5 Epistemic Value, Duty, and Virtue
Guy Axtell
Chapter Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:
- Identify questions about value associated with the pursuit of knowledge and justified belief.
- Critically evaluate claims about epistemic entitlement, such as the assertion that a person’s beliefs or attitudes are either responsibly or irresponsibly held.
- Demonstrate analytic writing and reasoning skills in articulating philosophical concepts of epistemic value, duty, and virtue or vice.
Epistemic Value and the Value Problem
You need to go to Larissa, but you do not know the way. We can agree that someone who knows the way would be a good guide. But what about someone who has “a true opinion about which way was the right way,” but who hasn’t gone there and isn’t directly acquainted with the path? (Plato [ca. 380 BCE] 2015, 97b). In the Platonic dialogue Meno, Socrates asks his friend whether such a person with “right opinion concerning that which other people know . . . will not be a worse guide than one who knows” (97b). Meno concurs that this person would not be a worse guide because the conveyed belief, or guidance, would be essentially the same. But upon receiving this response, Socrates observes an oddity: if true belief can serve our practical purpose of successfully guiding action just as well, then why do we value knowledge over true belief? Indeed, why (and how) do we try to distinguish knowledge from merely true belief?
These searching questions leave Meno in the uncomfortable, perplexed state of mind the Greeks termed aporia. Meno now seems to be without resources to answer Socrates’s initial question about the nature of knowledge. But Socrates immediately offers Meno a way out. It seems correct that an assertion or transmitted belief, insofar as it is true, would serve practical ends as well as would knowledge. But for the testifier in our example, the belief lacks justification, and in sharing it that testifier would be “offering guesswork in lieu of knowledge” (98b). If we abstract from the single-iteration cases in which the belief happens to be true, we find that relying upon luck, guesswork, or weakly supported beliefs is quite unlikely to serve well. If so based, our own beliefs are not likely to “stay put” even for us. So, “True opinions, for as long as they remain, are fine things and do nothing but good. But they don’t hang around for long. They escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one tethers them” with a logos or “account” (97e–98a).
Socrates does not say much about the nature of this logos. It might refer to the good reasons for a belief that an agent finds available upon self-reflection. It could also be something more like an explanation for why the agent reliably formed the belief—something that makes clear why it was more than extreme good luck that they came to hold this true belief, rather than some other false belief. But it is clear, firstly, that Socrate