How Understanding Makes Knowledge Valuable

Many have suggested that understanding is a worthier goal for theoretical reflection than is propositional knowledge.¹ Some have even claimed that, unlike knowledge, understanding is always intrinsically valuable.² In this essay, I aim only to show that there is a basic value in understanding and that when knowledge conduces to understanding, it gets this basic value extrinsically from understanding. After distinguishing two kinds of understanding, namely, teleological and non-teleological understanding, I will conclude that teleological understanding has more of this basic value than does non-teleological understanding.

I The Value of Knowledge

Let me first turn to the most convincing arguments against the intrinsic value of knowledge. There are two ways in which 'believing what is true is intrinsically valuable' can be conceived. First, one might put the emphasis on 'believing' and claim that believing what is true is intrinsically valuable. That is, it is always intrinsically valuable to assent to true propositions. Some have observed that there are instances of knowledge that lack epistemic value and that these instances can gain extrinsic epistemic value only if they serve some important epistemic or practical pursuit.³ To borrow Robert Roberts and Jay Wood's example, it is hard to see for instance why knowing that the third letter in the 41,365^th listing in the 1977 Wichita telephone directory is a 'd' should have any epistemic value whatsoever.⁴ Surely, this piece of knowledge might gain some epistemic value if it is related to some important epistemic or practical goal. But then its value is extrinsic, not intrinsic. If we are told that the person possessing this piece of knowledge is getting paid to find the typos in this telephone directory since it will be updated and the 'd' is in fact a typo, then we can bring into view the extrinsic value of this instance of knowledge. But in the absence of some such story, the person in question cannot be credited with a piece of knowledge that has intrinsic value. Along the same lines, Talbot Brewer emphasizes that a person who keeps memorizing phone numbers out of a phone book cannot really be in the business of accumulating intrinsic value.⁵ There is no loss, let alone loss of intrinsic value if the number memorizer remembers only a few of the numbers the next day. Robert Roberts and Jay Wood's diagnosis of someone who loves to assent to true propositions without any discrimination is that this person is showing a kind of intellectual pathology not an intellectual virtue.⁶

The second way to read 'believing what is true is intrinsically valuable' is to put the emphasis on 'true.' On this conception believing what is true is intrinsically valuable. So what has value is not assenting to as many true propositions as possible. Rather, the contention is that it is always good that a proposition be true if one believes it. The problem here resembles the one above. If the proposition one believes captures a fact that it is not valuable to believe in isolation, why should whether it is true or not matter? Imagine someone who is bored at a piano concert counting how many times the note E will be repeated throughout the performance. It is hard to see why she would be going through a valuable epistemic change by changing her false belief that there were 142 repetitions of E to the true one that there were 143 of them.

These ruminations seem to leave warrant as the last resource for establishing the intrinsic value of knowledge. But so long as a belief is not valuable, adding warrant to it cannot make it valuable, either. Take for instance Ernest Sosa's account of externalist warrant. Sosa points out that the reliability of the ability through which an achievement is produced alters the value of the achievement.⁷ For instance, a song on a CD recording of a musician might sound very impressive after having been corrected many times in the recording studio. Yet this is not nearly as impressive an achievement as the singer's skill giving...