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Expressivism about Knowledge and the Value of Knowledge

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Abstract

The aim of the paper is to state a version of epistemic expressivism regarding knowledge, and to suggest how this expressivism about knowledge explains the value of knowledge. The paper considers how an account of the value of knowledge based on expressivism about knowledge responds to the Meno Problem, the Swamping Problem, and a variety of other questions that pertains to the value of knowledge, and the role of knowledge in our cognitive ecology.

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Notes

  1. See the work by Duncan Pritchard, Ernest Sosa, Linda Zagzebski and others.

  2. See Timothy Williamson (2000).

  3. See Alvin I. Goldman and E. J. Olsson (2009).

  4. See Jonathan L. Kvanvig (2003).

  5. See my ‘Getting the Meno Problem Right’ (forthcoming).

  6. See Terence Cuneo (2007); Michael Lynch (2009).

  7. See Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, 158.

  8. See my ‘Is Epistemic Expressivism Dialectically Incoherent?’ (forthcoming) for a rejection of the arguments proposed by Cuneo, Lynch and Kvanvig.

  9. See Simon Blackburn (1996) where Blackburn considers moral epistemology. Gibbard suggests an account of attributions of knowledge in his Allan Gibbard (2003), chapter 11. Recent work in which epistemic expressivism is discussed (though not always endorsed) is: Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, chapter 7; Matthew Chrisman, “From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism,” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007); Cuneo, The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism; H. Field (1998); Lynch, “Truth, Value and Epistemic Expressivism.”; H. Field (2009). See also Matthew Chrisman (2009) (forthcoming).

  10. See Field, “Epistemology without Metaphysics.”

  11. Cf. Ibid.: 249–50.

  12. Kvanvig makes a similar note, Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, 176.

  13. Cf. Chrisman, “From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism,” 242 ff. Chrisman has since refined his views on these matters. See his interesting “From Epistemic Expressivism to Epistemic Inferentialism.”

  14. Cf. Chrisman, “From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism,” 241.

  15. In response to this, one might suggest a fuller reading of ‘entitlement’ in Chrisman’s (2’s) above. The suggestion might go that to be entitled to a true belief that p by some epistemic norm is to have a permission (or obligation) to regard p as true, and to suspend further inquiry, and so on. I have no objections to this. The suggestion might simply that the content of being entitled by an epistemic norm to a proposition is provided by the k-norms. With this explication, Chrisman’s epistemic expressivism might be identical with the view defended here. Chrisman made this comment in personal communication.

  16. Cf. M. Heller (1999). To keep the presentation manageable, I have defined epistemic position in terms of possible worlds. This isn’t essential, however, and many other ways of understanding epistemic position would do.

  17. Compare Ibid.: 119 where Heller remarks: ‘‘Knowledge’ is our word for saying that S’s epistemic condition is good enough when she has a true belief without saying exactly what that condition is’. I agree, but Heller’s view needs a friendly amendment: holding S’s epistemic condition with respect to p good enough by saying that S knows that p just is to endorse the k-norms for p.

  18. See Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, 183, where Kvanvig questions whether Greco’s pragmatic version of epistemic attitudinalism can easily meet this requirement.

  19. These sets of norms need not be complete, as Allan Gibbard explains (1990).

  20. These are what one might call simple disagreements about knowledge. Of course, we often have complex disagreements, in which one disagrees not only about whether some proposition is known, but also whether it is true at all.

  21. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement, 55.

  22. See the discussion in Cuneo about the parallels between expressivism in the epistemic and the ethical domain.

  23. Of course, the value of treating a belief as known may be outweighed by other factors, say the cost of bringing oneself in a sufficiently strong epistemic position. Moreover, even when other things are equal, there may be special circumstances cancelling the value derived from treating a belief as known. Consider a world in which an evil demon dislikes subjects that appear certain about their worldly beliefs and therefore severely punishes those that regard those beliefs as known but not those who merely regard their beliefs as more or less justified.

  24. Goldman and Olsson, “Reliabilism and the Value of Knowledge,” 28.

  25. Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits, 79.

  26. Note though, that nothing in the account on offer rules out that in many cases known beliefs are valuable for instrumental reasons or stability reasons.

  27. See the fuller discussion of these cases in my ‘Getting the Meno Problem Right’ (forthcoming).

  28. For discussions of this problem, see Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding. and Zagzebski (2003).

  29. See Mark Kaplan (1985).

  30. Note the similar remarks that Kvanvig makes about the aims of inquiry, in his Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, 143ff.

  31. Pritchard et al. (2009).

  32. Kaplan’s expression, see Mark Kaplan (2003).

  33. Earlier versions of material in this paper were presented at Danish Epistemology Network workshops in 2006, at the Amsterdam Conference on the Value of Knowledge, August 2007, The European Epistemology Network Meeting in Geneva, September 2007, and at the Analytic Philosophy Workshop, Amsterdam, January 2008. The most direct ancestor to this paper was presented at the Bled Epistemology Conference in 2009. I would like to thank all the audiences for stimulating discussions and important suggestions, in particular Martijn Blauw, Matthew Chrisman, Mikkel Gerken, Sanford Goldberg, David Henderson, Jesper Kallestrup, Jennifer Lackey, Adam Morton, Erik Olsson, Christian Piller, Duncan Pritchard, and Michael Ridge. Thanks to an anonymous referee for Acta Analytica who made some very helpful suggestions.

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Correspondence to Klemens Kappel.

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Kappel, K. Expressivism about Knowledge and the Value of Knowledge. Acta Anal 25, 175–194 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0073-1

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