The Meaning of Life: Early Continental and Analytic Perspectives

The question of the meaning of life is one that interests philosophers and non-philosophers alike. The question itself is notoriously ambiguous and possibly vague. In asking about the meaning of life, one may be asking about the essence of life, about life's purpose, about whether and how anything matters, or a host of other things.

Not everyone is plagued by questions about life's meaning, but some are. The circumstances in which one does ask about life's meaning include those in which: one is well off but bothered by either a sense of dissatisfaction or the prospect of bad things to come; one is young at heart and has a sense of wonder; one is perplexed by the discordant plurality of things and wants to find some unity in all the diversity; or one has lost faith in old values and narratives and wants to know how to live in order to have a meaningful life.

We may read our ancestors in such a way that warrants the claim that the meaning of life has been a human concern from the beginning. But it was only early in the nineteenth century that writers began to write directly about "the meaning of life." The most significant writers were: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy. Schopenhauer ended up saying that the meaning of life is to deny it; Kierkegaard, that the meaning of life is to obey God passionately; Nietzsche, that the meaning of life is the will to power; and Tolstoy, that the meaning of life lies in a kind of irrational knowledge called "faith."

In the twentieth century, in the Continental tradition, Heidegger held that the meaning of life is to live authentically or (alternatively) to be a guardian of the earth.  Sartre espoused the view that life is meaningless but urged us nonetheless to make a free choice that would give our lives meaning and responsibility. Camus also thought that life is absurd and meaningless. The best way to cope with this fact, he held, is to live life with passion, using everything up, and with an attitude of revolt, defiance, or scorn.

In the Anglo-American tradition, William James held that life is meaningful and worth living because of a spiritual order in which we should believe, or else that it is meaningful when there is a marriage of ideals with pluck, will, and the manly virtues; Bertrand Russell argued that to live a meaningful life one must abandon private and petty interests and instead cultivate an interest in the eternal; Moritz Schlick argued that the meaning of life is to be found in play; and A. J. Ayer asserted that the question of the meaning of life is itself meaningless.

All of these set the table for a veritable feast of philosophical writing on the meaning of life that began in the 1950s with Kurt Baier's essay "The Meaning of Life," followed in 1970 by Richard Taylor's influential essay on the same topic, followed shortly by Thomas Nagel's important 1971 essay on "The Absurd.”

Universals and Peter Abelard

Abelard is credited as the founder of nominalism for his claim that a universal is a name (nomen) or significant word (sermo). He is also credited with inspiring a school of followers called the nominales. His discussion of universals has two parts: a rejection of realism and a semantic solution to the problem of universals. In its simplest form, the problem of universals is the problem of explaining how two or more individuals are the same (or similar). Plato and Socrates are both human beings yet they are distinct individuals. A realist posits some item in the world, namely, "humanity"—a universal that is somehow shared by both Plato and Socrates. This shared universal makes both Socrates and Plato human and is the reason the word "human" applies equally to both. Abelard denies the existence of any such universal item in this realist sense. His solution to the problem of universals is a semantic account of how universal words apply to many discrete individuals when there is no universal shared by those individuals.

For the first part of his argument, Abelard generally finds it sufficient to refute particular realist arguments. The three most prominent in Abelard's writings are (1) material essence realism and (2) indifference realism—both held by William of Champeaux—and (3) collective realism.

Material essence realism has three central theses:

(1) there are ten most general essences, one corresponding to each of Aristotle's ten categories. These ten most general essences exist in some degree unformed.

(2) these general essences are the "matter" that is formed into sub-altern genera and species by the addition of differentia, the characteristic features that determine the species to which each type of substance belongs. The most general essence, Substance, is formed into Corporeal Substance and Incorporeal Substance by the addition of the differentiae Corporeal and Incorporeal, and so on down the tree of porphyry

(3) individuation is accomplished by the addition of accidental forms. At the species level—when substance has been differentiated into Rational, Mortal, Animate, Corporeal, Substance (Human)—the addition of accidental forms divides the material essence into discrete individuals. Socrates and Plato share exactly the same material essence of Humanity. But Plato is tall and has brown hair. Socrates is short and bald. These accidental properties make them individuals.

The individuals in a species or genus share the single material essence. This pure universal essence is never actually found in the world, but William claims "it does not go against nature for it to be a pure thing if it were to happen that all its accidents were removed." (Marenbon 2004: 33) This exercise of stripping away the accidental forms of Socrates to arrive at pure humanity is not merely a mental exercise; it could possibly occur thereby revealing the underlying pure universal essence.

It is this principle of a single universal substance individuated by accidents that Abelard reduces to absurdity. Material essence realism makes individuation itself impossible. The accidents that are supposed to individuate substance are themselves un-individuated universal essences. The material essences in the categories of quality and quantity etc. also must be individuated by the addition of an accidental form. An accident cannot individuate substance unless that accident has been individuated first. Abelard writes "The <accidental> forms in themselves are not in essence diverse from one another.... Therefore, Socrates and Plato are no more diverse from one another because of the nature of quality than they are because of the nature of substance." (Spade, 1994: §37) Material essence realism cannot explain the existence of discrete individuals.

In response, William formulates a second realist theory of universals. Indifference realism rejects the core principle of material essence realism: shared essences. William now accepted that it is simply a basic fact about individuals that they are completely discrete from one another. The seed of the theory is found in an ambiguity in the words "one" and "same." William claims that, "When I say Plato and Socrates are the same I might attribute identity of wholly the same essence or I might simply mean that they do not differ in some relevant respect." The stronger sense of "one" and "same" applies to Peter/ Simon, Saul/ Paul (we would say Cicero/Tully). As for Plato and Socrates:

We say that they are the same in that they are men, "same" pertaining with regard to humanity. Just as one is rational so is the other, just as one is mortal so is the other. But if we wanted to make a true confession it is not the same humanity in each one, but similar humanity since they are two men. (Sententiae 236.115-120)

So although Plato and Socrates have no common matter they are still called "same" because they do not differ. This leads to the claim that Abelard finds so disturbing: each individual is both universal and particular. William writes:

One Man is many men, taken particularly. Those which are one considered in a species are many considered particularly. That is to say, without accidents they are considered one perindifference, with accidents many (Iwakuma 1999 p.119).

Indifference realism is not a complete departure from material essence realism. When the accidents are stripped away, Plato and Socrates are still the same although in a weaker sense of "same." They do not share a material essence, nonetheless they do not differ. William's indifference realism holds that when the individuating accidents are stripped away from two individuals what you are left with may be numerically distinct but not discernable individuals. There are two of them but you cannot tell them apart or tell which one was Plato. What you are left with are pure things—there are no individuating characteristics. Each individual is itself the universal.

In his own works, Abelard did not explain indifference realism in any detail. He notes that this view is closer to the truth but he does not explain how or why. He rejects the view based on the metaphysical absurdity of the individual being the universal. On William's second view Socrates is the species "humanity." If Socrates, insofar as he is humanity, is the universal, then it is in fact Socrates that is predicated of Plato when we say "Plato is human." Conversely if the species "humanity" is the individual then it cannot be a universal. By definition an individual cannot be predicated of many. To the more basic claim that Plato and Socrates are the same in that they do not differ in being man, Abelard responds that they are also the same in that they do not differ in being stone. Pointing out that things do not differ does not explain their similarity, agreement, or sameness.

The third prominent realist theory Abelard refutes is collective realism. This is the view that the entire collection of individuals contained in a species constitutes the universal. For example, the entire collection of humans would constitute the universal "Humanity." The entire collection of animals is the universal "Animal." And so forth. Abelard's attack on this view is equally devastating. The central idea in his best arguments is that being an individual of a certain species or genus is metaphysically prior to inclusion in the collection. If there is a prior reason for placing an individual in one collection and not another—if there is a right and a wrong way to put individuals into species—then the collection is not doing the work of the universal. The collection is not defining genera and species, it is reflecting genera and species. If there is no such principle, then any collection of random items could be a genus and any subset of that collection would be a species. Two men, one squirrel and paper cup could be a universal. Collective realism either fails to explain what it purports to explain or adopts such radical conventionalism about ontology that it is reduced to absurdity. Abelard's refutation of William's realism revealed his (Abelard's) commitment to a world populated by discrete individuals. And his refutation of collective realism reveals a belief that individuals fall into natural kinds.

The refutation of prominent realist theories leaves Abelard free to pursue the second part of his argument. Having shown that there are no universal things, he can now develop a semantic theory of universals. In his Logica Ingredientibus, Abelard approaches the subject by posing three distinct questions: What is the common cause for the imposition of universal words? What is the common conception signified by universal words? Are universal words universal because of the common cause, the common conception, or both?

The common cause for the imposition of universal words is the status. The person who imposed the universal word "human" established the convention whereby the word's corresponding sound names each individual that has the status: being a human. In contemporary terms, Abelard holds a theory of direct reference. The universal word refers to—or nominates—each individual with the status even when speakers do not have a clear understanding of the status involved. The statusitself is not an item in Abelard's ontology. That is, it is not matter, form, or essence; it is not a part of the individual. Each individual human can be said to have the status: being a human. But equally a horse and an ass are alike in the status: not being human. Not being human is clearly not some thing shared by a horse and an ass. The status or states of being human or of not being human are basic features of the individual itself. Each human just is a human. Each horse is just not a human. It is a basic fact about individuals that each falls into a niche on the tree of Porphyry, each is of a particular kind. This is because of the way individuals are created. According to Abelard, God conceives an exemplar or model in his mind before he makes individuals. An individual's being human is the result of an individual's being made according to the exemplar for human beings. Analogously, a house's being a ranch results from its being built according to certain blueprints. Being human and being a ranch are not metaphysical items distinct from the individual. It is a basic fact about individuals that each one is made according to an exemplar in the divine mind.

The common conception is the understanding signified by the universal word. The utterance of the word "human" generates an understanding in the mind of the hearer. This common conception or common understanding is the meaning of the word. In successful communication, the speaker has an act of understanding that pertains to all and only things with the status being a human (as described below). He utters the word "human" and thereby causes his hearer to have his own act of understanding that pertains to all and only things that have the status being a human. The understanding generated in the mind of the hearer pertains to the same things as the speaker's understanding when uttering the word. These understandings are formed through a process of abstraction. From studying individual humans and honing the understanding of them, we form an understanding that pertains to each individual with a status but to no individual uniquely. The process of abstraction produces understandings that are alone (sola), bare (nuda), and pure (pura). Alone means apart from sense; we do not understand the individual as a present object of sensation. A bare understanding abstracts away some of the forms in the individual. An understanding that is alone and bare conceives of this-humanity, this-whiteness, etc. An alone and bare understanding is not yet a universal understanding. A universal understanding must be pure: it must abstract from all individuating conditions. The universal understanding generated by the word "human" conceives of just the nature, mortal rational animal, and nothing else. It pertains to all individual humans but only insofar as each is human. The understanding contains nothing by which one individual could be picked out over any other. These alone, bare, and pure understandings can approximate the exemplars in the divine mind sufficiently for the imposition and use of language. However, because we must learn by studying the created individuals our human understandings will always fall short of knowledge. We will never understand natures and properties as well as the creator.

The primacy of the individual is the central element in Abelard's theory. Unless and until individuals with a particular status are created, we cannot form an understanding of their nature or impose a word to name them. This limitation is not an accident of our imperfect epistemic position. In a way that Abelard finds disturbing, the same holds for God.

But a question now arises about the builder's (God's) plan: Is it empty 'false or meaningless' while he now holds in mind the form of the future work, then the thing is not that way yet?... If someone calls it "empty" on the grounds that it would not yet be in harmony with the status of the future thing, we shudder at the awful words, but do not reject the judgment. For it is true that the future status of the world did not materially exist while God was intelligibly arranging what was still future. (Spade, 1994: §135)

Before he creates roses even God's alone, bare, and pure understanding of the nature rose is empty. Presumably, were God to attempt to use the word "rose" under these conditions his word would not name any thing, and no one would know what he was talking about.

Discussion of the problem of universals in the early middle ages was framed by Porphyry's three questions: (a) whether genera and species are real or are situated in bare thoughts alone, (b) whether as real they are bodies or incorporeals, and (c) whether they are separated or in sensibles and have their reality in connection with them. These questions had clearly been formulated with a realist answer in mind. After some not too subtle spin in answering Porphyry's questions Abelard adds a fourth.

Do 'universals' so long as they are 'universals' necessarily have some thing subject to them by nomination? Or alternatively, even if the things named are destroyed, can the universal consist even then in the signification of the understanding alone? For example, the name "rose" when there are no roses to which it is common. (Spade 1994: §10)

Abelard's answer is "no." When there are no roses then the word "rose" is no longer a universal word; it no longer names (or nominates) many discrete individuals. The word "rose", when uttered, would still generate an understanding which would pertain to all roses were the roses to return. When all the roses are gone the sentence "There are no roses" would be both meaningful and true. The understanding, although preserving the meaning of the universal term, is not the universal. When the individuals are destroyed the word is no longer universal.

Aesthetic Concepts and value

The eighteenth century was a surprisingly peaceful time, but this turned out to be the lull before the storm, since out of its orderly classicism there developed a wild romanticism in art and literature, and even revolution in politics. The aesthetic concept which came to be more appreciated in this period was associated with this, namely sublimity, which Edmund Burke theorized about in his “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” The sublime was connected more with pain than pure pleasure, according to Burke, since threats to self-preservation were involved, as on the high seas, and lonely moors, with the devilish humans and dramatic passions that artists and writers were about to portray. But in these circumstances, of course, it is still “delightful horror,” as Burke appreciated, since one is insulated by the fictionality of the work in question from any real danger.

“Sublime” and “beautiful” are only two amongst the many terms which may be used to describe our aesthetic experiences. Clearly there are “ridiculous” and “ugly,” for a start, as well. But the more discriminating will have no difficulty also finding something maybe “fine,” or “lovely” rather than “awful” or “hideous,” and “exquisite” or “superb” rather than “gross” or “foul.” Frank Sibley wrote a notable series of articles, starting in 1959, defending a view of aesthetic concepts as a whole. He said that they were not rule- or condition-governed, but required a heightened form of perception, which one might call taste, sensitivity, or judgment. His full analysis, however, contained another aspect, since he was not only concerned with the sorts of concepts mentioned above, but also with a set of others which had a rather different character. For one can describe works of art, often enough, in terms which relate primarily to the emotional and mental life of human beings. One can call them “joyful,” “melancholy,” “serene,” “witty,” “vulgar,” and “humble,” for instance. These are evidently not purely aesthetic terms, because of their further uses, but they are still very relevant to many aesthetic experiences.

Sibley’s claim about these concepts was that there were no sufficient conditions for their application. For many concepts—sometimes called “closed” concepts, as a result—both necessary and sufficient conditions for their application can be given. To be a bachelor, for instance, it is necessary to be male and unmarried, though of marriageable age, and together these three conditions are sufficient. For other concepts, however, the so-called “open” ones, no such definitions can be given— although for aesthetic concepts Sibley pointed out there were still some necessary conditions, since certain facts can rule out the application of, for example, “garish,” “gaudy,” or “flamboyant.”

The question therefore arises: how do we make aesthetic judgments if not by checking sufficient conditions? Sibley’s account was that, when the concepts were not purely perceptual they were mostly metaphoric. Thus, we call artworks “dynamic,” or “sad,” as before, by comparison with the behaviors of humans with those qualities. Other theorists, such as Rudolph Arnheim and Roger Scruton, have held similar views. Scruton, in fact, discriminated eight types of aesthetic concept, and we shall look at some of the others below.

Aesthetic Value

We have noted Kant’s views about the objectivity and universality of judgments of pure beauty, and there are several ways that these notions have been further defended. There is a famous curve, for instance, obtained by the nineteenth century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, which shows how human arousal is quite generally related to complexity of stimulus. We are bored by the simple, become sated, even over-anxious, by the increasingly complex, while in between there is a region of greatest pleasure. The dimension of complexity is only one objective measure of worth which has been proposed in this way. Thus it is now known, for instance, that judgments of facial beauty in humans are a matter of averageness and symmetry. Traditionally, unity was taken to be central, notably by Aristotle in connection with Drama, and when added to complexity it formed a general account of aesthetic value. Thus Francis Hutcheson, in the eighteenth century, asserted that “Uniformity in variety always makes an object beautiful.” Monroe Beardsley, more recently, has introduced a third criterion—intensity—to produce his three “General Canons” of objective worth. He also detailed some “Special Canons.”

Beardsley called the objective criteria within styles of Art “Special Canons.” These were not a matter of something being good of its kind and so involving perfection of a concept in the sense of Kant. They involved defeasible “good-making” and “bad-making” features, more in the manner Hume explained in his major essay in this area, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757). To say a work of art had a positive quality like humor, for instance, was to praise it to some degree, but this could be offset by other qualities which made the work not good as a whole. Beardsley defended all of his canons in a much more detailed way than his eighteenth century predecessor however: through a lengthy, fine-grained, historical analysis of what critics have actually appealed to in the evaluation of artworks. Also, he explicitly made the disclaimer that his canons were the only criteria of value, by separating these “objective reasons” from what he called “affective” and “genetic” reasons. These two other sorts of reasons were to do with audience response, and the originating artist and his times, respectively, and either “The Affective Fallacy” or “The Intentional Fallacy,” he maintained, was involved if these were considered. The discrimination enabled Beardsley to focus on the artwork and its representational relations, if any, to objects in the public world.

Against Beardsley, over many years, Joseph Margolis maintained a “Robust Relativism.” Thus he wanted to say that “aptness,” “partiality,” and “non-cognitivism” characterize art appreciation, rather than “truth,” “universality,” and “knowledge.” He defended this with respect to aesthetic concepts, critical judgments of value, and literary interpretations in particular, saying, more generally, that works of art were “culturally emergent entities” not directly accessible, because of this, to any faculty resembling sense perception. The main debate over aesthetic value, indeed, concerns social and political matters, and the seemingly inevitable partiality of different points of view. The central question concerns whether there is a privileged class, namely those with aesthetic interests, or whether their set of interests has no distinguished place, since, from a sociological perspective, that taste is just one amongst all other tastes in the democratic economy. The sociologist Arnold Hauser preferred a non-relativistic point of view, and was prepared to give a ranking of tastes. High art beat popular art, Hauser said, because of two things: the significance of its content, and the more creative nature of its forms. Roger Taylor, by contrast, set out very fully the “leveller’s” point of view, declaring that "Aida" and "The Sound of Music" have equal value for their respective audiences. He defended this with a thorough philosophical analysis, rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as truth corresponding to an external reality, with the people capable of accessing that truth having some special value. Instead, according to Taylor, there are just different conceptual schemes, in which truth is measured merely by coherence internal to the scheme itself. Janet Wolff looked at this debate more disinterestedly, in particular studying the details of the opposition between Kant and Bourdieu.

The Correspondence Theory of Truth

Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to, or with, a fact—a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). This basic idea has been expressed in many ways, giving rise to an extended family of theories and, more often, theory sketches. Members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, conditions, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences.

The correspondence theory of truth is often associated with metaphysical realism. Its traditional competitors, pragmatist, as well as coherentist, verificationist, and other epistemic theories of truth, are often associated with idealism, anti-realism, or relativism. In recent years, these traditional competitors have been virtually replaced (at least from publication-space) by deflationary theories of truth and, to a lesser extent, by the identity theory (note that these new competitors are typically not associated with anti-realism). Still more recently, two further approaches have received considerable attention. One is truthmaker theory: it is sometimes viewed as a competitor to, sometimes as a more liberal version of, the correspondence theory. The other is pluralism: it incorporates a correspondence account as one, but only one, ingredient of its overall account of truth.

The Primary Value Problem in Knowledge

Knowledge and true belief both tend to be things we want to have, but all else being equal, we tend to prefer to have knowledge over mere true belief. The Primary Value Problem is the problem of explaining why that should be the case. Many epistemologists think that we should take it as a criterion of adequacy for theories of knowledge that they be able to explain the fact that we prefer knowledge to mere true belief, or at least that they be consistent with a good explanation of why that should be the case.

To illustrate: suppose that Steve believes that the Yankees are a good baseball team, because he thinks that their pinstriped uniforms are so sharp-looking. Steve’s belief is true—the Yankees always field a good team—but he holds his belief for such a terrible reason that we are very reluctant to think of it as an item of knowledge.

Cases like Steve’s motivate the view that knowledge consists of more than just true belief. In order to count as knowledge, a belief has to be well justified in some suitable sense, and it should also meet a suitable Gettier-avoidance condition (see Gettier Problems). But not only do beliefs like Steve’s motivate the view that knowledge consists of more than mere true belief: they also motivate the view that knowledge is better to have than true belief. For suppose that Yolanda knows the Yankees’ stats, and on that basis she believes that the Yankees are a good team. It seems that Yolanda’s belief counts as an item of knowledge. And if we compare Steve and Yolanda, it seems that Yolanda is doing better than Steve; we’d prefer to be in Yolanda’s epistemic position rather than in Steve’s. This seems to indicate that we prefer knowledge over mere true belief.

The challenge of the Primary Value Problem is to explain why that should be the case. Why should we care about whether we have knowledge instead of mere true belief? After all, as is often pointed out, true beliefs seem to bring us the very same practical benefits as knowledge. (Steve would do just as well as Yolanda betting on the Yankees, for example.) Socrates makes this point in the Meno, arguing that if someone wants to get to Larisa, and he has a true belief but not knowledge about which road to take, then he will get to Larisa just as surely as if he had knowledge of which road to take. In response to Socrates’s argument, Meno is moved to wonder why anyone should care about having knowledge instead of mere true belief. (Hence, the Primary Value Problem is sometimes called the Meno Problem.)

So in short, the problem is that mere true beliefs seem to be just as likely as knowledge to guide us well in our actions. But we still seem to have the persistent intuition that any given item of knowledge is more valuable than the corresponding item of mere true belief. The challenge is to explain this intuition. Strategies for addressing this problem can either try to show that knowledge really is always more valuable than corresponding items of mere true belief, or else they can allow that knowledge is sometimes (or even always) no more valuable than mere true belief. If we adopt the latter kind of response to the problem, it is incumbent on us to explain why we should have the intuition that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, in cases where it turns out that knowledge isn’t in fact more valuable. Following Pritchard (2008; 2009), we can call strategies of the first kind vindicating, and we can call strategies of the second kind revisionary.

There isn’t a received view among epistemologists about how we ought to respond to the Primary Value Problem, so the most useful thing to do at this point is to consider a number of the more interesting proposals from the literature, and to look at their problems and prospects.

i. Knowledge as Mere True Belief

A very straightforward way to respond to the problem is to deny one of the intuitions on which the problem depends, the intuition that knowledge is distinct from true belief.  Meno toys with this idea in the Meno, though Socrates disabuses him of the idea. (Somewhat more recently, Sartwell (1991; 1992) has defended this approach to knowledge.) If knowledge is identical with true belief, then we can simply reject the value problem as resting on a mistaken view of knowledge. If knowledge is true belief, then there’s no discrepancy in value to explain.

The view that knowledge is just true belief is almost universally rejected, however, and with good reason. Cases where subjects have true beliefs but lack knowledge are so easy to construct and so intuitively obvious that identifying knowledge with true belief represents an extreme departure from what most epistemologists and laypeople think of knowledge. Consider once again Steve’s belief that the Yankees are a good baseball team, which he holds because he thinks their pinstriped uniforms are so sharp. It seems like an abuse of language to call Steve’s belief an item of knowledge. At the very least, we should be hesitant to accept such an extreme view until we’ve exhausted all other theoretical options.

Of course it could still be the case that knowledge is no more valuable than mere true belief, even though knowledge is not identical with true belief. But, as we’ve seen, there is a widespread and resilient intuition that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief (recall, for instance, that we tend to think that Yolanda’s epistemic state is better than Steve’s). If knowledge were identical with true belief, then we would have to take that intuition to be mistaken; but, since we can see that knowledge is more than mere true belief, we can continue looking for an acceptable account which would explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

ii. Stability

Most attempts to explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief proceed by identifying some condition which must be added to true belief in order to yield knowledge, and then explaining why that further condition is valuable. Socrates’s own view, at least as presented in the Meno, is that knowledge is true opinion plus an account of why the opinion is true (where the account of why it is true is itself already present in the soul; it must only be recalled from memory). So, Socrates proposes, a known true belief will be more stable than a mere true belief, because having an account of why a belief is true helps to keep us from losing it. If you don’t have an account of why a proposition is true, you might easily forget it, or abandon your belief in it when you come across some reason for doubting it. But if you do have an account of why a proposition is true, you likely have a greater chance of remembering it, and if you come across some reason for doubting it, you’ll have a reason available to you for continuing to believe it.

A worry for this solution is that it seems to be entirely possible for a subject S to have some entirely unsupported beliefs, which do not count as knowledge, but where S clings to these beliefs dogmatically, even in the face of good counterevidence. S’s belief in a case like this can be just as stable as many items of knowledge—indeed, dogmatically held beliefs can even be more stable than knowledge. For if you know that p, then presumably your belief is a response to some sort of good reason for believing that p. But if your belief is a response to good reasons, then you’d likely be inclined to revise your belief that p, if you were to come across some good evidence for thinking that p is false, or for thinking that you didn’t have any good reason for believing that p in the first place. On the other hand, if p is something you cling to dogmatically (contrary evidence be damned), then you’ll likely retain p even when you get good reason for doubting it. So, even though having stable true beliefs is no doubt a good thing, knowledge isn’t always more stable than mere true belief, and an appeal to stability does not seem to give us an adequate explanation of the extra value of knowledge over mere true belief.

One way to defend the stability response to the value problem is to hold that knowledge is more stable than mere true beliefs, but only for people whose cognitive faculties are in good working order, and to deny that the cognitive faculties of people who cling dogmatically to evidentially unsupported beliefs are in good working order (Williamson 2000). This solution invites the objection, however, that our cognitive faculties are not all geared to the production of true beliefs. Some cognitive faculties are geared towards ensuring our survival, and the outputs of these latter faculties might be held very firmly even if they are not well supported by evidence. For example, there could be subjects with cognitive mechanisms which take as input sudden sounds and generate as output the belief that there’s a predator nearby. Mechanisms like these might very well generate a strong conviction that there’s a predator nearby. Such mechanisms would likely yield many more false positive predator-identifications than they would yield correct identifications, but their poor true-to-false output-ratio doesn’t prevent mechanisms of this kind from having a very high survival value, as long as they do correctly identify predators when they are present. So it’s not really clear that knowledge is more stable than mere true beliefs, even for mere true beliefs which have been produced by cognitive systems which are in good working order, because it’s possible for beliefs to be evidentially unsupported, and very stable, and produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties, all at the same time. (See Kvanvig 2003, ch1. for a critical discussion of Williamson’s appeal to stability.)

iii. Virtues

Virtue epistemologists are, roughly, those who think that knowledge is true belief which is the product of intellectual virtues. They seem to have a plausible solution to the Primary (and, as we’ll see, to the Secondary) Value Problem.

According to a prominent strand of virtue epistemology, knowledge is true belief for which we give the subject credit (Greco 2003), or true belief which is a cognitive success because of the subject’s exercise of her relevant cognitive ability (Greco 2008; Sosa 2007). For example (to adapt Sosa’s analogy): an archer, in firing at a target, might shoot well or poorly. If she shoots poorly but hits the target anyway (say, she takes aim very poorly but sneezes at the moment of firing, and luckily happens to hit the target), her shot doesn’t display skill, and her hitting the target doesn’t reflect well on her. If she shoots well, on the other hand, then she might hit the target or miss the target. If she shoots well and misses the target, we will still credit her with having made a good shot, because her shot manifests skill. If she shoots well and hits the target, then we will credit her success to her having made a good shot—unless there were intervening factors which made it the case that the shot hit the mark just as a matter of luck. For example: if a trickster moves the target while the arrow is in mid-flight, but a sudden gust of wind moves the arrow to the target’s new location, then in spite of the fact that the archer makes a good shot, and she hits the target, she doesn’t hit the target because she made a good shot. She was just lucky, even though she was skillful. But when strange factors don’t intervene, and the archer hits the target because she made a good shot, we give her credit for having hit the target, since we think that performances which succeed because they are competent are the best kind of performances. And, similarly, when it comes to belief-formation, we give people credit for getting things right as a result of the exercise of their intellectual virtues: we think it’s an achievement to get things right as the result of one’s cognitive competence, and so we tend to think that there’s a sense in which people who get things right because of their intellectual competence deserve credit for getting things right.

According to another strand of virtue epistemology (Zagzebski 2003), we don’t think of knowledge as true belief which meets some further condition. Rather, we should think of knowledge as a state which a subject can be in, which involves having the propositional attitude of belief, but which also includes the motivations for which the subject has the belief. Virtuous motivations might include things like diligence, integrity, and a love of truth. And, just as we think that, in ethics, virtuous motives make actions better (saving a drowning child because you don’t want children to suffer and die is better than saving a drowning child because you don’t want to have to give testimony to the police, for example), we should also think that the state of believing because of a virtuous motive is better than believing for some other reason.

Some concerns have been raised for both strands of virtue epistemology, however. Briefly, a worry for the Sosa/Greco type of virtue epistemology is that (as we’ll see in section 3) knowledge might not after all in general be an achievement—it might be something we can come by in a relatively easy or even lazy fashion. A worry for Zagzebski’s type of virtue epistemology is that there seem to be possible cases where subjects can acquire knowledge even though they lack virtuous intellectual motives. Indeed, it seems possible to acquire knowledge even if one has only the darkest of motives: if a torturer is motivated by the desire to waterboard people until they go insane, for example, he can thereby gain knowledge of how long it takes to break a person by waterboarding.

Still, the idea that knowledge can be analyzed as true belief which is somehow virtuously produced and creditable to the agent seems to be worth pursuing. Because the virtue-approach seems to be able to handle most of the Gettier-style problems which plague previous analyses of knowledge, and because it can provide what is on the face of it a plausible solution to the Primary Value Problem, virtue epistemology represents a promising research program, and its problems and prospects deserve careful exploration.

iv. Reliabilism

The Primary Value Problem is sometimes thought to be especially bad for reliabilists about knowledge. Reliabilism in its simplest form is the view that beliefs are justified if and only if they’re produced by reliable processes, and they count as knowledge if and only if they’re produced by reliable processes and they’re not Gettiered. (See, for example, Goldman and Olsson (2009, p. 29 ) The apparent trouble for reliabilism is that reliability only seems to be valuable as a means to truth—so, in any given case where we have a true belief, it’s not clear that the reliability of the process which produced the belief is able to add anything to the value that the belief already has in virtue of being true. The value which true9 beliefs have in virtue of being true completely “swamps” the value of the reliability of their source, if reliability is only valuable as a means to truth. (Hence the Primary Value Problem for reliabilism has often been called the “swamping problem.”)

To illustrate with an example borrowed from Zagzebski (2003): the value of a cup of coffee seems to be a matter of how good the coffee tastes. And we value reliable coffeemakers because we value good cups of coffee. But when it comes to the value of any particular cup of coffee, its value is just a matter of how good it tastes; whether the coffee was produced by a reliable coffeemaker doesn’t add to or detract from the value of the cup of coffee. Similarly, we value true beliefs, and we value reliable belief-forming processes because we care about getting true beliefs. So we have reason to prefer reliable processes over unreliable ones. But whether a particular belief was reliably or unreliably produced doesn’t seem to add to or detract from the value of the belief itself.

Responses have been offered on behalf of reliabilism. Brogaard (2006) points out that critics of reliabilism seem to have been presupposing a Moorean conception of value, according to which the value of an object (or state, condition, and so forth) is entirely a function of the internal properties of the object. (The value of the cup of coffee is determined entirely by its internal properties, not by the reliability of its production, or by the fineness of a particular morning when you enjoy your coffee.) But this is a mistaken view about value in general. External features can add value to objects. We value a genuine Picasso painting more than a flawless counterfeit, for example. If that’s correct, then extra value can be conferred on an object, if it has a valuable source, and perhaps the value of reliable processes can transfer to the beliefs which they produce.

(That is a negative response to the value problem for reliabilism, in the sense that its aim is to show that critics of reliabilism haven’t shown that reliabilists can’t account for the value of knowledge.)

Goldman and Olsson (2009) offer two further responses on behalf of reliabilism. Their first response is that we can hold that true belief is always valuable, and that reliability is only valuable as a means to true belief, but that it is still more valuable to have knowledge (understood as reliabilists understand knowledge, that is, as reliably-produced and unGettiered true belief) than a mere true belief. For if S knows that p in circumstances C, then S has formed the belief that pthrough some reliable process in C. So S has some reliable process available to her, and it generated a belief in C. This makes it more likely that S will have a reliable process available to her in future similar circumstances, than it would be if S had an unreliably produced true belief in C. So, when we’re thinking about how valuable it is to be in circumstances C, it seems to be better for S to be in C if S has knowledge in C than if she has mere true belief in C, because having knowledge in C makes it likelier that she’ll get more true beliefs in future similar circumstances.

This response, Goldman and Olsson think, accounts for the extra value which knowledge has in many cases. But there will still be cases where S’s having knowledge in C doesn’t make it likelier that she’ll get more true beliefs in the future. For example, C might be a unique set of circumstances which is unlikely to come up again. Or S might be employing a reliable process which is available to her in C, but which is likely to become unavailable to her very soon. Or S might be on her deathbed. So this response isn’t a completely validating solution to the value problem, and it’s incumbent on Goldman and Olsson to explain why we should tend to think that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief in those cases when it’s not.

So Goldman and Olsson offer a second response to the Primary Value Problem: when it comes to our intuitions about the value of knowledge, they argue, it’s plausible that these intuitions began long ago with the recognition that true belief is always valuable in some sense to have, and that knowledge is usually valuable because it involves both true belief and the probability of getting more true beliefs; and then, over time, we have come to simply think that knowledge is valuable, even in cases when having knowledge doesn’t make it more probable that the subject will get more true beliefs in the future.

v. Contingent Features of Knowledge

An approach similar to Goldman and Olsson’s is to consider the values of contingent features of knowledge, rather than the value of its necessary and/or sufficient conditions. Although we might think that the natural way to account for the value of some state or condition S1, which is composed of other states or conditions S2-Sn, is in terms of the values of S2-Sn, perhaps S1 can be valuable in virtue of some other conditions which typically (but not always) accompany S1, or in terms of some valuable result which S1 is typically (but not always) able to get us. For example: it’s normal to think that air travel is valuable, because it typically enables people to cover great distances safely and quickly. Of course, sometimes airplanes are diverted, and slow travellers down, and sometimes airplanes crash. But even so, we might continue to think, air travel is typically a valuable thing, because in ordinary cases, it gets us something good.

Similarly, we might think that knowledge is valuable because we need to rely on the information which people give us in order to accomplish just about anything in this life, and being able to identify people as having knowledge means being able to rely on them as informants. And we also might think that there’s value in being able to track whether our own beliefs are held on the basis of good reasons, and we typically have good reasons available to us for believing p when we know that p. Of course we aren’t always in a position to identify when other people have knowledge, and if externalists about knowledge are right, then we don’t always have good reasons available to us when we have knowledge ourselves. Nevertheless, we can typically identify people as knowers, and we can typically identify good reasons for the things we know. These things are valuable, so they make typical cases of knowledge valuable, too. (See Craig (1990) for an account of the value of knowledge in terms of the characteristic function of knowledge-attribution. Jones (1997) further develops the view.)

Like Goldman and Olsson’s responses, this strategy for responding to the value problem doesn’t give us an account of why knowledge is always more valuable than mere true belief. For those who think that knowledge is always preferable to mere true belief, and who therefore seek a validating solution to the Primary Value Problem, this strategy will not be satisfactory. But for those who are willing to accept a somewhat revisionist response, according to which knowledge is only usually or characteristically preferable to mere true belief, this strategy seems promising.

b. The Secondary Value Problem

Suppose you’ve applied for a new position in your company, but your boss tells you that your co-worker Jones is going to get the job. Frustrated, you glance over at Jones, and see that he has ten coins on his desk, and you then watch him put the coins in his pocket. So you form the belief that the person who will get the job has at least ten coins in his or her pocket (call this belief “B”). But it turns out that your boss was just toying with you; he just wanted to see how you would react to bad news. He’s going to give you the job. And it turns out that you also have at least ten coins in your pocket.

So you have a justified true belief, B, which has been Gettiered. In cases like this, once you’ve found out that you were Gettiered, it’s natural to react with annoyance or intellectual embarrassment: even though you got things right (about the coins, though not about who would get the job), and even though you had good reason to think you had things right, you were just lucky in getting things right.

If this is correct—if we do tend to prefer to have knowledge over Gettiered justified true beliefs—then this suggests that there’s a second value problem to be addressed. We seem to prefer having knowledge over having any proper subset of the parts of knowledge. But why should that be the case? What value is added to justified true beliefs, when they meet a suitable anti-Gettier condition?

i. No Extra Value

An initial response is to deny that knowledge is more valuable than mere justified true belief. If we’ve got true beliefs, and good reasons for them, of course we might be Gettiered, if for some reason it turns out that we’re just lucky in having true beliefs. When we inquire into whether p, we want to get to the truth regarding p, and we want to do so in a rationally defensible way. If it turns out that we get to the truth in a rationally defensible way, but strange factors of the case undermine our claim to knowing the truth about p, perhaps it just doesn’t matter that we don’t have knowledge.

Few epistemologists have defended this view, however (though Kaplan (1985) is an exception). We do after all find it irritating when we find out that we’ve been Gettiered; and when we are considering corresponding cases of knowledge and of Gettiered justified true belief, we tend to think that the subject who has knowledge is better off than the subject who is Gettiered. Of course we might be mistaken; there might be nothing better in knowledge than in mere justified true belief. But the presumption seems to be that knowledge is more valuable, and we should try to explain why that is so. Skepticism about the extra value of knowledge over mere justified true belief might be acceptable if we fail to find an adequate explanation, but we shouldn’t accept skepticism before searching for a good explanation.

ii. Virtues

We saw above that some virtue epistemologists think of knowledge in terms of the achievement of true beliefs as a result of the exercise of cognitive skills or virtues. And we do generally seem to value success that results from our efforts and skills (that is, we value success that’s been achievedrather than stumbled into (for example, Sosa (2003; 2007) and Pritchard (2009)). So, because we have a cognitive aim of getting to the truth, and we can achieve that aim either as a result of luck or as a result of our skillful cognitive performance, it seems that the value of achieving our aims as a result of a skillful performance can help explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

That line of thought works just as well as a response to the Secondary Value Problem as to the Primary Value Problem. For in a Gettier case, the subject has a justified true belief, but it’s just as a result of luck that she arrived at a true belief rather than a false one. By contrast, when a subject arrives at a true belief because she has exercised a cognitive virtue, it’s plausible to think that it’s not just lucky that she’s arrived at a true belief; she gets credit for succeeding in the aim of getting to the truth as a result of her skillful performance. So cases of knowledge do, but Gettier cases do not, exemplify the value of succeeding in achieving our aims as a result of a skillful performance.