The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as (...) justification or understanding, are distinctively valuable. We will call the general question of why knowledge is valuable the value problem. (shrink)

In “Process Reliabilism and the Value Problem” I argue that Erik Olsson and Alvin Goldman's conditional probability solution to the value problem in epistemology is unsuccessful and that it makes significant internalist concessions. In “Kinds of Learning and the Likelihood of Future True Beliefs” Olsson and Martin Jönsson try to show that my argument does “not in the end reduce the plausibility” of Olsson and Goldman's account. Here I argue that, while Olsson and Jönsson clarify and amend the conditional probability (...) approach in a number of helpful ways, my case against it remains intact. I conclude with a constructive proposal as to how their account may be steered in a more promising direction. (shrink)

The value of knowledge has always been a central topic within epistemology. Going all the way back to Plato’s Meno, philosophers have asked, why is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief? Interest in this question has grown in recent years, with theorists proposing a range of answers. But some reject the premise of the question and claim that the value of knowledge is ‘swamped’ by the value of true belief. And others argue that statuses other than knowledge, such as (...) justification or understanding, are distinctively valuable. We will call the general question of why knowledge is valuable the value problem. (shrink)

Among the epistemological ideas commonly associated with the Descartes of the Meditations, at any rate, is a knowledge-infallibilism. Such an idea was seemingly a vital element in Descartes’s search for truth within that investigative setting: only a true belief gained infallibly could be knowledge, as the Meditations conceived of this. Contemporary epistemologists are less likely than Descartes was to advocate our ever seeking knowledge-infallibility, if only because most are doubtful as to its ever being available. Still, they would agree—in a (...) seemingly Cartesian spirit—that if infallible knowledge was available then it would be a stronger link to truth than fallible knowledge ever manages to be. But this paper argues that infallible knowledge lacks that supposed advantage over fallible knowledge. Indeed, we will see why we should move even further away from the epistemological model at the heart of the Meditations: we should adopt knowledge-minimalism, by conceiving of a belief’s being true as always sufficient for its being knowledge—this, for any belief. (shrink)

The value problem for knowledge is the problem of explaining why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. The problem arises for reliabilism in particular, i.e., the externalist view that knowledge amounts to reliably acquired true belief. Goldman and Olsson argue that knowledge, in this sense, is more valuable than mere true belief due to the higher likelihood of future true beliefs (produced by the same reliable process) in the case of knowledge. They maintain that their solution works given (...) four empirical assumptions, which they claim hold “normally.” However, they do not show that their assumptions are externalistically acceptable; nor do they provide detailed evidence for their normality claim. We address these remaining gaps in Goldman and Olsson’s solution in a constructive spirit. In particular, we suggest an externalist interpretation of the assumptions such that they essentially spell out what it means for a broad range of organisms capable of belief-like representations to be epistemically adapted to their environment. Our investigation also sheds light on the circumstances in which the assumptions fail to hold and knowledge therefore fails to have extra value in Goldman and Olsson’s sense. The upshot is a deeper understanding of their solution as a contribution to naturalized epistemology and a strengthened case for its empirical validity. (shrink)

Mathematicians do not claim to know a proposition unless they think they possess a proof of it. For all their confidence in the truth of a proposition with weighty non-deductive support, they maintain that, strictly speaking, the proposition remains unknown until such time as someone has proved it. This article challenges this conception of knowledge, which is quasi-universal within mathematics. We present four arguments to the effect that non-deductive evidence can yield knowledge of a mathematical proposition. We also show that (...) some of what mathematicians take to be deductive knowledge is in fact non-deductive. 1 Introduction2 Why It Might Matter3 Two Further Examples and Preliminaries4 An Exclusive Epistemic Virtue of Proof?5 Analyses of Knowledge6 The Inductive Basis of Deduction7 Physical to Mathematical Linkages8 Conclusion. (shrink)