Abstract
This paper examines what it takes to be the intrinsic human goods of knowledge and achievement and argues that they are at many points parallel. Both are compounds, and of parallel elements: belief, justification, and truth in the one case, and intentional pursuit, competence, and success in the other. Each involves a Moorean organic unity, so its full presence or value requires a connection between its elements: an outside-in connection, where what makes a belief true helps explain why it’s justified, for knowledge, and an inside-out connection, where what makes a pursuit competent helps explain its success, for achievement. The features that determine the degrees of value of instances of the two goods, or make some truths more worth knowing and some goals more worth achieving, are also similar, turning in both cases largely on two forms of generality. And more specific goods that follow from valuing generality, such as integrated understanding and complex, difficult achievement, mirror each other structurally. Taken together, these many parallels suggest that knowledge and achievement may both instantiate a more abstract value of rational connection to reality. With or without that deeper unification, the parallels strengthen the claims of both to be genuine goods.
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Notes
This is a generalized version of the “swamping problem” for reliabilist theories of justification; see Kvanvig (2003, ch. 3).
Compare Goldman (1967, pp. 364–366), though he requires what makes p true to cause the belief that p, not its being justified, and even omits justification from his analysis. Nor does he apply his analysis to a priori knowledge or relate it to the value of knowledge.
Isn’t the relation the condition requires another part of knowledge, whose value then is the sum of the values of its parts? Not if “part” refers, as it usually does in discussions of organic unities, to elements of a whole that can exist independently of the other elements, as a relation between two of them cannot.
A related argument that likewise ignores this possibility is in Williamson (2000, pp. 69–72).
I borrow the idea for this extension from Lutz (unpublished).
Compare Goldman (1967, pp. 363, 369–370), though he doesn’t consider deviant-cause cases and applies his “reconstruction” condition only to inductive, not perceptual, knowledge.
Schroeder (2015) too requires both subjective and objective justification but interprets the latter more strongly, so it entails truth.
Compare Bradford (2015, pp. 18–19), which is followed by a deviant-cause case (p. 19).
Greco (2010) and Sosa (2017) give similar accounts of achievement, though with the required internal state a standing disposition or ability rather than, as in mine, an individual competent selection of a means. Their view implies that if someone who usually doesn’t choose effective means manages, on a particular occasion, to do so perfectly, his succeeding doesn’t amount to an achievement.
. What follows is a revised version of the account in Hurka (1993, chs. 9–10).
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented, most recently, at the 10th Congress of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie in Köln in September 2018, and before that, at a Workshop on Goods and the Good at the University of Zurich, a Western Canadian Philosophical Association annual conference, the University of Buffalo, the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, the University of Toronto, the University of Sydney, and the University of Adelaide. For helpful comments and encouragement I am grateful to David Barnett, Roger Crisp, Garrett Cullity, Thomas Grundmann, Joachim Horvath, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Hasko von Kriegstein, Matthew Lutz, Jennifer Nagel, Gideon Rosen, and, especially, Thomas Kelly and two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis.
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Hurka, T. The Parallel Goods of Knowledge and Achievement. Erkenn 85, 589–608 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00245-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00245-0