Beyond Truth and Falsehood: The Real Value of Knowing That p

WAYNE D. RIGGS

BEYOND TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD:THE REAL VALUE OF KNOWING THAT P

(Received 14 September 2000)

ABSTRACT. Current epistemological dogma has it that the twin goals ofbelieving truths and avoiding errors exhaust our cognitive aspirations. On sucha view, (call it the “TG view”) the only evaluations that count as genuinelyepistemological are those that evaluate something (a belief, believer, set of beliefs,a cognitive trait or process, etc.) in terms of its connection to these two goods. Inparticular, this view implies that all the epistemic value of knowledge must bederived from the value of the two goals cited in TG. I argue that this implicationis false, and thus that the TG view must be abandoned. I propose a candidate toreplace the TG view that makes better sense of the value of knowledge.

1. INTRODUCTION

There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion – ways entirelydifferent, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seemshitherto to have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we mustavoid error – these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers

. . . – William James1

Current epistemological dogma has it that the twin goals ofbelieving truths and avoiding errors exhaust our cognitive aspira-tions. The very borders of the epistemological realm are oftendemarcated by just these two considerations. On such a view, theonly evaluations that count as genuinely epistemological are thosethat evaluate something (a belief, believer, set of beliefs, a cognitivetrait or process, etc.) in terms of its connection to these two goods.The proposed connections will vary from one view to the next, butthe conviction remains that what makes an issue epistemological isthat, at bottom, it has to do with believing truths and avoiding errors.For ease of reference later, let us call this the “Twin Goods View”(hereafter “TG”).

Philosophical Studies 107: 87–108, 2002.© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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TG: There are exactly two goods that are distinctly and purelycognitive or epistemic. They are (1) having true beliefs,and (2) avoiding false beliefs.

There are well-known problems with formulating cognitivegoods in this way. For example, one can promote these goods bybelieving only necessary truths. This is not a satisfactory cognitivestrategy, and not one that we want to be rated highly in termsof satisfying what we take to be the defining goals of epistemo-logical pursuits. Therefore, TG must be revised to accommodate thisproblem. Richard Foley addresses this problem by stating that our“purely epistemic” goals all can be boiled down to the goal of “nowhaving an accurate and comprehensive belief system” [emphasisadded].2 (For my purposes here, I am treating “cognitive goods”and “cognitive goals” as interchangeable.) The necessity of havinga comprehensive body of beliefs before one’s achievement of truthand avoidance of falsity can count as satisfying one’s epistemicgoals eliminates the possible strategy of restricting one’s beliefs toa set of necessary truths. Such a set would be highly restricted inscope, and would not be sufficiently comprehensive to allow it tocount in favor of achieving our “purely epistemic” goal.

This might seem to add a third cognitive good, which wouldviolate TG, but this consideration is not yet a worry. Consider thateven from a very young age, human beings tend to have large anddiverse sets of beliefs anyway. Whether we like it or not, humanbeings are doxastically profligate. Thus, we can ignore for now thequalification that our belief set must be sufficiently comprehensivebecause it will, as a matter of contingent fact, always be met byany normal human cognizer. As long as we are explicit that we arelimiting ourselves to talking about human cognition, we do not yethave a reason to abandon TG. I will argue, however, that even withsuch charity the idea that acquiring truths and avoiding falsehoodsexhaust our cognitive goals cannot support itself. The TG view,when combined with two plausible principles about the value ofknowledge, implies that all the value of knowledge must be derivedfrom the value of the two goals cited in TG. This, I will show, cannotbe true.

I begin by stating the two epistemic principles upon whichmy argument depends. These principles are widely accepted by

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epistemologists, though often not explicitly stated by them. First,I assume that the epistemic value of knowledge is greater than thatof mere (i.e., accidental) true belief. More precisely,

A1: For any p, S’s knowing that p is more epistemicallyvaluable than S’s merely having the true belief that p.

This codifies a widely held, though often not explicitly stated, viewabout knowledge.3

Second, I assume that:

A2: the ultimate sources of all specifically epistemic value arethe goods specific to our cognitive pursuits.

This seems to be the common assumption of epistemologists, whenthey address the question of epistemic value at all. There are manyways one might propose for a cognitive state or activity to derivevalue from these goods, but one way or another, epistemic valuecomes from epistemic goods. The same is true of other kinds ofvalue. Specifically moral value can derive only from specificallymoral goods, and so on.

From these two assumptions and TG, the following principlefollows:

VK: the epistemic value of knowing that p derives entirelyfrom the specifically epistemic goods of having truebeliefs and avoiding false ones, and some of this valuemust be additional to the epistemic value that can bederived from the same sources for merely believing pwhen p is true (and not believing p when p is false).

In the following sections, I will argue that VK is false. Accord-ingly, I maintain that one of the three premises from which VKfollows must be false as well. Both A1 and A2 strike me as tooplausible to abandon. If knowing isn’t always more valuable thanmerely “getting it right,” then why spend so much time trying tofigure out an adequate account of it? And if we cannot distinguishepistemological concerns by the characteristic goods involved, thenhow are we to do it? Obviously, these rhetorical questions do notsuffice to make a case for abandoning TG. After arguing against VK,I will show that there are viable alternatives to TG that, in additionto allowing us to give up VK, also offer greater insight into what

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knowledge is like and why we value it as we do. These will providepositive reasons to jettison TG while keeping A1 and A2.

2. GOALS AND VALUE

Before proceeding with this argument, we ought to take care ofsome preliminary matters. We tend to speak blithely of knowledgehaving “epistemic value.” What does this mean? The general ideais that we take our two cognitive goals specified in TG as beingobviously, though not necessarily intrinsically, valuable. Any genu-inely epistemically valuable item must derive its value somehowfrom these goals. Only such value as is derived therefrom can belegitimately called “epistemic,” because only that value is derivedfrom purely epistemic sources of value. So the epistemic value ofknowledge must somehow be derived exclusively from the value ofour epistemic goals.4

Knowledge derives some of its epistemic value almost trivially,since knowing that p entails having a true belief that p. But thiscannot exhaust the value of knowledge, on pain of violating A1.So the real question is “what value does knowing that p hold overand above merely believing p when p is true (and not believing pwhen p is false)?” For my purposes here, I will call the property thatturns true belief into knowledge “warrant.”5 Some component orcomponents of warrant, then, must bear this additional value. Obvi-ously, the value provided by warrant must be epistemic value, or itwon’t help us satisfy A1. But how does warrant derive value fromour two goals of cognition? The vast majority of theories of knowl-edge assume that this derivation proceeds either instrumentally orteleologically. In what follows, I will argue that neither way ofderiving value from the goals of cognition will account for the valueof knowledge over and above the value of true belief simpliciter.

3. KNOWLEDGE AND VALUE

The standard view of knowledge these days is that it is a varietyof true belief. Unlike, say, Plato, contemporary philosophers do notthink that a line can be drawn between belief and knowledge based


on content, form, or any other property that would render themfundamentally different in kind. Of course, knowledge is differentfrom mere true belief, but often on the basis of conditions or factswholly extrinsic to the belief itself. This is especially obvious insome Gettier-type cases. Thus, an instance of knowledge has cometo be seen as a particular belief that is both true and justified. So far,so banal. Yet notice how knowledge, on this conception, becomesseparated from the cognizer; it is objectified, if you will. The valueof knowledge, on this conception, is simply the value of one of thesepeculiar beliefs. We specify the value of knowledge by specifyingproperties of the belief that are epistemically valuable.

Obviously, being true is an epistemically valuable property of abelief. But as it was noted above, the question at hand is what valueknowledge has that exceeds the value of mere true belief. VK tellsus that the value must be derived somehow from the value of thegoods of having true beliefs and avoiding false ones. There are twocommon accounts of how this happens. On the first view, the addi-tional value of knowledge is derived instrumentally from the valueof the epistemic goods. In other words, warrant is instrumentallyvaluable because beliefs that are warranted tend to be true. Warranttends to be productive of the epistemic good of having true beliefs.Call this view “value instrumentalism.”

On the second view, the value of knowledge is derived teleologi-cally from the value of the epistemic goods. It stresses that knowl-edge is “aimed at” the goals of cognition. In other words, there is ateleological connection between the goals of cognition and beliefsthat are candidates for knowledge. If the belief is not “aimed at”truth, it cannot derive value teleologically from that cognitive goal.Call this view “value teleologism.” I will consider these strategies inturn.

Value Instrumentalism

Let us first try to derive the value of warrant instrumentally fromthe goals of acquiring truths and avoiding falsehoods. Somethinghas instrumental value when it produces, leads to, or in some otherway constitutes a good means to some end we value. So on thevalue instrumentalist account, warrant must be a good means tohaving true beliefs and avoiding false ones. More precisely, the

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properties of belief that constitute epistemic warrant must be suchthat beliefs with such properties are (or would be) predominantlytrue. (This is, of course, a common feature of theories of warrantand/or knowledge.) The value instrumentalism comes in when oneaccounts for the value of warrant in purely instrumental terms – thatis, warrant is valuable only because it tends to lead to true belief.This sounds strange, however, when applied to the particular case.Let us examine this a little more carefully.

When we say “X is valuable because it tends to lead to truebeliefs,” what do we mean? A particular belief, after all, is eithertrue or false “already,” so it makes little sense to say that its beingwarranted makes it more epistemically valuable by making it morelikely to be true. If the belief is true, it can’t get any more so. Andif it’s false, it doesn’t come closer to being true by virtue of beingwarranted. It may well be that a particular belief’s being warrantedmakes it more likely to be true given our own background knowl-edge, but this is irrelevant to value instrumentalism. Only propertiesof belief that actually get us to the truth or keep us away from false-hood can derive value instrumentally from those epistemic goods.But it looks as though the only property of a particular belief thathas the right sort of connection to those goods is the property of‘being true’ itself.

This observation makes plain that the value chain from the valueof our epistemic ends to the value of some particular item of knowl-edge is more complicated than has been indicated so far. On theone hand, epistemic value “flows” instrumentally from the value ofhaving true beliefs and not having false ones to warrant, becausehaving warranted beliefs tends to produce the desired outcomeof having mostly true beliefs. Yet it is the property of “beingwarranted” that is supposed to provide the added value that an itemof knowledge has over and above its value as a true belief. Thus, thevalue of “being warranted” must subsequently “flow” somehow tothe individual true belief.

The trouble here seems to be that the property of “beingwarranted” specifies a class or type of belief that is valuable as aclass or type. According to value instrumentalism, warranted beliefsare valuable because warranted beliefs are predominantly also truebeliefs. But only a collection of multiple individuals can be predom-


inantly this or that. Individual beliefs either are or are not true, theycannot be predominantly so. And being a token of a type of beliefthat is valuable does not necessarily make the token itself morevaluable.

To see this, let us apply this same reasoning to a very differentkind of evaluation. One might tell a similar story to the above abouthow someone values, say, a CD from the blues section of a musicstore. Suppose that Aretha buys just such a CD because she tendsto enjoy the blues more than any other genre of music. A fewweeks later, a friend visits and sees the new CD. The followingconversation ensues.

Friend: “I see you have the new CD. Do you like it?”Aretha: “Oh, yes, I like it a lot.”Friend: “So you liked the songs on it?”Aretha: No, they were really quite bad. The lyrics were awful, the singer has aterrible voice, and the band didn’t seem to know how to play a blues rhythm atall.”Friend: “But I thought you said you liked the new CD!?”Aretha: Oh, I do. But I like it because it is a blues CD, not because it is actuallyany good.”

Aretha’s answers to her friend’s questions seem quite odd, at theleast. How can she like the CD if she dislikes all the music on it?(We leave aside considerations of other aesthetic aspects of the CD,such as cover design, etc.) She claims to like it simply because of itsgenre. By hypothesis, Aretha prefers the genre (the blues) becausemusic of that type tends to be pleasurable for her to listen to. Butit seems absurd to claim, as Aretha does, that such a preferencefor the blues would render a particular CD valuable when it is oneof the rare exceptions. If Aretha dislikes the music on the CD, shewill value it no more than any other CD whose music she dislikesequally, whatever the genre. Thus, the value that Aretha attaches tothe blues as a type of music does not transfer to a particular token ofblues music on those rare occasions that Aretha dislikes it.

But if that value does not transfer from type to token when thetoken is disliked, it must also fail to transfer when the token is liked.Consider a different blues CD that Aretha enjoys very much. Herenjoyment of the music is valuable to her, and this makes the CDvaluable. What value is added to this by the fact that the music istoken of a generally enjoyable type of music? None, it would seem.

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The type is valuable, on value instrumentalism, because tokens of ithave some particular property that tends to coincide with some otherproperty that is valuable. But particular tokens either have or fail tohave the valued properties. Thus, they can be evaluated directly onthese grounds alone.

Let us return this discussion to epistemology. The parallels withthe preceding example are obvious. According to value instrumen-talism, a belief token is valuable because it is of a type that tendsto be true more often than not. But that particular token is itselfeither true or false. Thus, it instantiates or exemplifies or achievesour cognitive goals directly. A true belief is epistemically valuable,but it does not become more so by virtue of also being of a type thatcontains mostly such beliefs. It can’t be any more true, so to speak,than it already is.

I take this to show that a particular token belief cannot, in prin-ciple, derive value instrumentally from the cognitive goals of havingtrue beliefs and avoiding falsehoods. A token belief is either trueor false on its own. If having true beliefs and avoiding falsehoodsis the goal, then believing some particular true proposition just isto partially accomplish that goal. It is what Richard Foley callsa “constitutive means.”6 But if having a true belief token is itselfpartially constitutive of achieving our cognitive goals, then the onlyway its epistemic value could increase would be if it somehow cameto constitute a greater achievement of our cognitive goals. Being amember of one type or another of beliefs does not do this.

Value Teleologism

A similar argument shows that a teleological account of the deriva-tion of the value of justified belief from our two putative cognitivegoals won’t go either. It is uncontroversial that being motivated tofind the truth and avoid error is epistemically valuable, and it isplausible to account for this value as being teleologically derivedfrom these two epistemic goals. Having such motivations is valuablebecause of what the motivations are directed towards. However, thisvalue accrues to the person, not to any particular belief she mayhave. How, then, might this value continue “downstream,” so tospeak, to a true belief that is the result of such motivations? Sincebeliefs are not themselves “directed” at anything, they cannot derive


their epistemic value teleologically.7 And if TG is true, then I cansee no reason to prefer, epistemically speaking, a true belief arrivedat via epistemically valuable motivations to one not so arrived at.Either way we get the truth (and, trivially, avoid error).

It may be objected at this point that I cannot simply dismiss thevalue accrued to the person as being relevant to the value of knowingthat p. After all, depending upon one’s (value teleologicist) theoryof justification, my knowing that p entails my having at least oneepistemic virtue, truth-directed motivation, or some other positive,epistemically relevant personal trait. Therefore, knowing that p isvaluable in part because constituents of this state of affairs are them-selves valuable. Furthermore, the value of these constituents can betraced back to the value of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods.Thus, it would seem that knowing that p is always more valuablethan believing truly that p without knowing (at least) because, in theformer case but not the later, one has something of epistemic valuebeyond true belief.

Though this approach makes further headway than does the valueinstrumentalist view, it still falls short of accounting for (all of) thevalue knowledge has over and above true belief that is not knowl-edge. For it is always possible for one to have the relevant personaltrait, to arrive at a true belief, yet nonetheless fail to have knowledge.In such cases, all the value involved in knowing is present, yet theperson does not know. Thus, it is false that knowing that p alwaysinvolves something of value that is lacking when one believes trulythat p without knowing.

For example, suppose that a normally quite epistemically respon-sible person makes an uncharacteristic slip and believes somethingfor which she has inadequate evidence, but is nonetheless true. Thisscenario does not show that her strong motivation to believe thetruth has disappeared. It simply illustrates the uncontroversial factthat even conscientious folks sometimes fail to be moved by theappropriate motivations – and they sometimes nonetheless arriveat a true belief. But those temporarily ineffective motivations arestill present. This possibility shows that one can have everything ofepistemic value that is included in the state of knowing that p – truebelief + good epistemic character, epistemic virtue, or what haveyou – yet fail to know. But this implies that knowing that p is not

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always more valuable than merely believing p when p is true, whichis in direct contradiction with our initial assumption A1. As I saidat the outset, I am much more committed to A1 than I am to TG,so I take this result to be a strong indictment of TG. Knowing mustinvolve some epistemic value that does not derive from either goalspecified by TG.

Of course, one reason such truth-directed motivations areconsidered epistemically valuable is that they are often assumed tobe likely to produce true beliefs a higher percentage of the time thanalternative motivations (self-aggrandizement, say). But this bringsus back to the option of deriving the epistemic value of justifiedbelief instrumentally from our cognitive goals, which we have justrejected. Of course, none of this is to deny the epistemic value eitherof belief types that are likely to be true or of truth-directed motiva-tions. I have argued only that the value of these things does not, atleast in any obvious way, devolve to the particular beliefs that resultfrom them.

4. A CLOSER LOOK

The arguments of the last few sections have been couched inquite general, abstract terms, and the reader will be forgiven forwondering if these arguments hold up against real theories that claimto hold TG. I cannot canvass the whole range of theories of knowl-edge here, but I can look at a couple of instructive cases. This willserve both to buttress my previous arguments and to point in thedirection of what additional goals are required to account for theepistemic value of knowledge.

Goldman’s Process Reliabilism

The recent literature on the value of knowledge has already provideda number of arguments to the effect that fairly simple versions ofprocess reliabilism have trouble accounting for the value of knowl-edge, on the assumption of TG.8 In many of these papers, thearguments against reliabilism are strikingly similar. The gist of themis this: according to process reliabilism, a reliably-produced beliefis valuable because it is so produced. Primary value attaches toprocess-types, by virtue of their reliability at producing true beliefs.


A particular belief-token would have to derive its epistemic value,then, from the process-type that was tokened to produce it. But, asthese philosophers have argued, a belief token that is true gets noadditional value from being produced by a process of a type thatnormally produces true beliefs. Once you have what you want (atrue belief), the reliability of the means you used to get it no longermatters to the value of the thing itself. Thus, Goldman appearsunable to accommodate VK while still holding TG, A1 and A2.

This is, of course, a slightly more specific and applied version ofthe argument given above against value instrumentalism generally.Since this ground has been covered thoroughly elsewhere by myselfand others, I will say no more about process reliabilism. Instead, Iwill turn to another very successful theory of knowledge, providedby Ernest Sosa.

Sosa’s Virtue Reliabilism

Sosa’s theory of knowledge is a version of reliabilism, but one thattakes very seriously the issue of the value of knowledge. Arguably,concern to capture this value in his theory is one of his primarymotivations in introducing “virtues” in the first place. The term“virtue” connotes moral and practical excellence, and Sosa makesappeals to just these features of virtue in his theory of knowledge.

When the agent’s actions are said to be right and the cognizer’s beliefs knowledge,we speak implicitly of the virtues . . . seated in that subject, which (a) give rise tothat action or belief, adding to the subject’s worth as agent or cognizer, and (b)make him reliable and trustworthy over an interesting spread of possible choicesor beliefs, and circumstances.9

An intellectual virtue, for Sosa, is a disposition to have truebeliefs of a certain kind, relative to a certain environment, in certainconditions.10 Though all these qualifiers are important to Sosa’stheory of knowledge and virtue, they need not detain us here. Themain point for present purposes is that a virtue is a disposition tohave true beliefs of a certain kind. So, one’s vision is a virtue if itreliably yields true beliefs about what objects are in your immediateenvironment, and so on.

A belief that derives from an intellectual virtue is called “apt.”Aptness, however, is sufficient only for what Sosa calls “animal

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knowledge.” To achieve what Sosa calls “reflective knowledge,”one’s belief must also be justified.

One has animal knowledge about one’s environment, one’s past, and one’s ownexperience if one’s judgments and beliefs about these are direct responses to theirimpact – e.g., through perception or memory – with little or no benefit of reflectionor understanding.

One has reflective knowledge if one’s judgment or belief manifests not onlysuch direct response to the fact known but also understanding of its place in awider whole that includes one’s belief and knowledge of it and how these comeabout.11

Sosa also says elsewhere that

The ‘justification’ of a belief B requires that B have a basis in its inference orcoherence relations to other beliefs in the believer’s mind . . . including principlesas to what beliefs are permissible in the circumstances as viewed by that subject.12

For Sosa, knowledge of the highest form is more than simplybelief produced by a reliable process. It is belief that is informed byreflection and understanding. It is a kind of knowledge that cannotbe had by unreflective creatures. All knowledge, then, depends uponintellectual virtue. How does this help Sosa account for the value ofknowing (of either sort, animal or reflective), over and above thevalue of mere true believing? Sosa tries to answer this in two inter-estingly different ways. One of these is an explicit attempt to explainthe value of knowledge, but the other is more implicit in some of hisexamples of knowledge and what he claims distinguishes them fromexamples of mere true belief. I’ll address each of these attempts inturn.

His explicit answer invokes the practical utility of being able totell reliable informers from unreliable ones. People, Sosa argues,have long needed to be able to discern the relative skills, compe-tences, and virtues of their social compatriots. This is true for nearlyall such skills when there is a societal division of labor. It wouldbe foolish, and potentially dangerous to the community, to ascribethe task of, say, defense of the camp, to a fumble-fingered cowardwho can barely hold a spear without dropping it. Moreover, it isimportant that we be able to distinguish those whose opinions weought to trust for important information. Thus, we have come toadmire and value these skills, competences, and virtues among ourfellows.


Since a knowledge ascription, on Sosa’s view, also ascribes intel-lectual virtue to the cognizer, knowing is more valuable than meretrue believing, which does not ascribe such virtue to the believer.This, then, explains why we value knowledge over mere true belief.The practical and epistemological exigencies of our forebears’ exist-ences have caused us to value reliable informants. In particular, ithas caused us to value the traits of character to which we attributesuch reliability. When someone comes to believe something throughthe operation of such a trait, we praise the believer both for the truebelief and for the trait itself.

However, insofar as Sosa is committed to TG, this way ofaccounting for the value of knowledge falls prey to the same argu-ment used against value teleologism. A person may have as manyintellectual virtues as one would like, and also have a true belief,but the latter may not be due to any of the former. Yet in such a case,the believer has the virtues in question, and she has the true belief.All that is lacking is the appropriate sort of causal or “grounding”relation to hold between them. Is this relation itself epistemicallyvaluable?

To see the answer to this question, let us consider a pairof imaginary cognizers – Savannah and Madison. Savannah andMadison have grown up in the same small community, had the sameteachers and local community influences, and their parents encour-aged their intellectual development equally zealously and withidentical effectiveness. The result is that Savannah and Madisonhave all the same intellectual virtues, and to the same degree.Furthermore, they are such close friends and intellectual soul-mates,they even have almost exactly the same set of (non-first-person)beliefs.

It would appear, then, that by any measure of value derived fromthe value of our cognitive goals of having true beliefs and avoidingfalsehoods, these two are equivalent. Their cognitive apparati areequally productive of true beliefs, and they are equally motivatedtoward acquiring those truths and avoiding falsehoods. Now imaginesome fairly mundane empirical proposition p. Both Savannah andMadison believe p. But in this particular case, Madison holds it outof intellectual virtue V, but Savannah does not. Savannah has madeone of her rare slips, and has come to believe p on the basis of unreli-

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able hearsay. She retains her intellectual virtues, including V, but asall imperfect beings will occasionally do, she made a mistake in thisinstance. As a result, we shall assume that Sosa’s view concludesthat Madison knows that p and Savannah does not.

By what argument is Madison’s knowing that p more valu-able than Savannah’s believing that p? Both beliefs are true. Bothcognizers have the intellectual virtue that prompts Madison’s, butnot Savannah’s, belief that p. If it is thought that the difference ofthis single instance of defective belief on Savannah’s part rendersher significantly less virtuous than Madison to account for thisdifference in value, we can add to the example that, with respectto proposition q, Madison and Savannah’s situations are reversed.Savannah’s knows that q by way of V, while Madison believes it,but does not know it. With this revision, there is no longer even adifference between the two women in terms of how many (or whatproportion of) true beliefs they have in all, nor how many (or whatproportion of) true beliefs they have by way of V. Everything ofvalue that can be derived from the twin goals of cognition is hadequally by both.

Clearly, Sosa must be committed to there being some epistemicvalue to a true belief’s arising from intellectual virtue that is inaddition to the true belief and the value of the virtue. In fact, thisis implicit in the passage cited at the beginning of this section. Else-where, Sosa compares the value of knowledge with the value wenormally attribute to a tennis champion when she makes a winningshot.13 It is assumed that the effective shot was a manifestation ofher skill, not just an accidental event caused by her stumbling overher shoelaces. Notice that, if the shot were an accident due to herstumbling, she would still be an excellent tennis player. We can evenassume that, had she not stumbled, she would have made an equallygood shot. Clearly, the fact that the virtue is indispensable to theproduction of the particular good is necessary for such productionto be counted a manifestation of skill. The analogous claims all holdfor intellectual virtues and true belief.

I think Sosa is exactly right to draw these analogies, and I believethat it is here that the “extra value” of knowledge lies. But if thevalue lies in the actual production of true belief by the intellectualvirtues, then some additional value must come into play to explain


this. Though Sosa implicitly acknowledges this in his comparisonof epistemic virtue to ethical virtue, he falls short of explicitlydenying TG and explaining why a true belief’s arising from virtueprovides it with some extra value. In what follows, I will considertwo different possible answers to this question, and briefly argue forthe superiority of one of them.

5. KNOWING AND UNDERSTANDING

One of these possibilities is suggested by Sosa’s distinction betweenanimal and reflective knowledge. One has reflective knowledge onlywhen “one’s judgment or belief manifests not only such directresponse to the fact known but also understanding of its place ina wider whole.”14 Reflective knowledge is cognitively integratedinto one’s wider cognitive economy. It “makes sense” within thescope of one’s doxastic domain. One way to capture this idea is tosay that reflective knowledge requires “coherence” of a belief withone’s prior beliefs. Another might be to say that reflective knowl-edge requires understanding. However one puts it, this approachadds a substantive new condition on at least a certain kind of knowl-edge. Furthermore, “coherence” or “understanding” are the kinds ofproperties or states that are plausible candidates for adding value toone’s epistemic situation. Thus, by stipulating that reflective knowl-edge always entails having such a property, one ensures that havingreflective knowledge has a kind of value that having mere truebeliefs does not.

One initial worry with this proposal might be that it accountsfor the value of only a small subset of the knowledge we takeourselves to possess. Perceptual beliefs in particular seem not to be“reflective” or to provide “understanding,” at least much of the time.But Sosa denies that perceptual beliefs in humans are unreflective.

Note that no human blessed with reason has merely animal knowledge of the sortattainable by beasts. For even when perceptual belief derives as directly as it evendoes from sensory stimuli, it is still relevant that one has not perceived the signsof contrary testimony. A reason-endowed being automatically monitors has back-ground information and his sensory input for contrary evidence and automaticallyopts for the most coherent hypothesis . . .15

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By Sosa’s account, then, all or nearly all human knowledge isreflective, not animal.

Furthermore, Sosa thinks that the value of this coherence comesfrom its propensity to result in our having true beliefs. “Sincea direct response supplemented by such understanding would ingeneral have a better chance of being right, reflective knowledgeis better justified than corresponding animal knowledge.”16 If thiswere the case, TG might be saved after all. But this proposal fallsto the arguments from the preceding sections. Coherence of one’sbeliefs is valuable, and having a true belief is valuable. And perhapsall the value of both of these things is derivable from the TG view.However, one can still construct a case in which S believes p, p istrue, S has the virtue that would normally have produced beliefs likep, S’s beliefs are highly coherent, p also coheres well with the restof S’s belief, but S does not know p. All it takes is the example ofa normally virtuous cognizer with a highly coherent belief system,who makes an uncharacteristic mistake and believes p for bad ornon-existent reasons, but gets lucky so that the belief is both trueand coheres with the rest of her beliefs.

If the addition of a coherence or understanding requirement toknowledge is to provide the “extra value” we are looking for, itwill have to derive that extra value from some other source besidesthe usual two cognitive goals. I will not here explore the possi-bilities for this, because I think that epistemologists should keepconsiderations of knowledge apart from considerations of under-standing. A problem that has, to some extent, hampered agreementand progress in epistemology is a deep ambiguity in the history ofour subject. At different times in the past, our intellectual forebearshave had importantly different paradigms of knowledge in mind asthey wrote the great works that define our philosophical tradition.For my purposes here, it will suffice to point out two broad strandswithin this tapestry.

One is the association of “knowledge” with certainty. Thiscornerstone of epistemology has been given up only recently, andonly grudgingly. The other is the deification of the term “knowl-edge.” By this I mean taking knowledge to be some great achieve-ment that provides deep insight into the nature of reality. Such aconception of knowledge invokes something very like what today


we would call “understanding.” Recent work in epistemology hastended to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter. Inparticular, like the Empiricists, we take true perceptual beliefs to beparadigm instances of knowledge (under the right conditions, etc.).Sosa’s remarks aside, this is hard to reconcile with the conception ofknowledge as a great achievement that advances our understandingof reality.

Explicitly tracing out these two strands and their influences onthe philosophical tradition is a worthy project, but one for anotherday. For now I point this out only to bolster my suggestion thatwe treat the two conceptions of knowledge separately. I think thatepistemologists should pay much more attention to “understanding”than we have in recent times, but if we are to preserve the insightsprovided by the torrent of publications in epistemology in the lastcentury, I think we will have to separate knowledge and under-standing so that we hobble neither with the constraints of the other.This can be motivated so long as there remains an interesting, valu-able, and viable conception of knowledge that is clearly distinctfrom the notion of “understanding.” In conclusion, I will point inthe direction that I think such a conception should go.

6. IN CONCLUSION: EPISTEMIC CREDIT

A theory of knowledge should provide both a set of criteria forknowing and an account of why meeting such criteria is a valuablething. I have argued that theories that embrace TG cannot do boththese things. I have also given tentative reasons for rejecting an alter-native to TG that makes understanding a third epistemic good, andderives the epistemic value of knowledge in part from that source.Instead, I propose to think of knowing along the same lines as wethink of a “right act” in the moral realm. This is not in itself a newidea, but the implications for the underlying value theory of knowl-edge have never fully been laid out. I will briefly point out some ofthese in order to show why I think an account of knowledge alongthese lines has a good chance of explaining the epistemic value ofknowledge, though it requires that we add a third epistemic goodfrom which that value derives.

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In ethics, it is standard practice to distinguish several differentobjects of evaluation. We can rate as “good” or “bad” in an ethicalsense actions, motivations, character traits, and possibly other thingsas well. These evaluations, as it is often pointed out, are independentof one another. Having a good character, say, does not imply of anyone action that it is good. Nor does the fact that one’s motivationsfor doing X were evil imply that X is itself a morally bad action. Anagent, M, performs a right act only when he does a good thing out ofgood motivations (some might further require that the action be theproduct of a virtuous character). Performing a right act thus requiresof an act that it be morally good, of a person that he has morally goodmotivations (and possibly a virtue), and of the total state of affairsthat the former arise from the latter. Sound familiar? This is just therelationship that holds in a case of knowledge among true beliefsand whatever properties of a person one considers constitutive ofepistemic warrant, as argued in parts 3 and 4.

Now we can ask the analogous question in ethics that we havebeen considering in epistemology. Why is performing a right actmore morally valuable than accidentally performing a good act?In the realm of moral action the answer is more clear. We valuemorally right acts because we are responsible for the good outcomesthat result. We are correctly granted credit for the good outcome.This credit is extremely valuable to us. Moreover, this value is “ontop of,” so to speak, the value of our actions, our motivations, ourvirtues, etc.

The lesson to draw from this for epistemology is that the valueof knowledge arises from the value of credit as well. We value thegoals of getting to the truth and avoiding error. We value the prop-erties of having reliable processes, epistemic virtues, truth-directedmotivations, and so forth. But, in addition, we value being respon-sible for the satisfaction of our cognitive goals.17 Such responsibilityrequires at least that the goals are reached by way of our veryown epistemically valuable properties. Otherwise, it is simply anaccident.

The need to avoid lucky or accidental cases of true belief whenattributing knowledge to someone seems to be what motivatesvirtually all theories of knowledge and/or epistemic justification.Depending on how one understands terms like “evidence” and


“make probable” one could develop a reliabilist, responsibilist, orevidentialist theory to rule out cases like these from counting asknowledge. All of these theories agree that certain kinds of luckare intolerable by any adequate theory of knowledge. As it is oftenput, “lucky guesses” cannot count as knowledge. But rarely is itasked why this should be. Why is luck so antithetical to knowledge?As Plato suggested in the Meno, true belief is as good as knowledgewhen it comes to practical utility. One is still right when one guessescorrectly. One is a perfectly good source of information about sometopic if one has true beliefs about it, regardless of how those beliefsare arrived at. So why all this fuss about luck?

One answer recommends itself immediately. Luck underminesthe credit we are due for some outcome of our actions. To theextent that a state of affairs came about independently of our ownintentions and abilities, we are not responsible for it, and so receiveno credit – good or bad – for it. This is evidently true in ethicalcontexts, where it is most often discussed. But our intuitions aboutthe connection between luck and knowledge indicate that it is truein knowledge contexts as well. I propose that the importance of luckto our intuitive assessments of knowledge-claims is explained bythe fact that knowing is something that we consider both admir-able and praiseworthy. One is admired and praised only for whatone is responsible for. Admiration and praise are, after all, modesof attributing credit to someone for bringing about a good state ofaffairs.

All this talk of credit and responsibility, alas, raises the grimspecter of doxastic voluntarism. Am I not committed to an implau-sible voluntarism with respect to how we come to hold our beliefs?We normally think that we can be responsible only for those statesof affairs that we can affect by our free choices. Ergo, if we canbe responsible and receive credit for having a true belief, that mustbe something that is subject to our free choice. This may seem tobe the price one pays for leaning too hard on the analogy betweennormative ethics and epistemology.

While I acknowledge this concern and recognize the appearanceto the contrary, I do not accept any kind of robust voluntarismregarding beliefs. This is a complex issue, and I certainly cannotgive an elaborate account here. Obviously, responsibility for some-

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thing depends on having sufficient control over its occurring or not.Just what degree or kind of control is necessary is, of course, amatter of much debate. It is far from clear that some kind of radicalfreedom is required. After all, if some version of compatibilism isright with respect to moral responsibility, then there would seem noobstacle in principle to our having a sufficient degree of control overour beliefs to be responsible for them. So long as compatibilismis at least a strong contender in the literature about free will anddeterminism, I am willing to hitch my wagon to its prospects inhopes of offering a more illuminating account of the kind of controlwe have over our beliefs at a later time.18

In conclusion, then, I offer the following observations. Anytheory of knowledge or justification that is committed to TG willbe unable to account for A1. If knowing that p is always morevaluable than mere believing-p-when-true, then some of that valuehas to come from some value other than the goals stipulated by TG.Placing the notion of “understanding” in the midst of our conceptionof “knowledge” would provide such outside value, provide that (1)understanding is epistemically valuable (which I take to be uncon-troversially true), and (2) understanding does not derive all of itsepistemic value from the two epistemic goals (which I also believe,but I admit it is controversial). Nevertheless, I think that as longas there is a reasonably promising alternative to this approach, weshould pursue it before running our contemporary notion of “knowl-edge” together with what we now call “understanding.” The viewthat knowledge is credit-worthy true belief provides just such apromising alternative.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Linda Zagzebski for much helpful discussion andcomments on earlier drafts. Also, I’d like to thank Karen Antelland an anonymous referee from Philosophical Studies for additionalhelpful comments.


NOTES

1 William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Dover, 1956).2 Richard Foley, Working Without A Net (Cambridge, Mass.: Oxford, 1993),p. 19.3 For some recent exceptions, see Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind(Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996), p. 301ff.; Wayne D. Riggs, “Reliability andthe Value of Knowledge,” forthcoming in Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch (2002); Ward Jones, “Why Do We Value Knowledge?” American Philo-sophical Quarterly 34 (1997); Jonathan Kvanvig, “Why Should Inquiring MindsWant to Know?” The Monist 81 (1998).4 As I’ve already mentioned, few epistemologists address explicitly issuessurrounding the value of knowledge. Nonetheless, examples of epistemologistswho define the realm of epistemology by appeal to the epistemic goods of havingtrue beliefs and avoiding falsehoods are legion. Two prominent examples areAlvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1986), p. 3, and Laurence BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 7.5 Here I follow the usage of Alvin Plantinga in his Warrant: The Current Debate(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 3ff.6 Foley, pp. 19–20.7 Some folks have argued that beliefs, by their very nature, are directed at truth.(Richard Foley, John Searle, Bernard Williams) However this may be, it is irrele-vant to the present point, since if true, this would be a property of all beliefs andwould not distinguish those that are justified from those that are not.8 See Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1996),p. 301ff.; Ward Jones, “Why Do We Value Knowledge?” American PhilosophicalQuarterly 34 (1997); Jonathan Kvanvig, “Why Should Inquiring Minds Want toKnow?” The Monist 81 (1998); Marian David, “Truth as the Epistemic Goal,”forthcoming in Knowledge, Truth and Duty (Oxford: Oxford, 2001) M. Steup,ed., Michael DePaul, Balance and Refinement, 1993.9 Ernest Sosa, “Reflective Knowledge in the Best Circles,” in The Journal ofPhilosophy (1997), p. 420.10 Ernest Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991), p. 140.11 Sosa (1991), p. 240.12 Ibid., p. 144.13 Sosa (1997), p. 419; I have modified the example slightly to suit my purposes.14 Sosa (1991), p. 240.15 Ibid., p. 240.16 Ibid., p. 240.17 In “Reliability and the Value of Knowledge,” I argue for this. John Grecoargues for a very similar view in “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief,” (forth-coming).18 For two papers that argue for a parallel between our responsibility for actions

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and our responsibility for beliefs, see John Heil, “Doxastic Incontinence,” in Mind(1984), 56–70, and Michael Stocker, “Responsibility Especially for Beliefs,” inMind (1982), 398–417.

REFERENCES

Alston, W. (1989): ‘Concepts of Epistemic Justification’, in Epistemic Justifica-tion, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

BonJour, L. (1985): The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press.

David, M. (2001): ‘Truth as the Epistemic Goal’, in M. Steup (ed.), Knowledge,Truth and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue,Oxford: Oxford.

DePaul, M. (1993): Balance and Refinement, London: Routledge.Foley, R. (1993): Working Without A Net, Oxford: Oxford.Goldman, A. (1986): Epistemology and Cognition, Cambridge: Harvard Univer-

sity Press.Greco, J. (2000): ‘Knowledge as Credit for True Belief’, to be presented at the

Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, conference atthe University of Notre Dame, September 21–23.

Heil, J. (1984): ‘Doxastic Incontinence’, Mind 93.Jones, W. (1997): ‘Why Do We Value Knowledge?’, American Philosophical

Quarterly 34.Kvanvig, J. (1998): ‘Why Should Inquiring Minds Want to Know?’, The Monist

81.Plantinga, A. (1993): Warrant: The Current Debate, New York: Oxford University

Press.Riggs, W.D. (2002): ‘Reliability and the Value of Knowledge’, forthcoming in

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2002).Sosa, E. (1997): ‘Reflective Knowledge in the Best Circles’, The Journal of

Philosophy.Sosa, E. (1991): Knowledge in Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Stocker, M. (1982): ‘Responsibility Especially For Beliefs’, Mind 91.William J. (1956): The Will to Believe, New York: Dover.Zagzebski, L. (1996): Virtues of the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge.

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