Abstract
Veritists maintain that true belief and only true belief is of fundamental epistemic value. They very often go on to derive epistemic norms based on considerations about what promotes this value. A standard objection is that many truths are pointless: there is no value in believing them. In response, veritists often distinguish between significant and insignificant truths, holding that the former are much more valuable (perhaps even incomparably more valuable) than the latter. But critics cry foul: veritists who say this give up on their claim that it is true belief per se that is of fundamental epistemic value. In this paper I evaluate this dispute by comparing it to the well known dispute over J.S. Mill’s doctrine of higher and lower pleasures. I conclude that the veritist can escape the objection, but that the escape route breeds a new, and different problem.
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Notes
And this makes sense. Those who defend veritism almost always also argue that we can derive epistemic norms or epistemic advice by thinking about how to best promote epistemic value. This is how Goldman (1999) proceeds for social epistemology and how Pettigrew (2016) proceeds with respect to the evaluation of rules governing credence functions.
As we’ll see shortly, this mirrors the kind of situation that hedonists about moral value find themselves in. There are objections to hedonism similar to the objection just considered to veritism, and they are standardly lodged against those who are both hedonists about value and who think that we can derive our ethical norms from considerations of value (such as certain kinds of utilitarians).
It is perhaps worth noting that throughout his paper Kvanvig talks about the epistemic value of truth and the problem of pointless truth, rather than the epistemic value of true belief and the problem of pointless true belief. Since his arguments make sense as applied to true belief, but are more puzzling as applied to truth itself, I assume that Kvanvig is using phrases like “the epistemic value of truth” as shorthand for “the epistemic value of true belief”. If that assumption is mistaken, then Kvanvig’s paper is not explicitly relevant to veritism, and one can think of Sect. 2 of this paper as adapting Kvanvig’s arguments about truth to a context where the focus is on true belief instead.
At the conclusion of his paper, Kvanvig seems to note this, but does not seem to think it is a problem. He writes: “It is important to note that nothing about this account presupposes any particular answer to the hard questions about how the value vectors interact or under what conditions undercutting occurs. The defeat of the intrinsic value of truth might occur quite regularly and across a broad range of topics and issues, so that the crassest of restrictions on basic research is justified; or such defeat might be so rare that nearly every restriction on basic research is unwarranted.” (p. 211) It seems to me, though, that inability to give an answer to the kind of case I present in the main text is a serious limitation of the approach, and one which the proponent of significant/insignificant belief distinction is in a good position to answer.
Carter (2011) develops this argument against Kvanvig in more detail and interested readers are directed to that discussion.
One might go even further and argue that in some cases knowledge of certain truths detracts from understanding. For instance, to understand why there was a run on the bank arguably requires us to ignore a host of details about, say, the number of hairs on the heads of those with money deposited in the bank. One could say that this is just because of our cognitive limitations, but there is a danger in this response. If ideal understanding is so far removed from our own, then perhaps we should not think that our intuitions about it are good guides to what is epistemically valuable.
Since knowledge requires true belief, anyone who thinks that knowledge is the sole fundamental epistemic value thinks that only true beliefs are fundamentally epistemically valuable.
Xingming Hu (2017) gives a similar sort of response to the rejoinder.
Nicholas Sturgeon (2010) argues in favor of this kind of interpretation of Mill.
For instance, Sturgeon (2010) argues that ‘the question of intensity’ is a phrase Mill uses interchangeably with ‘the question of quantity’. Hence, Mill is merely repeating here what he said in the first quoted passage: that the pleasantness of an experience is dictated both by its quantity (intensity) and quality.
Terrence Irwin (2009, p. 404), for instance says that this doctrine “introduces a non-utilitarian conception of value”.
It is possible to interpret Mill differently here. Perhaps Mill is saying that apart from intensity of pleasure and quantity of pleasure there is a third intrinsic feature of pleasure: quality. And just as an experience increases in value if the intensity of the pleasure contained in that experience increases, so too does an experience increase in value if the quality of the pleasure increases. According to this interpretation, it is not because they are derived from the higher faculties that certain pleasurable experiences are more valuable. It is just a kind of happy accident that those pleasures derived from the higher faculties turn out to be the pleasures higher in quality than those pleasures derived from the lower faculties. The fact that we have to posit this happy accident, however, also points to a challenge for this view.
Again, assuming, if only for the sake of argument, that the view I’m attributing to Mill is in fact his view.
If this is correct, then we can see that Ahlstrom-Vij and Grimm’s proposal is mistaken, but on the right track. They claim that the distinctive claim of the veritist is that only true belief is finally epistemically valuable. I agree that one can uphold the distinctive veritist claim and restrict the true beliefs that are valuable; but I deny that any way of so-doing preserves that distinctive picture.
Never mind for now how we measure the amount of true belief. That is a tricky, though different, problem.
In his (2015) paper, Clayton Littlejohn considers a case with some structural similarities to this one. I discuss the similarities and differences in the next section.
One might respond by claiming that epistemic obligations/rightness apply only to beliefs. In fact, Singer does write in this way. But there is no argument for this restriction and there is no principled reason to say that epistemic rightness is restricted to beliefs if one adopts a value-first approach according to which value ought to be promoted. Believing is one way to promote epistemic value; doing things is another way.
On many views the relevant believers and beliefs are just oneself and one’s own beliefs.
This requires us to understand counterfactuals in the standard way to disallow “backtracking” (Lewis, 1979). But this is a widely accepted way to understand such counterfactuals.
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Dunn, J. A solution, and a problem, for veritism. Philos Stud 180, 3057–3072 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02029-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-02029-y