The
Virtues of Knowledge
Anderson
Brown
We are
experiencing a collective epistemological crisis. Meritocratic ideals, the culture of
professionalism, the ideal of journalistic responsibility and the legitimacy of
the scientific enterprise are all called into question. There are always critical voices challenging
complacency, corruption and superficiality in our epistemic norms and that is
right and proper. And there is a long
philosophical tradition of epistemology, or the study of knowledge, dating back
in the European tradition to the ancient Greeks, and a great variety of
attitudes towards the concepts of “belief,” “knowledge” and “truth” can be
found in that tradition as the centuries have passed and cultural and political
circumstances have arisen and fallen away. But from time to time the nihilistic
impulse gains enough momentum that the dangers that would be posed by a general
collapse of epistemic norms become clear.
Times such as ours call for reflection on our concepts of “knowledge”
and “truth” and on the commitments these concepts entail and the values they
reflect.
The
current wave of skepticism in our public discourse is part of a larger wave of
reactionary populism driven by a sense of alienation from and distrust of professional
elites by a significant faction of the population. This is, at least so far, more sinister as a
political phenomenon than as an epistemological one. Reactionary populists and opportunistic
plutocrats are fomenting confusion and mistrust in pursuit of power and money. The tyrant and the pirates try to overcome
authority by subverting authority. This
created crisis does not, at least not yet, amount to a society-wide collapse of
epistemic norms. The scientific
community, for example, feels under attack but the center is holding. The
situation of the media is, unfortunately, more interesting, but enormous
technological changes are another complicated factor, one beyond anyone’s
control. We are not (yet) witnessing the
end of civilization as we know it.
Nonetheless the potential dangers of nihilistic skepticism are greater
than usual.
We
typically find philosophers working on the epistemology of ethics: What kind of
thinking is ethical thinking? Are there
moral facts? How are moral prescriptions
justified? And so on. But now we need to spend some time working in
the other direction: What can we say about the ethics of epistemology? What can we say about our duties as believing
beings? What are the epistemic virtues? The meta-ethical/epistemological question is
this: is knowledge valuable for its own sake?
Affirming the intrinsic value of knowledge both grounds the normative
discussion of the epistemic virtues and sheds new light on that topic.
There
is a global skeptical objection that should be dispensed with at the outset. Global skepticism is the view that knowledge
is not possible. Global skepticism can
be motivated in a variety of ways, some more interesting than others, but
asserting that there is no such thing as knowledge is much like asserting that
there is no such thing as ethics in the sense that we spend a great deal of our
daily lives trying to determine what is true and what is right and no amount of
philosophizing, nihilistic or otherwise, is ever going to change that. If the skeptic prohibits our conventional use
of the words “knowledge” and “ethics” then we will just have to use new words,
say “schmoledge” and “schmethics,” because it is in our quotidian, day-to-day,
pre-reflective world where ethics and epistemology press themselves on us in an
inescapable, existential way. It is in
this world of ordinary life that the bipolarities of right and wrong and truth
and falsity are givens, not constructs.
So, as the character Garcin says at the end of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, “let’s get on with it.”
We want
to think about the intrinsic value of knowledge as distinct from its
instrumental value. We can sharpen this
distinction with some analysis of the concept of “knowledge.” It might seem obvious that knowledge is true belief, but one can come to have a
true belief by accident, say, or perhaps even randomly. For a belief to be knowledge – for us to be
able legitimately to say “I know it” –
a belief needs, somehow, to be grounded or connected to the external
environment, and this connection needs to be causal. These causal connections with the world are
what make a belief justified. Think of a
causal chain that starts with a real entity, event, property or process of or
in the world and ends with the formation of a belief. Links in this chain can include sensory
perception, memory, introspection, logical and mathematical cognition,
testimony and links further downstream, notably inference and coherence. We can refine our concept of knowledge as justified true belief: belief that is
produced by reliable connections with the world.
However,
as the philosopher Edmund Gettier famously pointed out, justified true belief
may not be enough to constitute knowledge.
It is not hard to invent counterfactuals that show this. Say I have a friend and confidant who is the
most reliable source of testimony in my life.
She has told me countless things over the years, she has never lied to
me and everything she has ever told me has been true. She tells me something yet again: this time,
she tells me that “P.” As always, what
she tells me is true, and I believe her.
I now have a justified true belief.
But this time, for whatever reason, my friend is lying to me. She doesn’t believe that P, but she wants me
to believe what she thinks is a falsehood.
Only it is she who is mistaken, and P is in fact true. It doesn’t appear that I know that P (does
it?), even though I have a justified true belief that P. If we followed the causal chain from my
belief back towards its’ anchor in reality we would find the lie: the causal
chain has a broken link. We have refined
our concept of knowledge further: knowledge is a causally grounded justified true belief.
Now we
can examine our intuitions about the intrinsic value of knowledge. Let’s sharpen the question with a
counterfactual that appears more trivial (more connotatively neutral) than the
first one but that makes the same point: a newspaper reporter observes that P
with his own eyes. He reports to his
newspaper the (true) fact that P. The
paper publishes the story but at the printers there is a typo and the sentence
is printed that not-P. I read the story
over my morning coffee but (perhaps because I already suspect that P is true) I
miss the typo. I understand the story to
be asserting that P. Once again I have a
justified true belief but again it’s not causally grounded. If a friend asked, “Where did you read that?”
and I handed him the paper he could look at the article and notice that it read
“not-P.”
What do you feel? Do you value knowledge for its own sake? Do you feel that it is regrettable when your
justified true belief is not causally grounded, even when you don’t know that
it is not, even when you never will know that it is not? I cannot dictate other people’s intuitions,
but my intuition is strong: I prefer genuine knowledge. I want to know, not just truly believe. Why is this?
To use a big word from ethical theory, it feels deontological: it feels
like I have, somehow, a duty to prefer knowledge. It also seems that ethics and epistemology
are closely related at this “meta” level: my sense of a duty to know feels
closely related to my sense of a duty to be good, and to the degree that I feel
these duties I also believe that other people should and (normally) do feel
them as well. It is significant that
these feelings are what philosophers call “non-cognitive”: they do not appear
to be the products of logical chains of thought (remember we are putting to the
side our instrumental or pragmatic reasons for desiring to know and to be good,
in order that we might consider their intrinsic value). They are, instead, intuitions, intuitions
that I think most people share.
In
fact, it appears that these impulses run deeper than duties. A duty is something I might have without
knowing it, something I might have to learn.
But while my childhood caregivers taught me and the less-forgiving real
world continues to teach me about specific epistemic and ethical virtues (be
diligent about finding good sources, always tell the truth) the underlying
impulses to goodness and truth per se
are innate sentiments that must already be present if the derivative virtues
are to be cultivated and sustained. In
Plato’s dialogue Theatetus Socrates
confronts defenders of several varieties of relativism. He asks why, if the relativists believe that
false belief is not possible, are they arguing about anything at all? In seeking the epistemological truth through
argument, they are refuting their own premise that truth is not something that
can be found. Socrates’ claim is that it
is essential human nature to seek the truth and to love the truth. His definition of “philosophy” (which word in
the 4th century BCE referred to knowledge production and
intellectual activity in general: the love of Sophia, goddess of wisdom) is the
discipline of trying to determine what one believes to be true and, having
determined that, of stating these beliefs as clearly and courageously as
possible (Plato absorbed his teacher Socrates’ message that philosophy must not
distinguish the personal from the political: the love of truth is a social
virtue as humans are social animals).
This activity is not specialized; it is the essential activity that
defines the human being. Philosophy
defined this way, Socrates wants us to understand, is nothing less than human
life itself.
Classical
philosophy had much broader aims – and readership – than contemporary
philosophy which is one specialized discipline among others. Classical philosophy was conceived as an
investigation into what it was to live a good life and how the goal of living a
good life might be pursued. This
investigation necessarily included a concentrated focus on human nature, human
virtues and human failings. Whereas
modern ethical philosophy centers judgement on the motives and consequences of
discrete actions, classical ethics centers judgement on the whole person and
the life that person is living. We call
this approach to ethics “virtue ethics” and over the past fifty years or so this
approach has enjoyed a revival, co-existing today with “rights” theories (that
center judgements on motives) and “consequentialist” theories (that center
judgements on outcomes). Over the past
twenty years or so virtue theory has spawned another area of philosophical work
known as “virtue epistemology,” a small but quite vital literature that, as the
name indicates, attempts to delineate the epistemic virtues in a normative
spirit.
Plato,
like most classical writers, is clearly a virtue theorist at the normative
level (in his case rationality, discipline and sobriety are the three virtues
that correspond to the three respective parts of the soul). But the foremost classical avatar of virtue
theory is undoubtedly Aristotle. With
Aristotle as our guide we can develop the present theme of the connection
between the “meta” argument for the intrinsic value of knowledge and the normative
project of delineating the epistemic virtues.
On
Aristotle’s view all human virtues
are useful virtues in that all human virtues function as part of the
realization of a flourishing human being.
It is true that Aristotle, the great categorizer, goes on to distinguish
among several groups of virtues notably including what he called the
“intellectual” virtues and what he called the “practical” virtues, but this is
not to isolate any one group of virtues as essential relative to the rest
(Aristotle, like Plato before him, considers rationality to be the essential property that defines the human being). For Aristotle being “good” is being an
exemplification of a flourishing member of one’s natural kind (roughly, one’s
species): a good horse, a good songbird and a good human will each have their
own constitution of virtues. Virtues are
potentialities that can contribute to the ultimate actuality which is the
realization of one’s nature (the state of eudaimonia,
a word usually translated somewhat inadequately as “happiness.” A better word might be the more Stoic
“satisfaction”). Virtuous behavior is
behavior that serves to convert potential virtue into actual virtue (virtue
realized through action). A key
Aristotelean concept is phronesis,
the synthesis of thought (theory) and action (practice): goodness is not a
static property of a person, rather it is realized at all and only those times
that virtuous potentiality is converted to virtuous actuality. On this view to say of someone that they are
a good person is to say that they are consistently realizing eudaimonia through phronesis.
We now
have the conceptual tools to explain the innate desire to be good (and to know
the truth) that runs deeper than normative duty: prior to deontology (the study
of duty) is teleology, the study of
the function of a thing, in the case of a living being the study of the
realization of that organism. To be
fulfilled as a human being is to realize one’s telos. Understanding
Aristotle’s virtue theory this way we can go on to make some further
observations about the relationship between virtue epistemology’s normative
project and the intrinsic value of knowledge.
Aristotle
makes no distinction between qualitative virtues (“That’s a good knife,”
“That’s a bad refrigerator”) and moral virtues (“She’s honest,” “He’s
intemperate”). Any potential to realize
human fulfillment is virtuous, such that the sense of “virtuous” broadens out
from our contemporary sense of “ethical” to something closer to our sense of
“biological.” Strong and healthy stand
side by side with honest and temperate (this is what fascinated the
existentialist Nietzsche about ancient Greek ethics). It is enough that a quality that
characterizes a flourishing human being is present as a potential that can be
cultivated. The reason that virtues are
valuable is simply that oneself is valuable: choosing to live is more than
merely choosing not to die. (This
suggests an interesting discussion of the moral status of suicide that could be
developed further: the suicide could be said to have opted out of the normative discussion altogether, if prescriptions
are only coherent in the context of the choice to live. That sets an interesting limit on our warrant
to characterize suicide as morally transgressive. But this is a digression just now.) If there is any “duty” prior to ethical and
epistemic duties it is the duty to live, “living” understood as the project of
realizing one’s telos as best one can.
All virtues have equal standing, as the realization of each one is
intrinsic to whatever degree of fulfillment one manages to attain.
Virtue epistemology is conventionally divided
into two areas, the respective territories of the “reliabilists” and the
“responsibilists.” The reliabilists focus
on virtues that contribute to occurrent justification (the justification
provided by immediate experience and thought) such as sensory acuity, logical
acuity, memory and attentive focus. We
might call these “cognitive” virtues.
Responsibilists focus on dispositional virtues that are conducive to
knowledge production in the long run such as curiosity, impartiality, open-mindedness
and responsibility. We might call these
“character” virtues. Any number of
commentators have pointed out that these two projects are in no way mutually
exclusive, but with Aristotle’s teleological approach in mind we can make two
further observations that might expand the discussion in salutary ways.
First, because
virtue epistemology is a normative enterprise, any virtue that is cultivable presents
an epistemic prescription: right conduct is meeting the ongoing challenge of
turning our potentialities into actualities.
This prescription extends with equal force across both the cognitive and
the character virtues: I can correct my nearsightedness with lenses, I can take
steps to correct for my implicit biases (say by adopting a “blind” protocol
when grading student papers), I can practice memory-enhancing exercises, I can
expose myself through travel to other cultures to increase my open-mindedness
and so on. Considered as epistemic normative prescriptions these
all carry equal weight. A question
suggests itself as to how far one can reasonably be expected to self-improve. (Here
we should remind ourselves of Aristotle’s insistence on moderation in all
things lest this mischaracterizes him as unreasonably demanding.) For example, are we under some obligation to exercise our memories? All
other things being equal, it looks like the short answer is yes, we are, if we
accept that our nature as believing
beings entails a normative obligation to strive to be knowers.
Which
brings us to the second point: granting that for Aristotle the ongoing
actualization of potentialities is the definition of human life itself, this
definition dissolves any difference between any virtues at all when considered
as grounding normative prescriptions.
The overall project of Aristotelean virtue theory is neither
specifically “ethical” nor “epistemological.”
As I said above I think the best word to capture Aristotle’s sense of
virtue is a very broadly understood “biological.” (This is a fine example of
Aristotle’s fundamental ontological difference with Plato: for Aristotle
primary being is the unity of form and matter, a kind of non-reductive
materialism, as opposed to Plato’s dualistic ontology of form and matter. Thus, for Aristotle virtue is only present in
action.) So not only is there no
coherent distinction between the cognitive virtues of the reliabilists and the
character virtues of the responsibilists when these respective catalogs of virtues
are used to generate normative prescriptions, but there is also no coherent
distinction between whatever virtues any virtue epistemologist or virtue
ethicist might choose to enumerate and any other human potentialities,
normatively speaking.
Normative prescriptions
of any kind necessarily presume that we have chosen in the first place to live.
Life itself is the process of actualizing our potentialities and this
encompasses all possible exercise and improvement of the body and the
mind. Plato opposed the Manichean idea
that evil existed as an antipode to good.
He understood evil as (merely) the absence of good, and so he insisted
that no one who truly knew the good could act wrongly. In the same way to exist as a believing
being, but without the love of truth, is in a sense an impossibility, something
inconceivable, incoherent. Underlying
the motivation to love goodness and truth is the necessary, encompassing love
of life. To fail to love ourselves in
this way (perhaps this is to fail to have the virtue of dignity?) is to fail to
truly live.
Note
The counterfactual
involving the typographic error is owing to Alvin Goldman (Goldman 1967).
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