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Notes
I assume nominalism is false—there are such things as properties. I also assume that expressivism about epistemic value discourse is false—that is, that discourse about epistemic value is truth-apt and that the truth of such discourse requires the existence of the property of epistemic value. Though some philosophers question these assumptions, I find the usual criticisms of those views promising and will add nothing to such criticisms here.
Cf. Hazlett (2013: 243). I’ve modified Hazlett’s formulation to make clear that Anti-Realism is committed to the appropriateness of epistemic evaluation.
The contrasting position to Non-Nihilism is not Anti-Realism but Nihilism, the view that there is no such thing as epistemic value and nothing has the property of being epistemically valuable.
Though, on his final view, he thinks it is a trivial consequence of the conventions of epistemic evaluation; cf. (2013: 268).
What I say here about epistemic value could also be said about epistemic reasons, but I will not argue that here.
If there were no such thing as epistemic value, it might still be useful to utter sentences containing locutions like ‘epistemic value’ because such sentences might express certain non-cognitive attitudes, and it may be useful to express those attitudes. But the kind of “epistemic evaluation” under discussion includes more than merely expressing certain non-cognitive attitudes, but also attributing and describing the property of being epistemically valuable.
This paragraph answers the Uniqueness Question: the reason why epistemic value evaluation is appropriate is not unique; the same reason applies, mutatis mutandis, to the appropriateness of species evaluation (and, by extension, the inappropriateness of life-force evaluation).
Of course, on some occasion, such discourse might be irrelevant or rude. Clearly, that kind of “inappropriateness” is irrelevant to Hazlett’s argument.
There’s a complex issue of how exactly the way of thinking sketched here relates to “particularism,” or at least various forms of particularism (for more on kinds of particularism, see Sinnott-Armstrong (1999), McKeever and Ridge (2005), and Lance and Little (2006)). I assume that principles of value can state what is of value in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. That is in tension with the idea that whether something is of value can change its “valence” from context to context (cf. Dancy (2000)). It is also in tension with the idea that principles of value must have exceptions, only state prima facie conditions, or only hold in privileged conditions (cf. Lance and Little (2004)). Despite such surface disagreement, most particularists could agree with much of what I say. For most would agree that there are principles of value and that some could be used to explain others. Those are the main premises I need for my argument and my argument could, in principle, be run with more qualifications to take on some of claims particularists are inclined towards.
There’s an interesting question as how this usage of “fundamental” relates to the ever growing literature on fundamentality. I will not explore this issue here except to say that what I claim about the structure of explanation is consistent with many approaches in that literature.
But since the set is a set of epistemic principles should this mean these principles are non-fundamental ones? No, because the epistemic principles themselves are not used in the explanans. (Though, given my rejection of this possibility, perhaps the exact way to specify it is unimportant.)
This sort of conclusion is not without historical precedent. For instance, British Moralists—including Reid, Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick, Moore, etc.—were explicit that some moral principle are susceptible to “proof” from other principles whereas some are not.
David Lewis (1986) has a well-known conception of natural properties. I’m not particularly opposed to epistemic value being a natural property in Lewis’ sense. For Lewis’ sense of a natural property could be glossed as an elite property and I’m inclined to think value properties are elite properties. An alternative conception of natural properties is that they are those properties, whatever they are, that will eventually belong to a complete, scientific description of the world. I’m also skeptical that the property of epistemic value is a natural property in this sense, for reasons I’ve articulated in Oliveira and Perrine (2017). In short, my primary goal in this paper is to defend non-naturalism, where ‘naturalism’ is understood in Armstrong’s sense of spatiotemporal properties.
I will ignore his third constraint—the Universal Constraint—for two reasons. First, it is a constraint that non-reductive, non-naturalists have, historically, had the least difficulty meeting. Second, since any belief can be true or false, any position which accepts the Truth Principle will imply that any belief can be evaluated for epistemic value. So any position which accepts the Truth Principle trivially satisfies Universal Constraint.
See Hempel (1965: 415-418) for an initial discussion of the distinction between partial and full explanations. One might propose that p provides a complete explanation of q only if p logically implies q; call this the Implication Constraint. Kim—who Hazlett also favorable cites (2013: 151-3)—seemingly embraces it (2005: 106). But the Implication Constraint will run afoul of Hazlett (and Kim’s (2005: 105)) reductive ambitions. Specifically, suppose that (i) statement p about property P1 completely explains statement q about property P2, (ii) p does not refer to P2 at all, and (iii) Implication Constraint is true. Finally, suppose—as will normally be the case—that (iv) P2 is not universally held by everything. Surprisingly, (i)-(iv) are contradictory; they run afoul of a logical theorem known as the Generalization on Constants (see Fisher, Hong, and Perrine (2021) for the proof and surrounding discussion). Consequently, to retain his reductive ambitions, Hazlett should reject Implication Constraint. Since I think complete explanation include connections between properties in the explanans and explanandum, I could embrace the Implication Constraint without fear of this contradiction.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful discussion and feedback, I thank Dan Buckley, David Fisher, Hao Hong, Suzanne Kawamleh, Daniel Linsenbardt, Sharon Mason, Nick Montgomery, Ivan Verano, and Phil Woodward.
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Perrine, T. Realism, Naturalism, and Hazlett’s Challenge Concerning Epistemic Value. J Value Inquiry 58, 73–91 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09869-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09869-z