The value of truth and the value of information: On Isaac Levi's epistemology

"I preach a sermon on epistemology," says Levi (2004, p. 77). Isaac Levi is an immensely interesting and powerful philosopher. In my opinion, he has erected a most impressive epistemological edifice in the past 40 years. Inspection of current collections on epistemology, however, reveals that there is little interaction between Levi's work and almost any version of mainstream justification-based or reliability-based epistemology. Why is this? First, Levi resolutely distances himself from many main tenets of mainstream epistemology. He is very decidedly against any sort of "pedigree epistemology" (2004, pp. 11, 232) which holds that whether some belief counts as knowledge is dependent on its origin or its foundation, on where it comes from. He rejects the idea that convergence on the truth is the ultimate aim of inquiry (1980, pp. 70–72). And he is averse to "Parmenidean epistemology" (2004, pp. 10–12) according to which only logical, mathematical or conceptual necessities should be admitted as full beliefs, while everything else should get assigned a degree short of "the Permanent One" (2004, p. 10). For Levi, taking his position just means being true to the pragmatist stance. At any given point of time, a believer doesn’t have to justify his or her currently held beliefs, since there is nothing other than the current set of beliefs upon which the evaluation of the believer's mental state could be based (in Levi's terminology: there is no other "standard of serious possibility"). But that does not mean that believers are exempted from any duty of justification. Believers have to justify their changes of beliefs. Justification in the pragmatist's sense means justification in terms of a believer's goals and values. Within the pragmatist camp, the differentia specifica of Levi's specific position is that justification should be decision-theoretic. As we shall see, truth and information figure most prominently in his own decision-theoretic account. Secondly, even the term "knowledge" has come to play a minor role in Levi's works. In The Enterprise of Knowledge, he has only a short discussion of the justified-true-belief analysis (1980, pp. 1–3, 28–30), and in The Fixation of Belief and Its Undoing (1991, p. 45), he rather casually says that knowledge, as he uses the term, is "error-free, full belief", and he dismisses questions of justification as "irrelevant". I have not been able to find any definition or analysis of knowledge in his most recent books, For the Sake of Argument (1996) and Mild Contraction (2004). To put it provocatively, it begins to seem as if Levi is preaching a sermon on epistemology without knowledge. A third reason for the unfortunate neglect of Levi's work by epistemologists may lie in the fact that much of Levi's presentation is rather technical. It can be hard to follow his philosophy without attending to a lot of logical and probabilistic niceties. Levi finds large