CHAPTER
T E N
Is Truth the Primary
Epistemic Goal?
Truth Is not the Primary Epistemic Goal
Jonathan Kvanvig
The question before us concerns the epistemic goal, standardly taken in epistemology
over the past fifty years or so to be that of getting to the truth and avoiding error.
In order to assess the plausibility of any answer to this question, it will be useful to
begin by thinking about the question itself to make sure that it is properly understood.
Asking about goals is asking about values or goods. To ask what one’s goals
are in, say, going to college, we inquire about the perceived values or goods that are
being pursued. So the first thing to note about our question is that it asks about the
values or goods that are epistemic in character.
The second point to note about the question is that it can be addressed from two
quite different perspectives. One perspective is that of the theoretician. From this
perspective, the question concerns what goods or values are central or primary for
the theoretical task undertaken by the epistemologist, whatever that task may be.
There is also another perspective, however, and that perspective is the point of view
of those organisms about whose cognitive activity the epistemologist is theorizing.
From this perspective, the question concerns the values or goods involved in the type
of states and activities investigated by epistemologists.
It is important to keep the difference between these perspectives in mind when
addressing this question, for there is no reason to assume that the answer to the question
will be the same from either perspective. For example, it might be the case that
truth is the primary good that defines the theoretical project of epistemology, yet it
might also be the case that cognitive systems aim at a variety of values different from
truth. Perhaps, for instance, they typically value well-being, or survival, or perhaps
even reproductive success, with truth never playing much of a role at all.
Our question arises primarily from the perspective of the theoretical project of epistemology,
and I will address the question from that point of view. We will see that
the perspective of the cognitive system itself plays a role in this investigation, but
only an ancillary one. In addressing the question before us I will be arguing for a
negative answer to it. I will be arguing, instead, that there is a plurality of epistemic
values and goals, and that though truth is an important epistemic goal, it has no claim
to being the primary such value or goal. In order to argue for this plurality view, it
is important to begin with a general account of the subject matter of epistemology,
for the narrower one’s conception of epistemology, the easier it is to defend the
idea that truth is the primary epistemic goal. After explaining the appropriate
domain of epistemological theorizing, I will take up the task of defending the
pluralistic view.
What Is Epistemology?
Epistemology is often taken to be the theory of knowledge, but that conception is too
narrow. At the most general level of characterization, epistemology is the study of
certain aspects of our cognitive endeavors. In particular, it aims to investigate successful
cognition. Within its purview, then, are various kinds of cognizing, including
processes such as thinking, inquiring, and reasoning; events such as changes in one’s
world view or the adoption of a different perspective on things; and states such as
beliefs assumptions, presuppositions, tenets, working hypotheses, and the like. Also
within its purview is the variety of cognitive successes, including true beliefs and
opinions, viewpoints that make sense of the course of experience, tenets that are
empirically adequate, knowledge, understanding, theoretical wisdom, rational presuppositions,
justified assumptions, working hypotheses likely to be true, responsible
inquiry, and the like.
Two notes of caution are in order here. First, not just any kind of inquiry into
kinds of cognizing and varieties of cognitive success counts as epistemology. Presumably,
one can investigate these issues scientifically as well as philosophically, and
I assume that they can be investigated in other ways as well (religiously, politically,
morally, aesthetically, etc.). Epistemology is the result when these issues are investigated
philosophically, but I will not here attempt any general characterization of the
difference between philosophical and other forms of investigation.
The second point to note is that what kinds of success in cognition are relevant to
epistemology is somewhat controversial. Beliefs that contribute to the well-being of
the organism are successful in some sense of that term, and yet some will hold that
such success is not the kind of success within the purview of the discipline of epistemology.
Notice that success of a practical sort will advert to the causal consequences
of holding the beliefs in question, and a common view is that epistemology is more
concerned with intrinsic features of cognition, the kind reflected in talk of inquiry
for its own sake. When we engage in inquiry for its own sake, successful results will
partake of a kind of success that is independent of any causal contribution to wellbeing
or other practical concerns. When epistemologists reflect on the nature of successful
contribution and the extent to which an organism achieves it, the predominant
approach has been to reflect on a kind of success that abstracts from the consequences
of cognition, whether those consequences are practical, moral, religious, political, or
social. I am inclined here to make a terminological restriction that what I mean by
the use of “epistemology” and related terms is just this study of success which abstracts
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from the consequences of cognition, but I do not wish to be understood to denigrate
more pragmatic approaches that claim to be epistemological yet deny that there is
any value in, or value in thinking about, inquiry for its own sake. In part, my decision
to limit a discussion of epistemology to one involving reflection on success of
this rather rarefied sort rests on an attempt to consider the best case available to those
who defend a positive answer to the question of whether truth is the primary epistemic
goal. On these pragmatic approaches, such a positive answer has nothing to
recommend it, but I will ignore such approaches here.
In slogan form, my characterization of epistemology is that it is the study of
purely theoretical cognitive success, where the notion of what is purely theoretical
is understood as above in terms of abstraction from the causal consequences of
the success in question. As already noted, I grant that this characterization has a
mild stipulative dimension in that it refuses to count as epistemology certain types
of pragmatic approaches to the study of successful cognition. Even with this mild
stipulation, however, the point I am trying to bring across is the breadth of this conception
of epistemology, breadth with ramifications for the question before us. Once
we notice this breadth, we will be struck by the strong reductionist flavor of the claim
that truth is the primary epistemic goal. One’s first inclination should be to maintain
that each independent kind of cognitive success within the purview of epistemology
identifies a cognitive goal in its own right. From this viewpoint, epistemic goals
include knowledge, understanding, wisdom, rationality, justification, sense-making,
and empirically adequate theories in addition to getting to the truth and avoiding
error. Once we have seen the variety of cognitive successes, the proper answer
would seem to be that the class of epistemic goods is manifold, as wide as the
class of cognitive successes. To answer otherwise would seem to engage in Procrusteanism
involved in mild humor that begins with “there are two kinds of people
in the world,” except that this particular truncation would begin by trimming the
number from two to one. Given this initial variety, how could the reductionist viewpoint
be sustained?
Epistemic Values and Goals
One place to turn for a defense of the reductionist thesis is to the needs of epistemology
itself. Perhaps in theorizing about cognitive success, there is a need for appeal
to the goal of getting to the truth and avoiding error. I think something along these
lines underlies the standard view that the epistemic goal is that of getting to the truth
and avoiding error. The Reader’s Digest condensed version of this approach goes like
this: epistemology is the theory of knowledge, and knowledge includes, but is something
more than, true belief. What more is required provides a connection between
truth and belief. For example, it is well accepted that knowledge requires that the
connection between belief and truth is non-accidental. Furthermore, for those who
think that knowledge has a normative ingredient such as justification, rationality,
responsibility, or the like, there will be a theoretical need to distinguish the sense of
such terms from senses which have no place in an account of knowledge, such as
practical senses. Perhaps that epistemic sense of the term should be characterized in
Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal? 287
terms of the goal, or good, of truth itself. If so, then perhaps the best way to think
of the conditions needed for knowledge in addition to belief and truth are conditions
best conceived in terms of some connection to truth.
Marian David provides an account of the matter along these lines. He says:
Knowledge, the epistemic concept par excellence, is usually defined in terms of belief,
truth, and some other epistemic concept, say, justification: S knows p iff p is true, S
belief p, and S is justified in believing p in a manner that meets a suitable anti-Gettier
condition. Belief and truth, although fundamental to epistemology, are not themselves
epistemic concepts. They are the nonepistemic ingredients in knowledge. This means that
epistemology is not responsible for them; that is, as far as epistemology is concerned,
belief and truth are given and can be invoked to account for epistemic concepts. The distinctly
epistemic ingredient in knowledge is justification: the concept of S’s being justified
in believing p. . . . Epistemology is certainly responsible for this concept. Indeed, once
an account of knowledge is at hand, the task of epistemology pretty much reduces to
the task of giving a theory of justification. (David, 2001)
David here endorses several of the claims noted earlier. First, his conclusion that epistemology’s
task reduces to that of giving a theory of justification requires the assumption
that epistemology is the theory of knowledge. So David endorses
(1) Epistemology is the theory of knowledge.
Second, David endorses the strong claim that
(2) The only epistemic concept in an account of knowledge is justification.
David argues for (2) by claiming that belief and truth are not epistemic concepts,
though he does not explain why they are not. Perhaps he is thinking as follows. Truth
is a semantic notion and belief a psychological notion. As such, they should be investigated
by semanticists and psychologists, not epistemologists.
Even if we accept this explanation, David’s claim is a bit strong since it ignores
the condition needed to solve the Gettier problem. (2) denies that attempts to solve
the Gettier problem fall within the domain of epistemology, and that claim is mistaken.
This point is more important than it might seem initially to be, since David’s
approach to showing that truth is the primary epistemic goal requires focusing exclusively
on the theory of justification. Once we alter (2) to accommodate this point
about the Gettier problem, no claims about the theory of justification can establish
on their own the claim that truth is the primary epistemic goal.
I want to stress that we should not overestimate this difficulty, however. One
approach to the Gettier problem, the defeasibility approach, explains the condition
needed to handle that problem as a function on truth and justification. The simplest
example of this approach says that having knowledge requires, in addition to justified
true belief, there being no true information which, if learned, would result in the
person in question no longer being justified in believing the claim in question. Though
complications arise for this overly simple approach,1
the point to note here is that the
central concepts in this approach – truth and justification – already appear in the
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account of knowledge. If David’s point can be sustained that justification is the only
epistemic concept among the concepts of justification, truth, and belief, then this
approach to the Gettier problem will be quite useful in the attempt to argue that truth
is the primary epistemic goal by focusing on its role in the theory of justification. So
even though David’s account cannot succeed without some discussion of the Gettier
problem, there is some hope for the idea that the Gettier problem will not force an
alteration of his view that providing a theory of justification is the central task
of epistemology. Perhaps David finds the defeasibility approach to the Gettier problem
attractive, and it is this attraction that leads him to bypass any discussion of
the Gettier problem in his defense of the claim that truth is the primary epistemic
goal.
The defense of (2) is still troublesome even if we allow this explanation of why
the Gettier problem does not undermine it. One problem with this explanation is that
it proves too much. Justification is a property not only of beliefs but also of other
things (such as actions) not within the domain of epistemology. According to the
above explanation, if a concept is suitable for investigation by disciplines other than
epistemology (such as semantics or psychology), then that concept is not an epistemic
concept. Insofar as justification is also a property of actions, it is suitable for investigation
by action theorists, a subclass among philosophers of mind. So it appears
that the above defense of (2) implies that there are no epistemic concepts in the proper
account of the nature of knowledge!
One might reply that there is a distinctive concept of justification that is at home
only in epistemology, and that concepts of justification which apply to other things
such as actions are simply different concepts. In this way, the concept of justification
needed in an account of knowledge is at home only in epistemology and is thus the
only epistemic concept in an account of knowledge.
Such a view faces serious difficulties. Consider a simple juridical example such as
the O. J. Simpson case. Some who watched the case closely say that contrary to the
actual finding of not guilty, the evidence justified both their position that Simpson
was guilty (beyond a reasonable doubt) and a decision by the judge to send him to
prison for life. This claim predicates justification of two things: the first is a position
of the speaker, i.e. a belief, and the second is an action by a legal authority. On the
view proposed in support of (2) above, we would need to treat this juridical pronouncement
as semantically awkward, in the way it is semantically awkward to say
that both sides of rivers and certain financial institutions are banks.
Let us put these difficulties aside for the moment, however, to see how (2) is supposed
to take us to the idea that truth is the primary epistemic goal. On this issue,
David provides us with two quite different answers. His first answer appeals to the
idea of supervenience:
However, it is usually held that, at some point, the theory of justification has to “break
out of the circle” of epistemic concepts and provide a nonepistemic “anchor” for justification
by connecting it in some significant manner with nonepistemic concepts. . . . It is
not hard to see how the truth-goal fits into this picture. It promises to provide a connection
between the concept of justification and the concept of true belief, tying together
the different ingredients of knowledge. (David, 2001)
Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal? 289
This attempt to find a central place for the truth goal in epistemology is unsuccessful.
The need to anchor epistemic concepts in the non-epistemic is more plausibly
taken as a demand that evaluative concepts supervene on non-evaluative concepts,
and there is no reason to identify truth with the supervenience base of evaluative
concepts in epistemology, any more than there is reason to identify the concept
of the good as the supervenience base of evaluative concepts in ethics. For example,
one answer to the demand for a supervenience base is broadly empiricist: justification
supervenes on experiential states and logical (or quasi-logical) relations between
propositions. In this view, what makes a belief justified is that it stands in the
right logical or quasi-logical relationship to another belief or to (the propositional
content of) an experience. One may be tempted to maintain that the concept of
truth will still enter into this picture when we try to characterize logical relationships,
but that reply is a red herring. First, logical relationships can be characterized
syntactically as well as semantically. Second, and more important, even if truth is
an ingredient in our account of this supervenience base, it is not present in the manner
of a goal or anything of the sort. To argue that because truth is needed to explain
logic, it must be that a primary epistemic goal would also commit one to the
view that because the concept of a sensation is necessary to explain experience,
sensation itself must be a primary epistemic goal according to empiricism.
There is a particular kind of approach to the nature of justification that fits David’s
picture a bit better than the empiricist example. Alvin Goldman’s reliabilism of 1979
begins with the same demand to break out of the circle of epistemic concepts in order
to clarify the nature of justification, and the way in which Goldman prefers to break
out of the circle is in terms of the concept of reliability. The central non-epistemic
concept in his theory is that of the reliability of a process or method of belief formation,
the percentage of times that process or method generates a true belief. Given
that it is percentage of truth over error by which we favor some processes and methods
over others, we might wish to characterize our theoretical preference for some
processes or methods over others in terms of the goal of truth over error, thereby
securing the idea that truth is the primary epistemic goal.
This way of defending the claim that truth is the primary epistemic goal thus
requires the subconclusion that reliabilism is the correct approach to the nature of
justification, a position that is far from trouble-free.2
But the particular problems one
might cite for reliabilism are not the central difficulty. The deeper problem is that the
question we are attempting to answer arises at a different point in epistemological
inquiry than the question of the adequacy of some particular theory of justification.
The question whether truth is the primary epistemic goal is a meta-epistemological
question, whereas the question of the adequacy of reliabilism is not. When we ask
about the primary epistemic goal, we are asking whether there is a way of defending
the idea that truth is the primary epistemic goal that is neutral between competing
epistemological theories, and given that interpretation of the question, the approach
that relies on the adequacy of a reliabilist approach in epistemology must be judged
to be unsuccessful.
David seems to recognize the meta-epistemological character of the issue, for he
provides another and quite different answer to the question of the relationship
between justification and truth. He says:
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Why is truth typically cast as a goal . . . ? Alston provides the reason. It is generally
agreed that being justified is an evaluative concept of some sort: To say that believing
p is justified or unjustified is to evaluate belief p, in some sense, as a good thing or as
a bad thing, as having some positive status or some negative status. The suggestion is
that this type of evaluation, epistemic evaluation, is most naturally understand along
broadly teleological lines, as evaluating beliefs relative to the standard, or goal, of believing
truth and avoiding error. (David, 2001)
David here endorses Alston’s claim that the evaluative character of justification should
be understood teleologically, and this explanation of the relationship between truth
and justification is a suitably meta-epistemological account in contrast to the previous
account which seems to depend on the particular epistemological theory of
reliabilism.
What we need to know, however, is how this point about the teleological character
of justification helps to show that truth is the primary epistemic goal. David’s
argument proceeds by contrasting the idea that truth is the goal with the idea that
knowledge is the goal:
Although knowledge is certainly no less desirable than true belief, the knowledge-goal
is at a disadvantage here because it does not fit into this picture in any helpful manner.
Invoking the knowledge-goal would insert the concept of knowledge right into the specification
of the goal, which would then no longer provide an independent anchor for
understanding epistemic concepts. In particular, any attempt to understand justification
relative to the knowledge-goal would invert the explanatory direction and would make
the whole approach circular and entirely unilluminating. After all, knowledge was supposed
to be explained in terms of justification and not the other way round. This does
not mean that it is wrong in general to talk of knowledge as a goal, nor does it mean
that epistemologists do not desire to have knowledge. However, it does mean that it is
bad epistemology to invoke the knowledge-goal as part of the theory of knowledge
because it is quite useless for theoretical purposes: The knowledge-goal has no theoretical
role to play within the theory of knowledge. (David, 2001)
David’s argument thus proceeds as follows. We have already seen his claims that (1)
epistemology is the theory of knowledge and (2) justification is the only epistemic
concept within the theory of knowledge. These points imply that the central epistemic
concepts are knowledge and justification, so the primary epistemic goal will have to
be one related to these concepts. David’s teleological conception of justification makes
truth a contender for being the primary epistemic goal, and if the only epistemic concepts
are justification and knowledge, the central competitor of the idea that truth is
the primary epistemic goal would be that knowledge itself is the goal. Once we see
the implication from (1) and (2) to the point that the central task of epistemology is
to construct a theory of justification, the knowledge goal cannot be the primary epistemic
goal on pain of rendering our epistemology viciously circular. Only the truth
goal can be central if our theory has any hope of adequacy, so truth must be the
primary epistemic goal.
The form of argument here bears scrutiny since the particular argument in question
relies on the false assumption that epistemology is the theory of knowledge.
Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal? 291
Given this assumption, the competitor to the idea that truth is the primary epistemic
goal is the idea that knowledge is also an epistemic goal. Given the more general conception
of epistemology outlined earlier and the variety of cognitive successes it
implies, we will need a generalization of David’s argument in order to conclude that
truth is the primary epistemic goal. Such a generalization could begin by allowing
that any purely theoretical cognitive success is of value and hence a suitable epistemic
goal. But for each such goal, it has no theoretical goal to play within the project
of theorizing about it, for such an account would make the theory “circular and
entirely unilluminating.” Moreover, it would have to be claimed, any goal that would
render a theory circular and unilluminating in this way cannot be an epistemic goal,
leaving truth as the only standing candidate for that role.
So, on this view, nothing of epistemic value can be an epistemic goal. Instead, only
values that fall outside the domain of cognitive successes can legitimately be cited
when explaining epistemic success. It also follows from this point that truth and belief
cannot themselves be epistemically valuable, for otherwise getting to the truth cannot
itself be an epistemic goal.
Contrast this result with an alternative picture. For simplicity, let us grant David’s
claims that epistemology is the theory of knowledge and that knowledge is to be
understood in terms of justified true belief plus a Gettier condition. The alternative
picture holds that each element in the theory of knowledge should isolate some epistemic
good (something whose value contributes to and helps explain the value of
knowledge). So, for example, truth itself must be an epistemic good, implying that it
has value exceeding that of mere empirical adequacy. In a similar vein, belief must
be an epistemic good, implying that Pyrrhonian counsel to abandon beliefs in favor
of acquiescing to the appearances cannot, in any literal sense, accord with the facts
about what is important from a purely theoretical point of view. Similar points could
be voiced about the other two conditions as well, and the accumulated result of these
points is that if truth is an epistemic goal so are the other values just mentioned. As
a result, truth is not the primary epistemic goal, but rather one among several epistemic
values that have equal claim to being epistemic goals. This alternative picture
strikes me as much more plausible than the idea that nothing that is epistemically
valuable can itself be an epistemic goal or good.
The generalization of David’s argument above has a further problem. This generalization
requires that for any epistemic value V other than truth itself, the fundamental
goal in terms of which a theory of V is constructed is truth itself. Once we
put the view in these terms, I think it is fairly easy to see that it is false, though it
may be more plausible in some parts of epistemology than in others. Perhaps, for
example, it has some plausibility with respect to the value of belief itself. One might
maintain that the value of belief is in some way dependent on the value of truth in
that cognitive activity in general is prompted by the desire to get to the truth, and
that belief is the result of such alethic motivation. Alternative alethic accounts are
also available, ones which posit something sub-intentional as the driving force behind
such activity, perhaps a need or interest or drive or perhaps even an instinct to get
to the truth. One might even hold that it is the function of cognition to get to the
truth and avoid error, whether the organism in question can be properly characterized
by any of the intentional or sub-intentional descriptions just noted.
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Such a view is not without difficulties, however, for there are alternatives to this
truth-based account with some plausibility. To the extent that an organism has explicitly
intentional motivation for cognitive activity, it may be more plausible to characterize
those motivations in terms of a desire for knowledge or understanding rather
than in terms of a desire to get to the truth, for we typically view mere true belief as
something less than what we really want. Moreover, this point about fully intentional
cognitive activity carries over to subintentional contexts as well. If the function of
cognition is to be given a factive characterization – one which implies truth, as
opposed to one which requires only adequate coping with an environment for purposes
of survival and reproduction – the factives of knowledge and understanding
have at least as much going for them as truth itself. That is, it may be more plausible
to hold that the function of cognition is to produce knowledge or understanding
of one’s surroundings than it is to maintain that the function of cognition is to get
to the truth about one’s surroundings.
I do not wish to rest my negative answer to the question of whether truth is the
primary epistemic goal on a rejection of truth-based accounts of cognition, however.
My own view is that something close to a truth-based account is correct. Since my
answer to the question before us does not depend on my view of this matter, I will
present only the briefest account of it here. In my view, the fundamental function of
cognition and the fundamental intentional attitudes involved in cognitive activity can
be characterized without appeal to the concept of truth. The function in question is
that of determining, for any claim p, whether p, e.g. whether it is raining, or whether
a particular object is a predator. Such a characterization appeals to no factive concepts
stronger than truth, however. Moreover, even though the affective states underlying
cognitive activity often involve factives such as knowledge or understanding,
such states are not universal – not everyone wants knowledge, for example, and not
everyone is motivated by a concern for understanding. What is fundamental to explicitly
intentional cognitive activity as such is a weaker state, for even small children
and animals engage in fully intentional cognitive activity. We characterize curiosity
as the desire to know, but small children lacking the concept of knowledge display
curiosity nonetheless. The conclusion to draw from these considerations is that an
adequate characterization of cognition as such will appeal to no motivational structure,
either intentional or non-intentional, involving a factive element stronger than
truth. To the extent, then, that we are persuaded that such a motivational structure
must involve facticity of some sort, we should have no objection to characterizing
cognition in terms of the goal of truth.3
Let us return to the main issue, arising from the fact that the argument we are
considering requires that for any epistemic value V other than truth itself, the fundamental
goal in terms of which a theory of V is constructed is truth itself.
Even if we grant that truth is in some way fundamental to our understanding of
cognition itself, much more is needed to sustain this generalization. In particular, one
would have to be able to argue that truth is fundamental to any of the kinds of purely
theoretical cognitive successes noted earlier. Some such successes clearly involve the
concept of truth, concepts such as knowledge, understanding, wisdom, likely hypotheses,
and justified beliefs; and if these concepts involve the concept of truth, there is
some hope that the goal of truth is somehow fundamental to an adequate account of
Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal? 293
these concepts. There are also cognitive successes that are not obviously truth-related,
such as the concepts of making sense of the course of experience and having found
an empirically adequate theory. Both of these concepts can be explained without
recourse to the goal of truth. An empirically adequate theory is one that will never
be refuted by the course of experience, and one makes sense of the course of experience
by developing a classification system for experiences together with a theory of
explanation of how the various categories are explanatorily related.
Another example of a cognitive success that is not obviously truth-related is that
of responsible inquiry. Explaining why will take a bit of work, and we can begin by
distinguishing deontic concepts from evaluative ones. Most ethical theories are
teleological, explaining deontic notions such as obligation, permission, and forbiddenness
in terms of evaluative notions such as the good. Not all do, however. Deontological
theories refuse such definitions, explaining deontic concepts in other ways,
the paradigm example being a Kantian theory that explains forbiddenness in terms
of internal contradictions between universal maxims.
Epistemology has seen defenders of what is termed deontologism, and here
Chisholm is the paradigm example. Epistemic deontologists have not been deontologists
in the sense defined in the previous paragraph, however, for they have defined
epistemic duties in terms of epistemic values such as truth. Chisholm, for example,
says our epistemic duties arise from the fundamental duty to (do one’s best to) believe
the truth and avoid error (Chisholm, 1977).
What would real deontologism look like in epistemology? A good example of such
can be developed along Bayesian lines. According to one kind of Bayesianism,4
each
of us has a complete theory of evidence in our heads, encoded in the form of conditional
probabilities. Such a theory can explain the forbiddenness of a (degree of) belief
in terms of logical notions such as logical inconsistency, rather than in terms of value
terms. A degree of belief is forbidden when, in the face of new experience, it becomes
logically inconsistent with the relevant conditional probabilities.
Other examples are available as well. Though Richard Foley5
wholeheartedly
endorses the standard epistemic goal of getting to the truth (now) and avoiding error
(now), his theory doesn’t require this teleological aspect. On his theory, a belief is justified
if and only if it conforms to one’s deepest epistemic standards. These standards
are epistemic principles one would endorse given as much time to reflect as is needed
to reach a stable point of view.6
Once we have such internal standards playing a theoretical
role, real deontologism can emerge, for it is in conforming to these standards
that one’s epistemic duties are satisfied.
Teleology in epistemology is needed only when the epistemic principles are licensed
in some other, non-subjective way. If one’s theory is truly subjective, then consistency
with an internalized theory of evidence is all that is needed for defining key
epistemic concepts such as justification. If, however, the theory of evidence is objective,
then one needs some standard against which to assess its adequacy. It is here
that epistemic teleology has its natural home.
Given this background, let us return again to the concept of responsible inquiry.
The concept of epistemic responsibility can have strong subjective overtones, though
it need not. A theory of epistemic responsibility may be modeled on the ethical notion
of responsibility, which is to be contrasted with the notions of praiseworthiness and
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blameworthiness. In the moral sphere, one can be blameless in failing to live up to
one’s responsibility, and if we analogize to epistemic responsibility, we will be willing
to say that one’s inquiry might be irresponsible but blameless. If we refuse to distinguish
epistemic responsibility from epistemic blamelessness, our theory of epistemic
responsibility will be much more subjective, and the possibility of a non-teleological
account of it will emerge.
Not much turns on this issue in the present context, however, for even in the face
of a compelling argument that responsibility should be identified with blamelessness,
there will still be an epistemic concept of value that can be understood in nonteleological
terms – namely, intellectually blameless inquiry. So not only are there the
notions of sense-making and empirical adequacy that do not presume the goal of
truth, there are other, normative notions that can equally be clarified without appeal
to the goal of truth.
Conclusion
The slogan that truth is the epistemic goal has influenced much of epistemology in
recent history, and we have seen that there is some truth in this idea. In particular,
the idea of truth as a goal will play a significant and fundamental role in our understanding
of cognition itself. The claim that truth is the primary epistemic goal,
however, goes well beyond such a claim. It implies that the concept of truth plays a
fundamental role in any adequate theory of any cognitive success of a purely theoretical
sort. The view I have defended is that such a position has too narrow a view
of the variety of epistemic values and goods, and that once we appreciate this variety
and the broadened conception of the domain of epistemological inquiry, we will go
no further than to embrace the idea that truth is an important and central epistemic
value and goal.
Notes
1 For discussion of these complications, see Klein (1981).
2 To my mind, the most serious such problem is that reliabilism cannot explain adequately
the concept of propositional justification, the kind of justification one might have for a
proposition one does not believe or which one disbelieves (believes the opposite). I have
argued this point in several places (e.g. Kvanvig, 1990, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2003).
3 For a more complete investigation of these issues, see the chapter on the value of truth in
my 2003.
4 For an intuitive account of Bayesianism and its commitments, see van Fraassen (1990).
5 The view I discuss here is from Foley (1986).
6 This “operational” definition of the concept of one’s deep standards leads to various objections
to Foley’s view, of the sort that usually plague counterfactual accounts. For example,
if one’s deepest standards are chary of reflection of any kind, what results from Foleyreflection
will be self-stultifying. To avoid these problems, one could develop a Foley-like
view where the counterfactuals in question were taken to be evidentially related to the
question of what one’s deep standards are, but deny that they are related definitionally.
Is Truth the Primary Epistemic Goal? 295