Abstract

Veritists maintain that true belief and only true belief is of fundamental epistemic value. They very often go on to derive epistemic norms based on considerations about what promotes this value. A standard objection is that many truths are pointless: there is no value in believing them. In response, veritists often distinguish between significant and insignificant truths, holding that the former are much more valuable (perhaps even incomparably more valuable) than the latter. But critics cry foul: veritists who say this give up on their claim that it is true belief per se that is of fundamental epistemic value. In this paper I evaluate this dispute by comparing it to the well known dispute over J.S. Mill’s doctrine of higher and lower pleasures. I conclude that the veritist can escape the objection, but that the escape route breeds a new, and different problem.