Abstract
In recent discussions of the so-called “value of truth,” it is assumed that what is valuable in the relevant way is not the things that are true, but only various states and activities associated with those things: knowing them, investigating them, etc. I consider all the arguments I know of for this assumption, and argue that none provide good reason to accept it. By examining these arguments, we gain a better appreciation of what the value of the things that are true would be, and why it would matter. We also encounter three indications that what is true really is valuable, each of which provides a promising starting point for a serious argument with that conclusion.
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Notes
Geach (1979), p. 234.
For example, Goldman (1986), who thinks true beliefs have the relevant value, writes: “Truth acquisition is often desired for its own sake, not for ulterior ends. It would hardly be surprising, then, that intellectual norms should incorporate true beliefs as an autonomous [i.e. non-instrumental] value, quite apart from its possible contribution to biological or practical ends.” (98.) Alston (2005), who thinks knowledge and understanding are valuable in this way, claims that “the attainment of knowledge and understanding are...of intrinsic [i.e. non-instrumental] value.” (31). Williams (2002), who thinks dispositions to learn and tell truths are valuable in this way, argues that they are non-instrumentally valuable, and indeed, that “no human society can get by...with a purely instrumental conception” of their value. (59.) For a more critical discussion of the philosophical tradition that recognizes such a value, see the opening sections of Nietzsche (1886) and Essay 3 of Nietzsche (1887).
At this stage, for etymological reasons, talking of “alethic value” is better than talking of “epistemic” or “doxastic” value. Those terms at least suggest a value that is essentially connected with knowledge or belief, respectively, but there ought to be no such suggestion: all we are entitled to assume that the value is somehow connected to truth. (Many who use those terms do make it clear that they are not assuming, at least at first, that the relevant value has any special connection with knowledge or belief, only with truth; such authors often mean what I mean by “alethic value.”)
Williams (2002), p. 7.
Zagzebski (2003), p. 136.
Lynch (2004), p. 12.
Fassio and Meylan (2018), pp. 54–55. Fassio and Meylan follow the (somewhat etymologically ill-advised, see footnote 3 above) practice of calling the value and assessments in question “epistemic,” but they (rightly) use the term in a way that does not presuppose that the value has anything to do with knowledge, acknowledging that that it instead could be found in connection with mere true beliefs, possessed by agents or character traits, and so on. (see, e.g., page 50 and footnote 20.)
A Google search for the relevant phrases (“true and interesting,” “interesting truths,” etc.) produce millions of hits for books and articles: “True and interesting facts about Mars,” “Interesting truths about America’s Most-Forgotten Military Branch”, “25 Interesting Truths about your Musculoskeletal System,” “Fascinating Truths You Probably Didn’t Know About Freddie Mercury”, “Carly Fiorina Just Said a Fascinating and True Thing About Crony Capitalism”, etc. (For reasons that elude me, most of the top hits for “cool truths” are about teeth: “Cool truths about Dental Care,” “Ten Cool Truths about the Tooth,” etc.)
At best, I see arguments the driving force of which is not historical and linguistic data itself, but the substantive assumptions that drive the other arguments that we will consider below. (For example, one might suppose that the ordinary speakers cannot be ascribing alethic value with such terms because they do not describe all true propositions using such evaluative language, while (they must recognize that) alethic value must be found in connection with all truths. Whether alethic value must really be found in connection with all truths is the subject of the third argument below.)
The idea that these sorts of traditions could establish one view or another about alethic value will appeal to philosophers who employ a broadly endoxic method for theorizing about value: one on which the ways of thinking exhibited by the many and the wise—ordinary people and past theorists–, and which are encoded in their use of words, are taken to be good guides to how value is. Someone who wishes to turn this indication into a serious argument for the alethic value of truths would need to establish through detailed historical work that the view in question is well-represented in the history of philosophy, considering figures in detail and ruling out any alternative interpretations of what they say. One would also need to consider the linguistic data of ordinary speakers in more detail, ruling out any plausible linguistic reasons to doubt that the relevant terms are ascribing alethic value in these cases. (For example, Väyrynen (2011) claims that thick terms (like “fascinating”) can be sometimes used without conveying the usual positive evaluation; that this might be going on here would have to be ruled out.)
Williams (2002), p. 7.
Heal (1987–1988), p. 98.
Ross (1930), Chapter V.
Berker (2013), p. 343. Berker’s use of “teleological” is slightly broader than that of Scanlon (1998), since Scanlon takes teleological views to hold not only that the proper response to value is to bring it about, but also that “The primary bearers of value are states of affairs”, so that “what we have reason to do...as far as questions of value are concerned...is to act so as to realize those states of affairs.” (79–80.)
See Scanlon (1998), pp. 95 and 99. Scanlon himself aims to offer an analysis of what it is for something to be valuable in terms of reasons for such responses, in which case their existence becomes a necessary and sufficient condition for something’s being valuable, and something that we must be able to understand without at any point appealing to value itself. These analytic ambitions give rise to some much-discussed difficulties and challenges, such as the “Wrong Kinds of Reasons” problem. But the perspective on understanding value that Scanlon expresses in the quoted passage can be, and is, adopted even by some who do not aim for such an analysis. Without an analysis, one may still hold that the existence of reasons for positive responses is a central feature of valuable things: that the absence of such reasons makes it reasonable to doubt something is valuable while their presence makes it reasonable to affirm that it is, that part of understanding something’s value is to understand which positive responses are called for, and so on.
See Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2003), p. 391 and Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2004), p. 409. See also, for example, Velleman (1999) on the non-instrumental value (the value “as an end”) of persons and their rational natures: “the rational nature of a person already exists, and so taking it as an end doesn’t entail any inclination to cause or promote its existence...[Such] ends are the objects of motivating attitudes that regard and value them as they already are...[a person with a rational nature] is a proper object for reverence, an attitude that stands back in appreciation of the rational creature he is, without inclining toward any particular results to be produced.” (357–358)
Rønnow-Rasmussen (2011), p. 25.
It may be worth explaining how a different perspective on value also has no place for the assumptions on which the above arguments against the alethic value of truths depend. According to Geach (1956), all value is attributive: “there is no such thing as being just good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so.” (34) On the largely friendly emendation in Thomson (1997), the point is that “all goodness is goodness in a way” (276): if a book is good, it is either because it is good to read, or good to assign to undergraduates, or good to look at, and so on—not “just plain good.” Things that are good in these ways then provide reasons to those with appropriate desires: as Geach puts it, when someone wonders what they should do, “the only relevant answer is an appeal to something the questioner wants.” (39) Those who want something to read, for example, have reasons to read things that are good to read. (Geach does think that some wants are not optional.) This view does not support the idea that all value is to be “promoted”, or any other assumption that obviously yields a metaphysical objection to the alethic value of truths. Just as it is still the book that is good to read (and not just the reading itself), this view would allow that propositions would be good to engage in some relevant dealings with. (Neither this view nor Scanlon’s would be of the kind Williams describes, which regard “the objects of our knowledge and their value as in themselves entirely independent of our thoughts or attitudes.” As noted, Williams is describing one extreme version of the view I defend.)
The idea that this sort of thinking could establish one view or another about alethic value will appeal to philosophers inclined to pursue a broadly theoretical approach to thinking about value: one which aims to determine on general grounds the necessary and sufficient conditions to have various kinds of value, and then check whether those conditions are met in particular cases. Someone who wishes to turn this indication into a serious argument for the alethic value of truths would need to at least provide sufficient conditions for being non-instrumentally valuable and then argue that some truths meet these conditions. For the widespread perspective on value that we have been considering, this requires finding a general characterization of what it is to be a positive attitude directed at something for its own sake, affirming that the existence of reasons to take up such attitudes toward something is sufficient for its non-instrumental value, and arguing that there are such reasons for some truths. Though this does not necessarily require an analysis of non-instrumental value in terms of such reasons, it does depend on addressing some of the same problems that such an analysis must, including not only the “Wrong Kinds of Reasons” problem, but also the problem that there may be no general characterization of the relevant attitudes available no “common element...all we have is just a complicated network of various family resemblances, without clear borderlines.” (Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen 2004, p. 401.)
Sosa (2001), p. 49.
Wrenn (2017), pp. 108–109.
As we will see, one can arrive at this conditional claim by some apparently reasonable steps: steps that, I believe, lead Sosa to think that if any true thing is alethically valuable, then “the being true of truths” is valuable, and if so, every true thing is valuable.
There is also a problem with the claim that since T itself is alethically valuable, its alethic value does not depend on anything else but T. Something that is non-instrumentally valuable might still be valuable because of something other than the thing itself, so long as the relationship is not of the means-end variety. (This is why, as Korsgaard (1983) points out, even someone who thinks that all value in some way depends on humans and their interests should not acknowledge that point “by making goodness a property of something belonging directly to the human being—our experiences or states of mind.” We should rather allow for “the possibility that the things that are important to us have an objective [non-instrumental] value, yet have that value because they are important to us.”) This possibility is central to the approach to value described in the previous section. The problem I point out in the main text, however, is more important because the defense it offers extends even to the extreme view that Williams mentions: that truths and their value are “in themselves entirely independent of our thoughts or attitudes.” (It does not, however, defend the other extreme view mentioned in that section in connection with Frege. Those who think “true” is an evaluative term that expresses alethic value really must hold that all truths are alethically valuable, rejecting Sosa and Wrenn’s claim that not all truths are non-instrumentally valuable. The following section explains how they might do so.)
I do not intend here to defend any sufficient conditions for a truth to be alethically valuable. Nonetheless, filling in some possibilities on which being true is not sufficient might help to see how the explanatory claim could still remain true. Suppose, then, that truths themselves are always alethically valuable unless they have a relatively rare, disqualifying feature: the primitive, mind-independent property of “objective boringness.” (On the perspective described in discussing the Argument from Metaphysics, this would mean there are always reasons to engage in positive attitudes directed at a truth for its own sake, so long as it lacks that property.) If being true and lacking the property of objective boringness is sufficient to be valuable, then being true explains being valuable in much the way being a dog explains having four legs: under normal conditions, with no interference by any rare condition, being true implies being valuable. To take a different example, suppose there is a mind-independent property of “objective interestingness” which most truths do not have, but many do, and suppose that being true and objectively interesting is sufficient to be alethically valuable. In that case, being true explains being valuable in much the way being a smoker explains having cancer: one well-travelled route to being valuable goes by way of being true, just as one well-travelled route to cancer goes by way of being a smoker.
A related protest would be that if the explanatory connection is as weak as those we are considering, we theorists will have no reason to carve off “alethic value” as an interesting kind of value at all. But this point depends on the one in the main text: if there is an explanatory connection between truth and value strong enough to vindicate as non-misleading the description of the conduct of our intellectual heroes in terms of truth, then philosophers ought to carve off and be interested in alethic value. (See the previous footnote for what a philosophical theory of alethic value that makes use only of the weaker explanatory connection might look like.)
Plato [Rep], pp. 474c–475b.
One might propose that philosophers should regiment their talk to make it maximally informative: when we say that someone loves a certain kind of thing, we should mention all of the features that something must have in order for this person to love it. But to do so would simply be to give up describing people who love things. Most of those whom love wine, for example, take a wide range of different wines to be valuable for a wide range of different reasons that could never be exhaustively listed, and there will always be at least some wines that satisfy whatever description we could provide that the person we are describing does not take to be valuable.
I myself think it is reasonable enough. Suppose you find yourself awoken almost every night by a noise. Whenever you are so awakened, you go outside to find the source of this noise and find a certain house on the block rollicking with a wild party. Sometimes you wait up to see how the noise starts, and find that, indeed, this house regularly erupts into a party in the middle of the night. A couple of times while investigating, you also find a different house emitting noise at the same time: two people in that house are having an argument. It would be reasonable to conclude that the noise you are looking for—the one to which your attention is drawn by the way you are so consistently awakened, and which you should perhaps now lodge a complaint about—is the responsibility of the first house alone. That is the best explanation of what you have observed, even if there is, occasionally, another source of noise too.
Jonathan Kvanvig makes this point in defending the value of knowledge-relations to truth even when those relations are harmful to us. He urges us to “distinguish among different types of value: practical, social, moral, political, religious, and aesthetic...In addition to practical concerns, there are purely theoretical ones...it is this kind of value involved in the claim that knowledge and understanding have universal and unqualified value.” (Kvanvig 2008, p. 201.)
For example, Goldman (2001) takes the issue of triviality to motivate a “slight revision” to the claim that all true beliefs are alethically valuable: instead, “the core epistemic value is a high degree of truth-possession on topics of interest.” (38) Others who draw this conclusion from the phenomenon of triviality include Grimm (2008), Côté-Bouchard (2017), and Wrenn (2017). This conclusion is sometimes taken to rule out explaining doxastic normativity—the way we ought to believe—in terms of the value of believing that way.
See, e.g. Horwich (2006), p. 348: “Clearly our various values will occasionally conflict...on occasion...some are to be sacrificed for the sake of others....the sacrificed values continue to matter...but they are outweighed by more important considerations...we can explain our worry [about the value of trivial truths]...as reflecting the recognition that, in many circumstances, the value of finding out the truth...will be less than the costs of doing so.” Variations of this defense appear in Lynch (2004) and Kvanvig (2008).
To consider another such argument: Kvanvig (2008) argues that “part of the cognitive ideal...is knowledge of all truths....But for omniscience to be part of the ideal, no truth can be pointless enough to play no role at all in the story of what it takes to be cognitively ideal.” (pp. 209–210. See also Horwich 2006, footnote 2.) This strikes me as a rather dubious ideal, but even if it does provide reason to think our dealings with trivial truths are valuable, it thereby undermines the reliability of intuitions of worthlessness, leaving us without any particular reason to deny value to trivial truths themselves. Indeed, in many familiar cases, when our dealings with objects are non-instrumentally valuable, their objects are too. (For example, a lover typically thinks the states and activities that constitute her love are non-instrumentally valuable, and so is her beloved. See, e.g., Badhwar 2003.) This pattern ensures that any reason to think that dealings with trivial truths are valuable itself provides some reason to think that the truths themselves are. Strikingly, this very inference is endorsed in the same traditional discussions to which Kvanvig appeals to make it plausible that omniscience is a cognitive ideal in the first place: in Chapter 10 of the New Testament’s Matthew, the point of bringing up God’s omniscience is to use the fact that this (ideal) being engages in cognitive dealings with us to assure us that we ourselves must be “of value,” despite intuitions that we are not.
This is pragmatism in the spirit of James (1907), Lecture II: “What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?...Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.” (Note that this question is about the consequences of one side’s being right, not of, say, publicly affirming that they are.) This pragmatism is “mild” because it does not yet propose to understand truth about value itself in terms of practical consequences.
This point is central to Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy. Murdoch thinks that “in the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego,” which can best be defeated by way of focus on “an object of attention” other than “the brooding self.” The best such objects are non-instrumentally valuable things, because on them, “such focusing...is natural to human beings.” Hence, “It is...a psychological fact...that we can all receive moral help by focusing our attention upon things which are valuable.” See Murdoch (1969), pp. 342–346, and Murdoch (1967), pp. 369–370.
This term comes from the discussion of hedonism in Stocker (1976), Railton (1984) discusses a related “alienation”. One might think that this is only a problem for egoistic hedonists, but it is not: “universal” (or “Benthamite”) hedonists have their attention fixed on everyone’s pleasure, but this still hinders them, for the same reason, from pursuing the high pleasures of art and study, which depend on activities that can only be effectively engaged in if we focus entirely on something which is not anyone’s pleasure. Such hedonists can, though, still achieve the high pleasures of benevolence, since these involve actions whose conscious aim is the production of others’ pleasure.
Sidgwick (1874), pp. 489–490.
For example, Haidt (2006) argues that empirical research by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman shows that achieving the greatest pleasures (which he calls “gratifications”) requires something that “fully engages your attention” which “allow[s] you to lose self-consciousness” and achieve a “state of total immersion.” (94–98) Before Sidgwick, philosophers who had made similar claims include Mill (1873), who recognized at a crucial point in his upbringing that “those only are happy...who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness.” Mill takes this realization to have much in common with the “anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle” (145) and related points figure prominently in the eleventh Sermon of Butler (1726): “Disengagement is absolutely necessary to Enjoyment: And a Person may have so steady and fixed an Eye upon his own Interest...as may give him great and unnecessary Sollicitude and Anxiety; and hinder him from attending to many Gratifications within his reach, which others have their minds free and open to.”
Variations on this perspective might insist that the benefits be especially important, and/or that affirming the thesis about value meets certain reflective tests. Williams (2002), for example, claims that “It is...a sufficient condition for something...to have an intrinsic value that, first, it is necessary (or nearly necessary) for basic human purposes and needs that human beings should treat it as an intrinsic good; and, second, they can coherently treat it as an intrinsic good...[doing so] is stable under reflection.” (92) Those who take the paradox of hedonism to be an objection to hedonism are assuming something along these lines: Stocker (1976), for example, thinks that “as ethical theories,” theories like hedonism “fail by making it impossible for a person to achieve the good in an integrated way.” When he considers the objection that they might nonetheless provide correct “indices of goodness and rightness,” his pragmatism emerges: “why should we be concerned with...theories that cannot be acted on?” (pp. 455–456, 463.) When pragmatists drop independent requirements of truth, they sometimes end up simply identifying truth itself in terms of these practical consequences: as Rorty (1985) puts it, they come to “view truth as, in William James’ phrase, what is good for us to believe.” (4).
Again, the idea that discovering what it is most useful to think about value could support one view or another about alethic value will appeal to philosophers inclined to pursue a broadly pragmatic approach to thinking about value: one which holds philosophical theses about value to be adequately established when overall benefits attend their acceptance. A serious argument for the alethic value of truths along these lines would need to establish in detail the truth of psychological claims like those above, and also ensure that it is overall better for us to affirm the alethic value of truth. It would, then, need to rule out that believing in the alethic value of truths requires giving up on believing something that brings more important benefits. This will put it in conflict with the general thrust of Rorty (1985), which is that the more we come to understand truth itself and the value connected with it in terms of our practices and relations to each other, the better off we will be.
For helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts, I am thankful to audiences at IU Bloomington, UNC Greensboro, and Simon Fraser University, and to Kirk Ludwig, John MacFarlane, Kirsten Pickering, Levi Tenen, Evan Tiffany, and Yuan Wu.
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Hutchinson, J. Why can’t what is true be valuable?. Synthese 198, 6935–6954 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02499-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02499-w