridge University Press. 19–43.

Pritchard, Duncan (2010) Part I: Knowledge and Understanding. In Duncan Pritchard, Allan Millar, and AdrianHaddock, The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Riggs, Wayne (2002). Reliability and the Value of Knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 64, 79-96.

Riggs, Wayne (2003). Understanding Virtue and the Virtue of Understanding. In Michael DePaul & Linda Zagzebski,eds. Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford University Press.

Riggs, Wayne (2008). Epistemic Risk and Relativism. Acta Analytica. vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 1-8.

Sartwell, Crispin (1991). Knowledge is Merely True Belief. American Philosophical Quarterly. 28: 2, 157-165.

Sartwell, Crispin (1992). Why Knowledge is Merely True Belief. The Journal of Philosophy. 89: 4, 167-180.

These two articles by Sartwell are the only places in contemporary epistemology where the view that knowledge is just true belief is

seriously defended.

Sosa, Ernest (2003). The Place of Truth in Epistemology. In Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski, eds. IntellectualVirtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.

Sosa, Ernest (2007). A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press;New York: Oxford University Press.

Sets out a virtuetheoretic analysis of knowledge. Distinguishes animal knowledge from reflective knowledge. Responds to dream

skepticism. Argues that true belief is the fundamental epistemic value.

Treanor, Nick (2014). Trivial Truths and the Aim of Inquiry. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 89: 3,pp.552-559.

Argues against an argument for the popular claim that some truths are more interesting than others. Points out that the standard

comparisons between what are apparently more and less interesting true sentences are unfair, because the sentences might not

involve or express the same number of true propositions.

Vahid, Hamid (2003). Truth and the Aim of Epistemic Justification. Teorema. 22: 3, 83-91.

Discusses justification and the epistemic goal. Proposes that accepting a diachronic formulation of the epistemic goal solves the problem

raised by Stephen Maitzen (1995).

Weiner, Matthew (2009). Practical Reasoning and the Concept of Knowledge. In A. Haddock, A. Millar, and D.Pritchard, eds. Epistemic Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 163-182.

Argues that knowledge is valuable in the same way as a Swiss Army Knife is valuable. A Swiss Army Knife contains many different

blades which are useful in different situations; they’re not always all valuable to have, but it’s valuable to have them all collected in one

easytocarry package. Similarly, the concept of knowledge has a number of parts which are useful in different situations; they’re not

always all valuable in all cases, but it’s useful to have them collected together in one easytouse concept.

Williamson, Timothy (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Among many other things, Williamson sets out and defends knowledgefirst epistemology, adopts a stabilitybased solution to the

Primary Value Problem, and suggests that his view of knowledge as the most general factive mental state solves the Secondary Value

Problem.

White, R. (2007). Epistemic Subjectivism. Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology. 4: 1, 115-129.

Whiting, Daniel (2012). Epistemic Value and Achievement. Ratio. 25, 216-230.

Argues against the view that the value of epistemic states in general should be thought of in terms of achievement (or success because

of ability). Also argues against Pritchard’s achievementaccount of the value of understanding in particular.

Zagzebski, Linda (2001). Recovering Understanding. In Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic



Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue. Ed. Matthias Steup. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 235–56.

Zagzebski, Linda (2003). The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good. Metaphilosophy. 34, 12-28.

Gives a virtuetheoretic explanation of knowledge and the value of knowledge. Claims that it is morally important to have true beliefs,

when we are performing morally important actions. Claims that knowledge is motivated by a love of the truth, and explains the value of

knowledge in terms of that love and the value of that love.

Zagzebski, Linda (2009). On Epistemology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Accessible introduction to contemporary epistemology and to Zagzebski’s preferred views in epistemology. Useful for students and

professional philosophers.

Author Information

Patrick BondyEmail: [email protected] UniversityU. S. A.

Article printed from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/epvalue/

Copyright © The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. All rights reserved.

mailto:[email protected]

iep - epistemic value

Documents