Abstract
Jonathan Kvanvig has recently attempted to reconcile the problem of (apparently) pointless truths with the claim that the value of truth is unrestricted—that truth is always and everywhere valuable. In this paper, I critically evaluate Kvanvig’s argument and show it to be defective at a crucial juncture. I propose my own alternative strategy for generating Kvanvig’s result—an alternative that parts ways with Kvanvig’s own conception of the cognitively ideal.
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Notes
These truths which we don’t care about, however, wouldn’t be thereby pointless truths simply in virtue of our not caring about them. For if they were, then for the student uninterested in history, it would be pointless for him to ever learn about it. And for the man with no interests, it would be pointless to gain any truths at all. This tells us that if some truths really are pointless, this wouldn’t be just because we don’t care about them.
It should be noted that, on this view, there could not be any such thing as purely cognitive value apart from practical value; truths that simply satisfy our curiosity whilst generating no practical value would fail to be valuable truths.
Kvanvig’s point here is that, so long as it’s both logically and metaphysically possible that some ‘unusual and powerful ruler’ (2008, p. 13) made a given truth worthwhile to believe, it’s possible that believing such truths would be worthwhile; he claims that the issue is the same when the applied to the notion of ‘chance’ rather than possibility.
From here on, the relevant variety of pointless truths will be the latter, more threatening sort–and I’ll be referring to those specifically as pointless truths.
Thanks to Pritchard for bringing this point up in conversation.
Such a case is clearly possible. The possibility is entailed by the fact that one can know propositions P1 ... Pn and yet fail to understand subject matter α where α is something understood only by one who knows P1 ... Pn but also further grasps, for instance, the coherence-making relations between various items of knowledge within P1 ... Pn. For example, a student might know–say, through memorisation on the basis of expert testimony, that certain axioms of quantificational logic are true. The student might, however, plausibly fail to understand quantificational logic. The student might fail to grasp the relationship between the axioms that would be requisite for applying quantification logic argument evaluation. It would be hard to accept that the student understands quantificational logic, even though the student knows P1 ... Pn.
References
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Kvanvig, J. (2008). Pointless truth. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXII, 199–212.
Lemos, R. (1995). The nature of value: axiological investigations. Gainesville: University of North Florida Press.
Sosa, E. (2000). For the love of truth. In L. Zagzebski & A. Fairweather (Eds.), Virtue epistemology: Essays on epistemic virtue and responsibility (pp. 49–62). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Carter, J.A. Kvanvig on Pointless Truths and the Cognitive Ideal. Acta Anal 26, 285–293 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0114-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0114-9