Benjamin W. Jarvis

The Rules of Thought

PART I: PROPOSITIONS, FREGEAN SENSE, AND RATIONAL MODALITY PART II: RATIONALITY, APRIORITY, AND PHILOSOPHY PART III: INTUITIONS AND PHILOSOPHY

Knowledge and the value of cognitive ability

We challenge a line of thinking at the fore of recent work on epistemic value: the line (suggested by Kvanvig in The value of knowledge and the pursuit of understanding, 2003 and others) that if the value of knowledge is “swamped” by the value of mere true belief, then we have good reason to doubt its theoretical importance in epistemology. We offer a value-driven argument for the theoretical importance of knowledge—one that stands even if the value of knowledge is “swamped” by the value of true belief. Specifically, we contend that even if knowledge itself has no special epistemic value, its relationship to other items of value—cognitive abilities—gives ample reason to locate the concept at the very core of epistemology.

Knowledge: Value on the Cheap

We argue that the so-called ‘Primary’ and ‘Secondary’ Value Problems for knowledge are more easily solved than is widely appreciated. Pritchard, for instance, has suggested that only virtue-theoretic accounts have any hopes of adequately addressing these problems. By contrast, we argue that accounts of knowledge that are sensitive to the Gettier problem are able to overcome these challenges. To a first approximation, the Primary Value Problem is that of understanding how the property of being knowledge confers more epistemic value on a belief than does the property of being true. The Secondary Value Problem is one of understanding how, for instance, the property of being knowledge confers more epistemic value on a belief than does the property of being jointly true and justified. We argue that attending to the fact that beliefs are continuing states reveals that there is no difficulty in appreciating how knowledge might ordinarily have more epistemic value than mere true belief or mere justified true belief. We also explore in what ways ordinary cases of knowledge might be of distinctive epistemic value. In the end, our proposal resembles the original Platonic suggestion in the Meno that knowledge is valuable because knowledge is somehow tied to the good of truth.

Book Symposium: Truth as One and Many

In Truth as One and Many, Michael Lynch makes an ambitious attempt to elucidate the nature of truth. His theory locates him between deflationists on the one hand, and traditional monists – such as traditional correspondence theorists – on the other. In my own view, Lynch is to be applauded for resisting the easy urge to deflate truth while maintaining sensitivity to the failures of traditional monistic accounts of truth that motivated this deflation. Deflationists effectively claim that the nature of truth is so fractured so as to have no substantial nature at all. Traditional monists, on the other hand, insist that the nature of truth is not only substantial, but monolithic. Lynch rightly disagrees with both. Truth is substantial, but fractured. Only it is not too fractured, Lynch tells us. Else, it could not be substantial. On this point, I thoroughly disagree.