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A New Argument for the Non-Instrumental Value of Truth

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Abstract

Many influential philosophers have claimed that truth is valuable, indeed so valuable as to be the ultimate standard of correctness for intellectual activity. Yet most philosophers also think that truth is only instrumentally valuable. These commitments make for a strange pair. One would have thought that an ultimate standard would enjoy more than just instrumental value. This paper develops a new argument for the non-instrumental value of truth: (1) inquiry is non-instrumentally valuable; and (2) truth inherits some of its value from the value of inquiry. This makes truth finally but extrinsically valuable, a thesis that to my knowledge has not been directly defended in the literature. I support (1) by appeal to the notion of epistemic injustice, and (2) through the surprising claim that some goals get their value from the pursuit that aims at them.

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Notes

  1. Some have denied even instrumental value to truth, e.g., Hazlett (2013), Stich (1990), Whiting (2013), Wrenn (2010).

  2. E.g., Christensen (2013), Fantl and McGrath (2009), Heal (1988), Sosa (2001), Whiting (2013), Wrenn (2017).

  3. E.g., Ferrari (2018b, 2020), Hazlett (2013), Heal (1988), Horwich (2006), Lynch (2004, 2009), Sosa (2001), Whiting (2013), Wrenn (2010). Exceptions include Christensen (2013) and Heal (1988).

  4. Respectively: Hazzlett (2013: 111), Lynch (2004: 55), Heal (1988: 105), and Sosa (2001: 49).

  5. I am following Fantl and McGrath (2009: 167) and Whiting (2013: 227). An alternative motivation is something like this: A property/ relation is valuable iff all states of affairs that instantiate it are valuable (e.g., Fantl and McGrath 2009: 166). My argument here is not affected by which version is used.

  6. Things might get more complicated if we distinguish between conditional and instrumental value (e.g., Bader 2013: fn 45; Ferrari 2018b: 1121, 2020: Sect. 2; Orsi 2015: 32). We could then say that the value is conditional on our caring, but is still non-instrumental. (Thanks to an anonymous referee.) This is dialectically OK for me: it means that the friend of non-instrumental value has one less obstacle to clear.

  7. Both opponents and proponents consider it: e.g., Fantl and McGrath (2009), Hazlett (2013), Heal (1988), Kvanvig (2008), Whiting (2013), Wrenn (2017). My formulation is based on Paul Horwich (2006: 348), who defends it.

  8. I am really grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to Wrenn’s work.

  9. This distinction is inspired by the Wrong Kind of Reason problem (e.g., Hieronymi 2005), which teaches us that we need to distinguish between content-related and attitude-related reasons for attitudes like belief and intention. The most vivid example of the wrong kind of reason for intention is generated by the toxin puzzle (Kavka, 1983), where you have an attitude-related reason to form an intention to drink the toxin, but no content-related reason for the intention, since you have no reason to drink the toxin and all the reasons not to.

  10. Korsgaard’s words are ‘the way we value the thing’ (1983: 170), but this would make the distinction a descriptive rather than a normative matter, which she doesn’t mean. Hence, I use Orsi’s explicitly normative formulation.

  11. Ferrari (2018b) also distinguishes a third contrast – between conditional and unconditional value. This depends on whether certain enabling conditions need to be met in order for the value to be realised. I ignore this dimension here as the issue of how to demarcate enabling from constitutive and causal conditions is too thorny to allow for quick treatment. But the extra complexity should be kept in mind for a fuller account of truth’s value. See also fn 6.

  12. For an argument that we should understand intrinsic and extrinsic value in terms of the ‘in virtue of’ relation, see Bader (2013).

  13. Huge thanks to an anonymous referee for making me aware of Ferrari’s work.

  14. If my explanation from agency (Sects. 4 3.4 and 4.3) works, then inquiry should also be understood to have final and extrinsic value. The relevant relation here is the one to epistemic agency.

  15. The closest to an exception that I am aware of is Ferrari (2018b). But even he doesn’t defend either the thesis that truth has final extrinsic value or the particular rationale I give for it. His argument only goes as far as establishing that such a thesis would be congenial to minimalism about truth, and could help the view to counter some standard objections. But he neither commits to the thesis nor defends minimalism.

  16. See, e.g., Wrenn (2005).

  17. See also Wrenn (2017: 109).

  18. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this issue and for the example.

  19. See also Ferrari (2020: Sect. 2), who builds a rider about appropriate inquiry into his statement of the value of true belief.

  20. See e.g., Ferrari (2018b). Kvanvig (2008: 201) and Lynch (2009: 226) also seem to have this in mind but call it ‘prima facie’. For a persuasive argument that this is a bad idea, see Wrenn (2017).

  21. A standard example is having the concept of sexual harassment. Before we did, many women were unable to fully understand their experiences or justify their actions by appeal to them (Fricker, 2007: 147).

  22. Since Fricker (2007), many other kinds of injustice have been identified. See, e.g., Dotson (2014), Mitova (2020), Pohlhaus (2012).

  23. See, e.g., Code (1993), Dotson (2014).

  24. See, e.g., McGlynn (2019).

  25. First, the existing hypothesis that Dickie has committed suicide doesn’t gel with his character or general state of mind before his disappearance. Second, she has found Dickie’s rings in Ripley’s possession.

  26. Thanks to two anonymous referees for the objection and to one of them for the example.

  27. For persuasive arguments that beliefs can wrong, see Basu (2018).

  28. What if I also value making this group of people suffer? Would I be unjust to you then if I judged you incompetent? (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this question.) I don’t see how that could be, unless we adopt some form of relativism about moral evaluation. I assume that I don’t have to engage relativist intuitions of this kind, as the whole debate about the value of truth is clearly about truth’s objective value.

  29. See e.g., Railton (1997) for grounding epistemic norms in agency. Such constitutivist accounts are controversial, of course, but what is disputed is not that final value is inherited, but that Y, usually agency, has such value (e.g., Enoch 2006). I hope that the considerations from epistemic injustice here help deflect a potential similar objection to my argument.

  30. I expect that the first would appeal to Korsgaardians, the second to those who favour slightly looser connections between constitutive claims and claims about final value (e.g., Railton 1997, who considers the latter sort of strategy to confer final but conditional value).

  31. Of course, not all true beliefs are the product of inquiry. But this is not a problem since truth gets its value from being the aim, not the product, of inquiry. I discuss this point in Sect. 5.3.

  32. A third reading is what Shah and Velleman (2005: 599) call ‘truth-regulation’: for an activity to have truth as its aim in this sense, it needs to be typically responsive to truth-considerations such as evidence. Although inquiry also aims at truth in this sense, I don’t consider this reading here, since it will not be enough to get me to the value of truth.

  33. I am riding roughshod over quite a few subtleties here. For instance, one might add the qualification that it is only when one consciously deliberates about the activity in question that one needs to aim at truth or conceive of oneself as truth-accountable. There are also various ways of understanding the teleologist and normativist claims more generally (See, e.g., Velleman 2000: Chapter 11 and Wedgwood 2002, respectively). Nothing in my current argument turns on these subtleties.

  34. In the philosophy of mind, what is at stake is whether ‘belief’ is a normative concept (e.g., Steglich-Petersen 2006). In epistemology, the choice might determine how we think of the source of epistemic norms (e.g., Mitova 2016).

  35. E.g., Williamson (2000).

  36. For a good map, see Pritchard (2007).

  37. Other epistemic values at which inquiry might aim are knowledge, understanding, justification and rationality. An anonymous reviewer has pressed me to mention how I think these various aims relate, especially in cases of conflict, e.g., when inquiry produces true but unjustified belief. I am not sure I have a fully worked out answer. A plausible one is to see some of these aims – knowledge, truth, and understanding – as ultimate aims while one’s proximate aim in inquiry is to follow one’s evidence (and hence justification/ rationality) (see e.g., Lynch 2009: 227). For a persuasive pluralism that I am sympathetic to, see Ferrari (2018a). For some ingenuous examples of conflicts between truth and justification, in the context of trivial truths, see Wrenn (2017: 118).

  38. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

  39. See also Lynch (2009: 239) for a similar argument, but going through truth as the norm of belief. Haack also makes the point that there is an internal connection between inquiry, belief, etc., on the one hand, and truth on the other, in the sense that to inquire whether p is to inquire whether p is true (1996: 58). I think this point is overrated, but don’t have space to argue so here. (See Velleman 2000: Ch. 11.).

  40. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this objection.

  41. Huge thanks to an anonymous referee for making me aware of Nguyen’s work.

  42. See also (2020: 46 and Chapter 3) for a detailed account of the motivational structures and general psychology of striving play.

  43. I could be, of course. For instance, when I look into the glove compartment to confirm that my driving sunglasses are there.

  44. An alternative way of extending final value to all true beliefs would be to claim something like dispositional value for beliefs that are not the actual products of inquiry. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.) I suspect that this alternative is less than congenial for my purposes, in at least two ways. First, it ties value to being the product of inquiry rather than its aim; so, much of the foregoing argument would need reworking. Second, and consequently, it is difficult to see how to then claim – as friends of non-instrumental value want to – that all true beliefs have actual non-instrumental value. But much will depend on how exactly we spell out the notion of dispositional value. So, I leave this as a possible direction for those who are reluctant to grant final value to beliefs that are only potential products of inquiry.

  45. Pritchard (2021).

  46. I think that it is also fruitful for the ‘Swamping Problem’, by diagnosing it as due to getting backwards the explanatory relationship between the value of true belief and the process that aims at true belief. But I leave this argument for another occasion.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following colleagues for really helpful comments on earlier drafts: Anne Meylan, Graeme Forbes, David Scholtz, Abraham Tobi, Tess Dewhurst, two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis, and my audiences at the 2019 Epistemic Injustice, Reasons and Agency/ Annual SWIP Conference (University of Kent), and the 2019 annual conference of the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa (University of Pretoria). This paper was written with the financial support of the British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship NAFR 1180082.

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    Veli Mitova

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Mitova, V. A New Argument for the Non-Instrumental Value of Truth. Erkenn 88, 1911–1933 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00435-4

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