Abstract
The fact that we ought to prefer what is comparatively more likely to be good, I argue, does, contrary to consequentialism, not rest on any evaluative facts. It is, in this sense, a deontological requirement. As such it is the basis of our valuing those things which are in accordance with it. We value acting (and believing) well, i.e. we value acting (and believing) as we ought to act (and to believe). In this way, despite the fact that our interest in justification depends on our interest in truth, we value believing with justification on non-instrumental grounds. A deontological understanding of justification, thus, solves the Value of Knowledge Problem.
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Notes
Knowing that p goes beyond truly believing that p. Nevertheless, there is a clear sense in which knowledge cannot outrun true belief (and this explains why your friends may not notice the difference between your knowledge and your true beliefs.) Take any fact F which when added to truly believing that p will make it a case of knowing that p. (Obviously, there are different views about which fact will play this role.) As long as the person truly believes that F obtains (whatever F is), he or she will satisfy the condition imposed on him or her for knowing that p. In order to know that p one has to truly believe p and one has to truly believe some further things.
I tackle the evaluative problem–why is knowledge better than true belief–via the analogous question about attitudes–why do we prefer knowledge to (or value more than) merely true belief. This need not disturb anyone who has a more robustly objectivist view of values as long as the reasonableness of our attitudes is allowed to count in favour of the respective evaluative claims (however we understand the metaphysical status of what they are about). What we, after reflection, desire might not be the only evidence for what is good, as Mill thought, but it will be some evidence.
I exaggerate. There is a sense in which it would be better to know–it would be ‘epistemically better’. The axioms of ‘epistemic axiology’, I suppose, could simply put knowledge ahead of mere true belief. I want to open this can of worms at another occasion. One of the problems is whether epistemic betterness is a kind of betterness, analogous to, let us say, aesthetic betterness, or whether it is supposed to be built on Geach’s idea that goodness is an attributive and not a predicative notion.
For GE Moore only some cases of knowledge (or of true belief) are important, namely knowledge of the existence of something good. He writes in Principia Ethica (Moore 1903, 248), ‘...it appears that knowledge though having little or no value by itself, is an absolutely essential constituent in the highest goods, and contributes immensely to their value.’ Sosa also seems to share the view expressed here when he writes, ‘...take some bit of trivia known to me at the moment: that it was sunny in Rhode Island at noon on October 21, 1999. I confess that I will not rue my loss of this information, nor do I care either that or how early it will be gone. As interpreted so far, the view that we rationally want truth as such reduces to absurdity, or is at best problematic.’ (Sosa 2000, 49). Jane Heal, see (Heal 1987/88), has forcefully made a similar point.
Goldman and Olsson’s claim (ibid.) that ‘...if p is believed, it is better that it be true than false’. This is certainly false. No one wants any of the bad things to happen that he or she believes are going to happen. They are, after all, bad things and bad things do not become any better by having been expected. See (Piller 2009) for how this point affects our understanding of our epistemic aims. Note that, in contrast to (Goldman and Olsson 2009), (Goldman 1999) emphasizes the importance of interests for the evaluation of (social) epistemic practices. I have no disagreement with what he says there.
Whenever there is a (significant) evaluative difference between p and not-p, our interest in the presence or absence of p can ground an interest in the question of whether p. Curiosity, however, will often go beyond what is evaluatively significant.
If the assumption of this paragraph, namely that knowledge is justified true belief, is correct, explaining why we value justified beliefs over unjustified ones would explain the value of knowledge. If, however, an anti-Gettier condition would need to be added to turn justified true belief into knowledge, then we would have explained the value of something that falls short of knowledge. I will briefly revisit this issue in the penultimate footnote. For details of how this point has affected the contemporary debate see (Pritchard 2007).
I choose this formulation to make room for both externalist and internalist accounts of justification. Externalists will emphasise the actual likelihood, internalists the apparent likelihood of justified beliefs. Let me add that my focus on this aspect of justification–its comparatively higher likelihood of being true–leaves other important aspects aside. For example, we seek justification not only to get things right but also to make our views publicly defensible. Without justification we would not be a respectable participant in practices of epistemic cooperation. Thus, more could be said about the value of justification than I attempt to say here.
For developments of this problem see, for example, (Zagzebski 2003) and (Kvanvig 2003, Kvanvig 2004). Let me add here an idea for a quick solution of this problem. It is often true that when I aim at something, I also want to find out (when the time comes) whether I have achieved my aim or not. If I aim at owning a Ferrari one day, then, should my efforts be successful, I also want to find out that I own a Ferrari. (Sometimes finding out whether and to what extent one’s goal has been achieved might interfere with other of one’s ends. This is why I claim that one’s ends are typically (but not always) conjoined with a desire for finding out whether one’s goal has been fulfilled.) Suppose this holds for our epistemic interests. Wanting to have a true belief regarding whether p or not-p, I also want to find out whether I have achieved my aim, once I have settled on a belief. Arguably, if one finds out that one’s belief is true, then one knows that p. We value knowing that p over mere true belief because in knowing we satisfy a typical further concern we have, namely the concern to find out whether we have achieved our aim.
There is awkwardness in presenting the case in this manner, as one might be puzzled by the fact that a true proposition need not have a probability of one. Actually, true propositions can have any probability, even a very low one, as long as it is higher than zero. We are interested in the probability of a belief being true given the method which has been used I arriving at this belief. If an unreliable method has been used, the probability of the belief being true will be small, even if it is true. This sounds odd because we talk of ‘the probability of a proposition being true’, when we actually mean a conditional probability. Once clarified, no harm should come from continuing to talk in this way. Kvanvig’s favourite example (Kvanvig 2004, 203) involves two computer generated lists, one which tells you where chocolate is sold and another which tells you where it is likely that chocolate is sold. (His point is that a third list, which is the intersection of the first two, is no better than the first.) Analogous to the puzzlement above, one will wonder why the first list is not a proper subset of the second. To make his example plausible, Kvanvig has to assume that the list generator uses different programmes to compute each of the two lists, one generating a list of conditional probabilities of chocolate selling places given, for example what else they sell, and the other generating from a different set of data a list of chocolate selling places. The information used for the list of chocolate sellers has to be unavailable to the probability list generator.
Kvanvig and others use the notion of instrumental value with some justification or ‘in a wide sense’ because the same problem which arises in the case of likely to be good and good also arises in the case of likely to produce some good and good.
I assume that in the choice between the likely and the unlikely good the same state of affairs results not only if they are successful (you win the lottery) but also if they are unsuccessful (you do not win the lottery). In such circumstances, a comparison between the expectation of goodness for both options reduces to a comparison of the likelihood by which they will be good.
I have made my disagreement with Broome look bigger than it actually is. He might actually be an ally when it comes to the rejection of (A). Broome, if I understand his view correctly, would not object to my claim that deontic facts come first. Broome says, ‘The pursuit of good may give to ethics, not an objective, but a structure. It may fix the way in which ethical considerations work and how they combine together. It may provide not a foundation or an objective, but an organising principle for ethics’ (Broome 1991, 17). Thus, the normativity of probabilistic goodness is not derived from goodness as an outside objective, like it was for Moore. Broome appeals to the structure of rationality and, thereby, to deontic facts when he tries to justify his probabilistic notion of goodness. ‘The structure of rationality’, he says, ‘must tell us something about the structure of ethics’ (Broome 1991, 18). Thus, his consequentialism is also only structural and not like in claim (A) foundational. This means that the normativity of probabilistic goodness is not derived from the normativity of goodness. The disagreement that remains is, therefore, less important for the purposes of this essay. I object to a deontically based notion of goodness on the grounds that it leads into evaluative conflicts. Broome would say that there is a sense in which the likely good is only good if the likely things which make it good happen. But there is also another sense in which the likely good is good independently of what happens. It is good in the sense which expresses in evaluative terminology the fact that we ought to choose it. The tension between these notions surfaces when Broome talks about ‘the different status of probabilities’. ‘Lower status goodness [goodness determined by a probability less than 1] is a sort of interim goodness, which has to be revised in the final account.’ (Broome 1991, 130) Here Broome gives priority to a notion of goodness that is not probabilistic. In the end, it seems to me, Broome is, like me, a Moorean about goodness. Not in the sense that goodness is a non-natural property–we have made no commitment regarding the metaphysical status of evaluative facts–but in the sense that, in contrast to their normative status, the goodness of probabilistic means is settled by facts about there effectiveness.
Thus, instrumental value is a ‘value’ in name only. The consequentialist had to invent an evaluative notion, which mirrors basic deontic facts, namely that we ought to prefer the likely good to the unlikely good, in order to defend the idea that evaluative facts explain deontic facts. I read (Ross (1939, 257) as defending a similar position.
Goldman’s recent attempt to solve the Meno Problem from a reliabilist basis can be seen as yet another attempt to deny claim (B). He calls his view ‘type-instrumentalism’ and explains it as follows, ‘When tokens of type T1 regularly cause tokens of type T2, which has independent value, then type T1 tends to inherit (ascribed) value from type T2. Furthermore, the inherited value accruing to type T1 is also assigned or imputed to each token of T1, whether or not such a token causes a token of T2’ (Goldman and Olsson, 2009, 16). I am unconvinced. A train, which derails and kills you, does not seem to inherit any goodness from its safe relatives. Similarly, the winning lottery ticket did not inherit the property of being a useless piece of paper from its million useless cousins. For more details see (Piller 2009a).
If Sosa is right in thinking that his account of knowledge does not need a separate anti-Gettier condition, then we would have indeed solved the restricted Meno Problem. Although the deontological account offered here is compatible with Sosa’s condition of aptness, which is the idea that a belief is true because in holding it one believes as one ought to believe, I am not convinced that a deontological account profits from the addition of Sosa’s condition.
I have presented material from this paper in talks in Amsterdam, Dresden, Krakow, York, and Bristol. I thank the audiences on these occasions for their helpful comments. Special thanks to Johan Brännmark, John Broome, Dorothea Debus, and Wlodek Rabinowicz.
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Piller, C. Valuing Knowledge: A Deontological Approach. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 12, 413–428 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9185-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9185-3