Duncan Pritchard the Value of Knowledge

It is commonly held that knowledge is of distinctive value to us. The goal of this paper is to unpack and examine a possible defence of this claima defence which is at least implicit in recent work by some virtue epistemologiststo the effect that knowledge is distinctively valuable because, qua cognitive achievement, it has final value. 1. THE VALUE PROBLEM It is widely thought that knowledge is of distinctive value. Presumably, this is the reason why knowledgeand not, say, justified true beliefhas been the principal focus of generations of epistemological theorising. Understanding just why knowledge is distinctively valuable to us, however, has proved elusive. Call this the value problem. Notice that the value problem, as it stands, is ambiguous in an important respect. Are we simply seeking an explanation of why, whether rightly or wrongly, we regard knowledge as distinctively valuable? Or are we seeking an explanation of why knowledge is distinctively valuable which can in turn explain why we regard knowledge as distinctively valuable? The distinction is of course important, since one will respond to the value problem in very different ways depending on which reading one takes. For now, I want to read the value problem as seeking an explanation of the second sort. As we will see below, however, a failure to adequately respond to the value problem, so construed, could force a retreat into the other construal of this problem; indeed, a construal on which what we seek is an explanation of why we wrongly regard knowledge as distinctively valuable. Part of the difficulty posed by the value problem involves getting clear about just what it means to say that knowledge is distinctively valuable to us. One minimal reading of this claim is that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. Call the challenge to explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief the primary value problem.