Abstract
Elgin has offered us a powerful articulation of an epistemology that does not, contra veritism, have a concern for truth at its core. I contend that the case for Elgin’s alternative epistemological picture trades upon a faulty conception of what a veritistic epistemological outlook involves. In particular, I argue that the right conception of veritism—one that is fundamentally informed by the intellectual virtues—has none of the problematic consequences that Elgin claims. Relatedly, I maintain that we can account for the core role of objectual understanding in inquiry without thereby giving up on truth as the fundamental epistemic good (and even while granting that such understanding might well involve some false beliefs on the part of the subject).
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Notes
Elgin (2017, 1). Henceforth, unless otherwise indicated, all page references are to this work.
See also Goldman & Olsson (2009) and my remarks in endnote 13.
Note that it obviously doesn’t follow from this claim that veritism is committing to holding that truth is non-instrumentally valuable simpliciter.
Indeed, I think the mistake that Elgin is making in this regard can also be found in the work of other contemporary epistemologists who have rejected epistemic value truth monism in favour of competing concetions of epistemic value, though I will be setting this wider point aside here. For my defence of epistemic value truth monism, see Pritchard (2014b, 2016a, 2019). See also Pritchard (2011, 2016c).
Or at least endorsing it in some way, where this might not be best captured by the propositional attitude of belief, but perhaps by some other propositional attitude like acceptance. In what follows I will set this complication to one side.
For a helpful recent overview of the literature on epistemic consequentialism, see Dunn (2019).
Notice too that supplementing veritism with the idea that we should only care about ‘interesting’ truths is not going to work. Either the notion of an interesting truth is understood as some further epistemic good, independent of truth, in which case one is not then defending veritism, but rather advancing a form of epistemic value pluralism instead. Or else the notion of an interesting truth is understood along non-epistemic lines, such as in terms of practical value. But then one has not resolved the problem in hand, since it would remain the case that from a purely epistemic point of view a large but trivial set of beliefs can be preferable to a smaller, but more significant, set of beliefs.
Elsewhere I have argued that the problem that Elgin identifies for veritism is part of a cluster of related difficulties. For example, another prominent difficulty facing this proposal is the ‘swamping’ problem. For some key recent articulations of this problem, see Kvanvig (2003, 2010) and Zagzebski (2003). For my defence of veritism in this regard, see Pritchard (2011, 2014b, 2016a, c).
Interestingly, in a recent paper that responds to some similar problems facing veritism (though with a specific focus on how this view plays out with regard to epistemic justification) posed by Berker (2013), Goldman (2015, §5) makes the curious move of arguing that he regards the projects of offering an account of epistemic value and of understanding epistemic justification as entirely orthogonal to one another, such that one can be a veritist about the former without this having any ramifications for the latter. As I hope my comments here make clear, I think this is a mistake, in that Goldman would be better off rethinking how he understands veritism (i.e., so that it doesn’t entail veritism*). See also the exchange between Author (2016c) and Goldman (2016), where my attempts to rescue his veritism from the so-called ‘swamping problem’ are resolutely spurned.
For a useful recent overview of work the intellectual virtues, see Battaly (2014).
A related confusion that is common in epistemology is to think that whatever epistemic standing would properly close a well-conducted inquiry must thereby be the goal of a well-conducted inquiry. (So, for example, if only knowledge would close a well-conducted inquiry, then well-conducted inquiry must aim at knowledge, rather than, say, truth). For discussion, see Pritchard (2016b; cf. Pritchard 2014b, 2016a).
One difference between Elgin and myself concerns how we treat the relationship between objectual understanding and a narrower form of understanding that is sometimes called propositional understanding—roughly, an understanding of why something quite specific is the case (e.g., why such-and-such happened). Elgin (43–44) clearly thinks that objectual understanding is the primary notion in play here, such that we can only understand propositional understanding in relation to it. In contrast, I tend to think that propositional understanding is the more basic notion, in that objectual understanding is what results when one has an integrated body of propositional understanding. See, for example, Pritchard (2009, 2014a) and Pritchard et al. (2010, ch. 4).
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Pritchard, D. Veritism and the Goal of Inquiry. Philosophia 49, 1347–1359 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00325-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00325-7