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Engel on pragmatic encroachment and epistemic value

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Abstract

I discuss Engel’s (2009) critique of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology and his related discussion of epistemic value. While I am sympathetic to Engel’s remarks on the former, I think he makes a crucial misstep when he relates this discussion to the latter topic. The goal of this paper is to offer a better articulation of the relationship between these two epistemological issues, with the ultimate goal of lending further support to Engel’s scepticism about pragmatic encroachment in epistemology. As we will see, key to this articulation will be the drawing of a distinction between two importantly different ways of thinking about epistemic value.

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Notes

  1. I am here focusing on pragmatic encroachment about knowledge, specifically, though of course there are versions of the pragmatic encroachment thesis which apply to other epistemic standings.

  2. For the main defences of pragmatic encroachment, see Fantl & McGrath (2002, 2007, 2009), Hawthorne (2004) and Stanley (2005). For a helpful survey of recent work on pragmatic encroachment, see Fantl and McGrath (2010).

  3. I discuss such conversational effects on knowledge ascriptions in Pritchard (2012b, part 3).

  4. See also Pritchard (2007a) for a different kind of response to the lottery-style cases that Hawthorne (2004) employs to motivate a version of pragmatic encroachment.

  5. An anonymous referee has alerted me to the fact that there is a degree of dialectical slippage in Engel’s (2009, Sect. 5) treatment of these issues, in that he opens this section by claiming that pragmatic encroachment, even if true, would have no implications for the value of knowledge. It is clear if one reads further on in this section, however, that Engel’s target is not this claim at all, since his point becomes rather that since pragmatic encroachment is false, hence the kind of pragmatic factors appealed to by proponents of this view have no implications for the value of knowledge.

  6. See, for example, Engel (2009, p. 199). For some of the main defences of this general view about the relationship between knowledge and action, see Williamson (2000), Fantl and McGrath (2002), Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), and Hawthorne and Stanley (2008).

  7. Actually, I think that rather than lending support for pragmatic encroachment about knowledge, this claim would simply be incoherent. For pragmatic encroachment to even make sense we need a fairly clear sense of the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic (e.g., practical) factors. If practical factors are now allowed to generate a specifically epistemic kind of value, then in what sense is this still pragmatic encroachment at all? Haven’t we instead just extended the realm of epistemic to take in factors hitherto considered non-epistemic? This is not to say that such a view is unavailable, only that it is not best thought of in terms of pragmatic encroachment but as a different claim entirely.

  8. The exceptions would be certain defences of pragmatic encroachment. For example, if one holds that knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for rational action, then one might hold that the practical value of knowledge relates to just this epistemic property of knowledge itself. I am grateful to an anonymous referee from Synthese for pressing me on this point.

  9. For more on the swamping problem, see Jones (1997), Swinburne (1999), Kvanvig (2003), and Zagzebski (2003). See also Pritchard et al. (2010, chap. 1) and Pritchard (2011).

  10. The coffee cup analogy is due to Zagzebski (2003).

  11. The chief exponent of veritism is Goldman (1999, 2002), though a view of this sort is implicit in the work of a lot of key contemporary epistemologists. For further discussion of veritism, see Pritchard (2014, forthcoming).

  12. For more on this point, see Pritchard (2011, forthcoming).

  13. Indeed, I think that the best responses that reliabilists offer to the question of the value of knowledge are essentially of this form (though to my knowledge they do not register the distinction between epistemic value and the value of the epistemic that I mark here). See Olsson (2007, 2009) and Goldman and Olsson (2009). For further discussion of reliabilism in this regard, see Pritchard (2014, forthcoming).

    Note that the possibility that one’s theory of knowledge can explain the value of knowledge by appealing to non-epistemic value is even clearer in the case of virtue epistemology. This is because of the general plausibility of the idea that intellectual virtues have broadly ethical value. Thus it could follow from the nature of knowledge that knowledge is of greater value than its sub-parts in virtue of its greater ethical value, even though it is conceded that knowledge is not of greater epistemic value than its sub-parts. For more on virtue epistemology and the value of knowledge, see Pritchard (2009a, (2009b) and Pritchard et al. (2010, chaps. 1–4). See also Pritchard (2012a).

  14. I think that understanding this point also helps us to see why the claim that truth is the fundamental epistemic good is not nearly as problematic as it is (these days anyway) typically supposed to be. For further discussion of this claim, see Pritchard (2014).

  15. Elsewhere—see Pritchard (2007b), Pritchard et al. (2010, ch. 1), and Pritchard and Turri (2011)—I’ve referred to the value problem in terms of these first two contrasts as the “primary” and “secondary” value problems, respectively. See also endnote 16.

  16. There are other axes along which to cast the question of the value of knowledge. For example, one issue we haven’t touched on here is whether knowledge has a distinctive kind of value that its sub-parts lack, such that the difference in value in play is not merely a difference of degree but of kind. (This is a problem that I’ve elsewhere called the “tertiary” value problem—see Pritchard (2007b), Pritchard et al. (2010, chap. 1) and Pritchard and Turri (2011). Relatedly, one gets different versions of the value problem for knowledge by combining different axes: why is knowledge epistemically more valuable than mere true belief?; why is knowledge more valuable than its sub-parts? and so on.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks also to two anonymous referees for Synthese who provided detailed comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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    Duncan Pritchard

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For a Synthese special issue on Truth and Epistemic Norms, (eds.) J. Dutant, D. Fasso & A. Meylan.

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Pritchard, D. Engel on pragmatic encroachment and epistemic value. Synthese 194, 1477–1486 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0755-8

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