The value problem of knowledge can be dated back to at least Plato’s dialogue Meno. In this dialogue, Socrates’ interlocutor asks why knowledge is more valuable than simply having a true belief. After all, a true belief that p seems just as practically valuable as knowledge that p. Consider the case of Sam who wishes to get to his friend, Susan. It might be argued that a true belief about the correct way to get to Susan is just as useful as knowledge of the correct way to get to Susan. After all, in both cases a true belief and knowledge gets Sam to Susan. On the other hand, many believe that knowledge is more valuable than true belief, but it remains difficult to explain why. The central issue in the value problem is the following: why is knowledge more valuable than true belief? Moreover, how exactly do we account for this value?
Plato attempts to solve the value problem by asserting that knowledge gives an agent confidence in one’s belief. True belief, on the other hand, apparently does not. So the value of knowledge, according to Plato, is closely connected to confidence. Additionally, Plato goes on to argue that knowledge requires justification that ties down a true belief so it does not “fly away”. The additional justification gives one confidence in one’s belief, which in turn makes the belief more difficult to give up. True beliefs, on the other hand, do not give one the type of confidence that knowledge does. The difficulty with Plato’s solution is it’s not entirely clear why true belief cannot be believed in confidence. After all, there seem to be many people who truly believe a proposition with high degrees of confidence. Cult leaders, for example, often believe very confidently that they are some sort of beacon of truth. They believe that what they say is true with unwavering confidence, and they expect their followers to share this belief with similar degrees of confidence. Even though many cult leaders believe falsely, the unwavering confidence still exists. But if one can have confidence in a false belief, there is no reason why that same person cannot also have confidence in a true belief without justification. Therefore, Plato’s initial response to the value problem is not satisfactory.
Perhaps credibility has something to do with the value of knowledge. In other words, credibility can add to Plato’s view the notion that some beliefs are worthy to have confidence in. Call this view “the credibility theory.” Expanding on Plato’s reply, the credibility theorist argues that knowledge that p, makes the proposition worthy to have confidence in. Although the cult leader or the true believer may be confidant in their belief, their confidence is misplaced without the added justification. Imagine a case where Sam wants to get to his friend Larissa. Sam is walking down a path and meets a fork in the road: one road goes left and the other road goes right. Standing at the fork is a mysterious cloaked guide that is supposed to point passing travellers to the right or left. Now, suppose the guide merely truly believes that Larissa is on the left and does not know that Larissa is on the left. While the guide might lead Sam down the right path, he lacks credibility as a guide, since he does not know. The guide is not epistemically trustworthy and Sam should not have as much confidence in the guide than if the guide actually knew. In other words, the guide lacks the credibility that he might otherwise have if he knew.
Now, one might object that a guide who only truly believes that Larissa is on the left path has some credibility. After all, the guide points to the right direction. In response, the credibility theorist can argue that while the guide can lead Sam correctly, it is also important to remember that the guide has less credibility than if she knew that Larissa is on the left path. For example, consider a similar case where there are two mysterious guides. One guide knows, but the other guide lacks knowledge and only truly believes. Which guide should Sam have confidence in? Which guide should Sam epistemically trust? Which guide is more credible, as a guide, to Sam? I think the answer is clear, the guide who has knowledge is the one Sam should have confidence in. In other words, the guide who has knowledge is the guide Sam should trust, and, according to the credibility theory, the guide with knowledge is a more credible guide to Sam.
Plato’s initial account ran into some difficulties associated with tying the value of knowledge too close to confidence. Particularly, one can have high degrees of confidence in a mere true belief. I think Plato gets something right, and his account can be improved on by the credibility theorist. According to this view, knowledge makes one’s belief worthy to have confidence is. Moreover, one can additionally argue that the closer an epistemic agent is to knowledge, by satisfying at least some conditions for knowledge, the more credible he or she may be. This implies that true belief (or other conditions relevant to knowledge) might give one some credibility, it does not give one as much credibility as knowledge. Although I have not argued the credibility account is true, I think it takes some steps towards addressing the value problem. And, in many cases, taking some steps in answering troubling philosophical worries can add to a philosophical theory. Perhaps it can even add some more credibility to that theory. Does the credibility theory give a promising account towards solving the value problem in epistemology? Are there additional worries I have not presented here that the credibility theorist might encounter? What’s your take?
A Philosopher's Take 
Justin Caouette
September 12, 2013
Ray, I thought Plato`s Theaetetus was his first and most significant epistemic work…
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Ray Aldred
September 12, 2013
Justin, you are certainly right. Meno is where Plato really seems to explore the value problem in significant detail.
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Ray Aldred
September 12, 2013
Reblogged this on Thinking…..
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rmhebertRyan Hebert
September 12, 2013
Thanks for the post, Ray. Interesting stuff. That said, I have some reservations with some of the moving parts here. Let me try to express them.
My first set of reservations have to do with the interpretation of Plato. I’m not a Plato scholar, and I admittedly have no idea what Plato is up to in the Meno, but I find little textual evidence to support the claim that Plato adopted the confidence account you describe. In particular, if you look at 97e through 98a, you find Socrates making the following remark about the statues of Daedalus:
Socrates: If you have one of his works untethered, it is not worth much; it gives you the slip like a runaway slave. But a tethered specimen is very valuable, for they are magnificent creations. And that, I may say, has a bearing on the matter of true opinions. True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place, but they will not stay long. They run away from a man’s mind; so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason. That process, my dear Meno, is recollection, as we agreed earlier. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable. That is why knowledge is something more valuable than right opinion. What distinguishes one from the other is the tether.
Of course, immediately Socrates goes on to dismiss the theoretical depth of the analogy, but I think there are some observations to be made. Most importantly, it seems to me that Plato wouldn’t accept mere confidence as an adequate tether for true belief because mere confidence runs into exactly the same problems that true belief has, namely that it can give you the slip “like a runaway slave”. Moreover, Plato seems to entertain a possible account of the tethering of belief, namely that you tether “by working out the reason”. Whatever is involved with mere confidence, it isn’t working out the reason—your examples dealing with cult leaders shows us that much.
My second set of reservations has to do with the credibility account. I have a number of conflicting feelings about it, but my suspicion is that it is uninformative (at least as it is currently described). If all it takes for a view to be a credibility account is that the belief is worthy of one’s confidence, then it seems to me that there is a risk that literally every account is a credibility account. Let’s compare a pair of inconsistent theories about the value to illustrate my point.
External Goods Theory (EGT): Knowing that P is more valuable than merely truly believing that P because one’s future prospects are in general/in the long run/overall better if one knows than if one merely truly believes.
Justification Theory (JT): Knowing that P is more valuable than merely truly believing that P because the property “…is justified to believe that…” is an intrinsically and ultima facie good feature of belief.
Williamson argues for something like EGT in chapter 3 of “Knowledge and Its Limits”. JT has various proponents; virtue epistemologists endorse variations of it, though they typically use the virtues as the good-makers. You can see something like it in chapter 2 of Sosa’s “Knowing Full Well”.
One reason why EGT and JT are inconsistent is that there is a disagreement about the kind of good enjoyed by knowledge. Given EGT, knowledge is instrumentally good because it is the best way to secure the other kinds of goods required for flourishing or happiness or whatever. Given JT, knowledge is intrinsically good because justification is a constitutive feature of knowledge and justification is intrinsically good.
Yet both are consistent with the credibility account. The EGTheorist can say that what makes a certain kind of belief worthy of your confidence is that by having it, your life will go better. The JTheorist can say that is what makes a certain kind of belief worthy of your confidence is that it is justified. So both account agree that beliefs that are instances of knowledge are more valuable than beliefs that aren’t instances of knowledge, but they disagree about the worthiness-making features of belief. The same goes for pretty much every other substantive account of the value of knowledge.
In fact, the confidence account can be cast as a credibility account to. Here how: What makes a belief worthy of your confidence is that you (would) so confidently believe. On such an account, all and only those beliefs you (would) have confidence in are those beliefs worthy of your confidence. On this rendering, the cult leaders you discuss satisfy the credibility account.
I’m not saying that the confidence account, modified or unmodified, is plausible. It isn’t. But the credibility account—at least as it is discussed here—is underspecified. This lack of specification seems to me to lead to some serious worries for the view.
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Ray Aldred
September 12, 2013
Hi Ryan,
Interesting points! I think I will reply to your first worry, then reply to the second worry later, since the latter requires more thought. I could be wrong, but my reading of Plato was that he brought up “tethering” as a psychological point. In other words, justification psychologically ties a belief down in ones mind so that it does not escape. True belief is more apt to run off like a slave. Indeed, this seems to be Duncan Pritchard’s and John Turri’s reading of Meno in their Stanford article on the Value of Knowledge. The particular evidence for the reading can be found in the following:
“True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place, but they will not stay long. They run away from a man’s mind…”
Indeed, as I read it, here Plato seems to be making a psychological point similar to a confidence view. Knowledge gives one psychological confidence in one’s belief. The problem I had with this view is with the psychological assertion Plato gives about true belief. To me, it is not clear that knowledge tends to give us more confidence, or that true beliefs we tend to have less confidence in, or, for that matter, false beliefs we tend to have less confidence in. The confidence account is a psychological account about a distinction between knowledge and true belief: true beliefs tend to “fly away” and justification (or knowledge) tends to give one psychological confidence in one’s belief. The credibility account does not rely on any such psychological assertions. At least that is how I read it, and that is the distinction I tried to make, albeit perhaps I did so unclearly.
I’ll have to think about the second worry a bit more, so stay tuned for that….
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Ray Aldred
September 19, 2013
Hi Ryan,
Sorry it has taken me so long to reply, your second point indeed raised issues with the credibility view that I had not previously considered, so thanks for that.
Your criticism seems to be that the credibility view appears underspecified. (1) is uninformative (or perhaps trivial) and (2) it appears consistent with EGT and JT, which is problematic.
With respect to (1), I would argue that it is not trivial because it makes a few notable distinction. Firstly, it is distinctive from Plato’s initial view about confidence and adds a normative element to it. Secondly, it is obviously logically distinct from knowledge: while if S knows that p, then S is credible, is true, the opposite may not be true. S might be credible, to some degree, but lack knowledge. Perhaps it’s uninformative, because there may not be cases where someone knows, yet lacks the sort of credibility I describe. However, isn’t this what we want when we give some sort of answer to a difficult and perplexing philosophical question? Don’t we want to come up with an account that fails to be false? If I were given more space I would have also implied that the credibility theorist can answer a particular worry Jon Kvanvig raises towards any account that attempts to solve the value problem (he actually claims this worry is insurmountable). Alas, I didn’t have the space. But, that itself seems to make the credibility theory philosophically interesting and informative. Perhaps the uninformative criticism lies more with (2).
The idea with (2) is that for any theory T, T cannot be consistent with two theories that contradict each other. This seems false, or needs clarification. I will try to spell out how. Consider the claim made by Fantl and McGrath that ties knowledge with action, expressed in the following principle:
(KA) If S knows that A is the best action, S ought to act as if A is the best action (essentially, S ought to do A).
Now, KA is consistent with various moral and ethical theories, depending on your moral tastes. It’s consistent with consequentialism and deonological theories, in particular. Does this mean that KA is false? No. Furthermore, Fantl and McGrath might argue that the underspecification of their theory might make it better. After all, it’s consistent with most approaches in moral philosophy. It does not crucially rely on some controversial moral theory, but you can further specify it with whatever moral theory you would like.
I would claim something similar, my underspecification of the theory does not make it false. Moreover, Plato gets something right, because confidence does have something to do with knowledge. I haven’t specified which theory I lean toward when I would further specify it, but, for the record, I am more sympathetic towards the JT theory.
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Ray Aldred
September 12, 2013
Hi Ryan,
Interesting points! I think I will reply to your first worry, then reply to the second worry later, since the latter requires more thought. I could be wrong, but my reading of Plato was that he brought up “tethering” as a psychological point. In other words, justification psychologically ties a belief down in ones mind so that it does not escape. True belief is more apt to run off like a slave. Indeed, this seems to be Duncan Pritchard’s and John Turri’s reading of Meno in their Stanford article on the Value of Knowledge. The particular evidence for the reading can be found in the following:
“True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place, but they will not stay long. They run away from a man’s mind…”
Indeed, as I read it, here Plato seems to be making a psychological point similar to a confidence view. Knowledge gives one psychological confidence in one’s belief. The problem I had with this view is with the psychological assertion Plato gives about true belief. To me, it is not clear that knowledge tends to give us more confidence, or that true beliefs we tend to have less confidence in, or, for that matter, false beliefs we tend to have less confidence in. The confidence account is a psychological account about a distinction between knowledge and true belief: true beliefs tend to “fly away” and justification (or knowledge) tends to give one psychological confidence in one’s belief. The credibility account does not rely on any such psychological assertions. At least that is how I read it, and that is the distinction I tried to make, albeit perhaps I did so unclearly.
I’ll have to think about the second worry a bit more, so stay tuned for that….
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rmhebert
September 12, 2013
Ray,
So we’ll disagree on the interpretation on the passage you quote, but it seems to me that the passage you quote favors something more akin to an external goods view. Recall that the passage concerns the question why it is better to know the way to Larissa than merely truly believe it. Given the passage you quote, your life goes the best way it can when you have merely true belief.
I think you’re right to say that there is a psychological element. One’s opinions—even if true—are prone to running away. To take a dialectical strategy from the pragmatic encroachers, it’s easy to undermine confidence by putting the subject in a high-stakes situation. Suppose that if the subject is right, they go to Larissa; if they are wrong, they suffer horribly for all eternity; if they turn back the way they came, nothing good or bad happens. In such a circumstance, confidence is going to be undermined. Moreover, rational confidence can be undermined in a similar sort of way.
So what’s the tether supposed to do? It’s supposed to keep one’s true opinions in place; it’s supposed to make sure one’s confidence doesn’t waver (when it shouldn’t, at least). But if that’s the function of the tether, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to employ an account that makes the tether the very thing one is trying to tether down. You don’t tether a small fortune by burying it under a pile of an even larger fortune; you don’t tether a statue by stacking a statue on top of it; and you don’t tether beliefs by believing really hard. Fortunes are tethered by e.g. vaults, statues are tethered by e.g. chains, and beliefs are tethered by e.g. “working out the reasons”.
If you’ve worked out the reasons, then presumably you’ve actually justified—publicly or privately—your true belief. You have your reasons at the ready, as it were. This has psychological benefits. I’m more confidence I know an answer once I’ve worked out the reasons for the answer. I am more confident I know how to prove a theorem once I’ve practiced the proof. This seems to me to jive well with the last bit in the passage I quoted where Plato refers to recollection, which, if you will recall (pun intended), is central to the Platonic theory of knowledge. A possible reading is that the thing that tethers is the thing that adds value; and this tether is what makes the thing known. Or, at least, that’s what it appears Plato says:
“[T]hey are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason.”
If something like what I’ve said is right, the psychological benefits aren’t doing the tethering, and they’re not the explanation of the value of knowledge.
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Ray Aldred
September 15, 2013
Ryan, you are probably right, I think we are going to disagree about the interpretation of Plato, but, I would also add, we may disagree about what you take my interpretation to be of Plato. I have some misgivings about some of the examples used to spell out your view, so I will try to present them more clearly. Then I will explain where you might have misread me.
You had suggested that the passage I quoted is more akin to an external goods view, but this is not clear. In fact, there might be an equally plausible reading of an internal goods view of this passage. But, I am generally cautious about reading something from 20th century analytical philosophy into an ancient text. It’s not clear that Plato was wrestling with the exact same questions that our analytic contemporaries were, so please excuse my caution.
I think your usage of pragmatic encroachment might just muddy the issue, since Plato’s point, as I took it, is that knowledge is less apt to run away. You had suggested that confidence in a true belief can easily be undermined given the stakes and interests of the agent. However, if pragmatic encroachment is true, it’s not just the confidence in true belief that is undermined, but also knowledge. This is a grim prospect for anyone who adheres to the psychological distinction Plato seems to make between knowledge and true belief. Moreover, I think high stakes might also add some sort of confidence in one’s belief. For example, consider a religious believer who thinks that he might burn in hell if he gives up his belief that God exists, yet if he’s wrong about his belief that God exists, then he would simply be wrong. Certainly, this believer would have a difficult time giving up his beliefs, even if he was given reasons to the conclusion that it is highly probably that God does not exist. Therefore this religious believer would not likely waver in his beliefs and has a large degree of confidence in his belief, given the stakes.
I liked your ideas about the tether: that it is supposed to, according to Plato, tie true opinions down so that they do not waiver. However, I think you misread my own reading of Plato. You seem to imply that I argue that it is the confidence that is functioning as a tether. This is not the case. Like you, I think that justification or “working out the reasons” functions as a tether. You are right, it is not the psychological benefits that are doing the tethering. But, once tethered, the beliefs are not apt to run away, and it is the “not running away” bit that seems to be doing a lot of the work for Plato’s solution to the value problem. That is why knowledge is more valuable than true belief, for Plato. At least this is how I read him. Indeed, he seems to scoff at true beliefs for exactly that reason: true beliefs are okay as far as they go, but they don’t stick around, they are apt to run away. The wonderful thing about knowledge, Plato argues, is that knowledge is less apt to run away.
An alternative would be to suggest that the “tether” is actually the valuable bit of knowledge. The “working out the reasons” is the valuable bit of knowledge, and not the psychological benefits. But this seems inconsistent with the external goods view (since justification, for Plato, is inherent to knowledge), that you seemed to imply Plato was adhering to in the passage. Moreover, it doesn’t explain why Plato asserts that true beliefs are less valuable, because they are more apt to run away. For Plato, as I read him, the tether he alludes to ties beliefs down so that they don’t run away, and because the belief is less apt to run away than knowledge, it is more valuable than a true belief. Irregardless, I still think this reading of Plato is, at the very least, plausible.
Ray
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