This chapter compares virtue epistemology to two types of Internalisms, Statism and Propositionalism in light of the intelligibility problem first raised by Sellars. It explains the problem and argues that both virtue epistemology and Statism are subject to this problem. Even thoughPrropositionalism is designed to address the problem, the problem is much more difficult to solve than is recognized. I show why, and what a solution to the problem might look like.

We have been unable to unearth some unique value for knowledge, contrary to the ordinary conception of things. This result leaves us with somewhat of a dilemma, for it would be hard to defend the position that the common viewpoint is wholly without merit. Not that we are anywhere close to claiming such about the common view of knowledge, for our findings that true belief, subjective justification, and displays of intellectual virtue are valuable puts us already within the general locale of knowledge, even if knowledge itself is not uniquely valuable. Furthermore, nothing argued here suggests that knowledge is not valuable. What has been argued is rather a more specialized point: that the problem suggested by Socrates in the Meno concerning whether knowledge has more value than its subcomponents is a problem requiring a negative answer. Knowledge is valuable, to be sure, but its value is exhausted by the value of a subset of its constituents.

This result may be in part a product of a bit of myopia on the part of contemporary epistemologists, given the debates among philosophers of the ancient period about the best translation of the Greek term that is commonly translated ‘knowledge’. For some argue that the term ought to be translated as ‘understanding’. Given this fact, it may be a mistake to identify the problem of the Meno with any question about the value of knowledge.

The topic for this chapter arises out of two sources. In the previous two chapters, we discovered two properties of belief that are valuable beyond that of truth, the properties of subjective justification and intellectual virtuousity. Both of these properties are valuable by themselves, so that it is epistemically better for a belief to be subjectively justified than not and it is better for a belief to be virtuous than not. Moreover, these properties have a value not swamped by the presence of truth, so that it is better to have a subjectively justified true belief than one that is true but unjustified in this sense, and it is better to have a virtuous true belief than to have a true belief that is not virtuous. In the former case, what makes the property of subjective justification valuable in a way not swamped by the value of truth is that this property is a transparent mark of truth. So it has value because of its connection to truth, but its value is not swamped by the presence of truth, as are other properties such as reliability that also have value because of their connection to truth. Intellectually virtuous belief is valuable because when a belief has this property, the believer is due credit for having a true belief.

With the scientific sophistication of the local news, I polled some folk (my son and daughter) about the value of knowledge. They apparently think of knowledge as Quine thinks of induction: Those eschewing it tend to fall off cliffs. Knowledge is good, the survey says, because you can make more money with it, get into a better college, get a better job, live a better life.

These answers are examples of finding the value of knowledge in its connection to practical affairs of life. Instead of tracing the value of knowledge to the value of its constituents or some intrinsic value that it has, these accounts claim that knowledge is valuable because it is useful.

The most obvious alternative to this account of the value of knowledge is the view that knowledge has value intrinsically. Academics often lament the pragmatism of undergraduates who prize knowledge only indirectly, in terms of what it can get for them in terms of money, prestige, power, and the like. Academics like to insist, instead, that knowledge is valuable for its own sake and not (just) because it helps you get a good job or get rich.

These two theories provide paradigm examples of the kinds of theories of the value of knowledge I want to explore, but they are only paradigms and not exhaustive of available approaches.

It will be helpful to take a moment to reflect on where we are in our study of the value of knowledge. We began with the assumption that knowledge is valuable, arguing that this assumption is one of two central desiderata on any adequate theory of knowledge. First, an adequate theory of knowledge must give a correct account of the nature of knowledge. Second, an adequate theory of knowledge must account for the value of knowledge.

After defending the Socratic view that the value of knowledge is not to be found in relation to the practical realm or to other things external to knowledge, we pursued the idea that we should seek its value among its constituents. Traveling this path has led to some useful results, including accounts of the value of true belief, subjective justification, and displays of intellectual virtue. We have had to conclude, however, that this path fails to lead us to our destination, for the Gettier problem raises issues that give us reason for pessimism. In particular, we have seen grounds for thinking that a clause aimed at solving the Gettier problem will not cite some further constituent of knowledge that is valuable that explains how knowledge is more valuable than subsets of its constituents.

This conclusion has been anticipated by Timothy Williamson in a passage quoted in the previous chapter, and his reaction to it is instructive at this point in our inquiry. He says:

I want first to point out an important misconstrual of what I have been arguing. For a quick but misleading summary of my thesis might be that knowledge is not valuable, whereas understanding is.

Such a summary is grossly misleading, for the position I have defended maintains a high value for knowledge. First, knowledge involves true belief, and true belief is valuable in virtue of the action-guiding character of belief and in virtue of the intrinsic value of finding the truth. Second, knowledge is valuable because of its relationship to subjective justification. I have not claimed, and do not claim here, that subjective justification is necessary for knowledge, but it is nonetheless true that one of the paths to knowledge is through the land of subjective justification. So, much knowledge is subjectively justified, even if not all of it is. Third, we have found also that displays of cognitive excellence or intellectual virtue are valuable as well. Once again, I have defended no position on the relationship between such displays and knowledge, but the same point is true here that is true of subjective justification. That is, even if displays of cognitive excellence are not necessary for knowledge, it is nonetheless true that much of our knowledge is explained in terms of such displays.

There are also other items that are related to knowledge that are valuable as well and lead to the conclusion that knowledge is of immense value.

The motivation for the present chapter arises from the swamping problem regarding the property of objective likelihood of truth. This property is one that it is better for a belief to have than to lack, but it is also a property that adds no value to true belief itself. That is, a belief that is both true and objectively likely to be true is no more valuable than a belief that is merely true. The value of objective likelihood of truth is wholly parasitic on the value of truth itself, so once truth is in the picture, objective likelihood of truth can add no further value. In the same way, Swinburne and others claim, reliabilism cites a property of belief that it is better to have than to lack, but that is also one that adds no value to true belief itself.

Reliabilists can attempt to evade this argument by citing the normativity of knowledge. Perhaps reliability is precisely that natural property on which the normativity of knowledge supervenes. If so, reliabilists can lay claim to a theory immune to the swamping problem because the value derived from reliability is just that value involved in the normativity of knowledge. The easiest way to see the idea here is to take reliabilism to be offering a theory of justification, though this assumption is not crucial.

If the value of knowledge cannot be explained adequately in terms of things external to it, such as its usefulness or its permanence or its role as a foundation for acceptable action, we will have to look at internal features in order to find the value of knowledge. Perhaps the value of knowledge will emerge as we look at its (purported) constituents, and because knowledge is ordinarily conceived to involve true belief, I begin with the value of true belief here. There are those who doubt that knowledge involves true belief, maintaining that belief itself is a quite different state from knowledge. There are even those who maintain that there is no such thing as belief. I do not want to become embroiled in these controversies, because these disputes will take us too far afield from the focus of this work on the value of knowledge. Given that focus, our interest can concentrate on the connection between the shared informational content that exists both when a person knows something and when that person only believes it. When a person knows something, there is informational content in the cognitive, as opposed to the affective, mental realm, informational content endorsed by the person, or to which that person is committed, or to which that person assents.

The history of epistemology centers on the concept of knowledge, especially on the difficult questions of whether knowledge is possible and, if it is, how much of it there is. A presupposition of this inquiry is that whether and to what extent we have knowledge is deeply important. Philosophers reflect on the nature and extent of knowledge not simply because they have free afternoons to fill but (also) because questions about what we know and how we know it touch on the deeply significant questions about the relationship between mind and world and the possibility of success in determining what is true and what is not. In a word, knowledge is valuable, and philosophers reflect on what we know because they share this viewpoint.

Given the centrality of this presupposition to epistemological inquiry, it is surprising to find so little discussion of the value of knowledge in the history of epistemology. Given the singular importance of the concept of knowledge to the history of philosophizing about the nature of cognitive success, we might have expected such inquiry to be preceded by a defense of the idea that knowledge constitutes an (almost) unsurpassable achievement with respect to the connection between mind and world. Such expectation disappoints, however. The question of the value of knowledge is simply not among the questions that dominate the history of epistemology.

The conclusion to which our investigation seems to be pointing is that ordinary thinking about knowledge is mistaken, that knowledge does not have the kind of value it is ordinarily thought to have. In particular, we seem to be heading for the conclusion that knowledge does not have a value that exceeds that of subsets of its constituents. Knowledge cannot be identified with intellectually virtuous, subjectively justified true belief, and it appears that its value does not exceed the value of this combination of ingredients.

Perhaps, though, we are missing what is right under our noses. Language is a perplexing combination of semantic and other features, and to this point, we have largely ignored features other than semantic ones. Moreover, within our exploration of the semantic features of the concept of knowledge, we have been assuming a descriptivist standpoint about knowledge. We have been assuming, that is, that the concept of knowledge applies to objective, factual features of the world. It is, perhaps, this combination of assumptions that leads us toward a pessimistic conclusion such as that there is no good answer to the problem of the Meno.

A different proposal is that the value of knowledge is found in certain attitudinal features involved in the concept or use of the concept of knowledge. One approach along these lines would involve making claims about knowledge that emotivists in ethics make about moral concepts. We might call this the “boo/hiss” theory of knowledge.

Recent discussions of the nature of knowledge have yielded two divergent paths to follow. On the one hand are reliabilists and other externalists, and on the other hand are justificationists and internalists. Sometimes members of the former camp claim to be offering a theory of justification, but for present purposes I am going to treat such claims as idle explanatory wheels of their theoretical machine. If they turn out to be right, it will make their theories no better than they would have been as theories of knowledge, and if they are wrong, their theories of knowledge might still survive the amputation of this aspect.

We shall see in this chapter that ordinary reliabilist theories of knowledge cannot explain the value of knowledge over true belief, but this point is not my ultimate target. My ultimate target is to determine whether a justificationist account of knowledge can do any better. I will argue that it can, but that the picture of justification required for success is quite unusual. The conclusion will be a slightly disturbing account of what a theory of justification must look like if it is to have a chance of accounting for the value of knowledge.

EXTERNALIST ACCOUNTS

To see the difficulty of providing a good answer to the question of the value of knowledge over true belief, consider the following theory of knowledge. On this theory, what closes the gap between true belief and knowledge is objective likelihood of truth for belief.

The problem of evil centers on the claim that some evil is so bad that God would not allow it. If evil has such a character, it might be claimed that evil constitutes evidence against the existence of God. Even more, it might be held that evil constitutes an epistemic problem for theism, that the presence of evil has the power to alter the epistemic status of theism. For even if there are reasons which in themselves might confirm theism, factoring in the presence of evil might decrease the status of theism from, say, being rational to believe to being counterbalanced. Though not universal, this account of the epistemic implications of evil is widely shared, an account on which evil constitutes evidence with sufficient epistemic force to alter the epistemic status of theism. On this conception, then, evil constitutes an epistemic problem for theism.

This account of the nature of an epistemic problem for a point of view focuses on the concept of change (that some piece of information has the power to alter the epistemic status of that point of view), and that isn't quite right. The real issue is whether the new information has the power to make the epistemic status of a point of view different from what it would have been otherwise, different from what it would have been had that information not been present or available. Information can do the latter without ever changing the epistemic status of any point of view.