Examining the nature of epistemic value
Authors:   , Burmeister Jonathan 
Published: September 2024

"In Plato's Meno, the titular character asks "why knowledge is prized far more highly than right opinion" and wants Socrates to explain why they are different. In another of Plato's dialogues, the Phaedo, the character of Socrates states that it would be bad if his friends were swayed to have false beliefs based on his authority alone with no eye for the truth. Later, Aristotle claims that truth is good and falsity is bad with regard to intellectual value when he claims in the Nichomachean Ethics that "[Of] the intellect which is contemplative, not practical not productive, the good and the bad state are truth and falsity respectively (for this is the work of everything intellectual)." More recently than the ancient Greeks, in the early 20th century W.D. Ross included knowledge in the list of things which are prima facie valuable in his 'objective list' theory of value. The discussion of the value of knowledge and true belief has continued from this rich philosophical history into contemporary debates in epistemology. For instance, there is talk of multiple 'value problems' for knowledge and true belief which continues and expands upon the questions asked by Plato in the Meno by asking variations of Meno's original question. The primary value problem involves the question whether knowledge is more valuable than true belief and is essentially the same as Meno's question and the secondary value problem is the question of whether knowledge is more valuable than any proper subset of the parts of knowledge5 --an extension of the original Meno problem. Additionally, there has been quite a bit of discussion centered on the 'swamping problem' for knowledge and true belief, which asks how reliabilist justification can add any value to a belief that is already true. Clearly, the value of knowledge and true belief has been, and continues to be, an important area of discussion for many philosophers. However, as philosophers are wont to do, there hasn't been much agreement on the solutions to the questions that have been asked throughout the years. Furthermore, some of the questions, like the 'value problems' for knowledge, have been disproportionately represented in the contemporary literature on the value of knowledge and true belief. In the following dissertation, I focus on a number of the questions related to the particular nature of the value of knowledge and true belief, evaluating potential lines of response in the literature, and proposing a cohesive set of answers to these various questions. The main focus of the entire project is to begin to answer a number of fundamental questions about epistemic value. Among these questions are: (1) "Does epistemic value exist?" (2) "What types of entities possess fundamental epistemic value?" (3) "Is there any intrinsic epistemic value?" (4) "What is the nature of epistemic value?" and lastly (5) "How does epistemic value relate to other kinds of value posited by philosophers?" Before attempting to answer these questions, however, it will be useful to define some of the important terms used throughout the rest of the project."--Introduction.