1. The eudaimonic value of knowledge
Being a knower is central to being a human being. We are not merely repositories of information; we also stand in epistemic relations to information. And being able to stand in these relations is relevant to our lives. Knowing pertinent information can make you a good source of testimony, and if you are silenced, this may cause you harm.Footnote 1 Knowing can protect you from blame or criticism when you make choices and act on this knowledge.Footnote 2 Given the wide-ranging roles that knowing plays in our lives, it is natural to think that being a knower contributes in a distinctive and central way to living well. So what exactly is the eudaimonic value of knowledge?Footnote 3
While historically important, this question has not received much contemporary interest.Footnote 4 In one of the few recent discussions, Allen Hazlett addresses this question by considering the role that knowledge can play as a means or final end.Footnote 5 On this basis, he concludes that while knowledge possesses eudaimonic value, it only does so relative to the particular kinds of projects that we pursue or the particular values and commitments we have. There is no general and systematic sense in which knowledge is good for living well.
Consider the value that the possession of knowledge has as a means. If you know that there will be a typhoon in Tokyo the next weekend, then that may lead you to wisely delay your vacation plans. Knowing this particular fact about the weather in Tokyo is important and instrumentally valuable but only insofar as this information is relevant to your life plans.
Alternatively, the possession of some bit of knowledge (e.g. knowing the answer to a question) can be valuable in virtue of being a final end (i.e. a state of affairs that is valuable in and of itself). For example, someone may spend his or her whole life trying to prove the twin prime conjecture. And knowing the answer to this question may be a state of affairs that is valuable in and of itself. So there are cases where there is intimate connection between knowledge and living well. After all, for this individual, part of what it is to live well is to possess a particular bit of knowledge. Nevertheless, as before, the eudaimonic value of possessing knowledge depends on the fact that one possesses a particular goal.
One may retort that the general eudaimonic value of knowing is not contingent on having any particular aim or value. Since everyone has some ends, there must be corresponding instances of knowledge that are instrumentally valuable as a means. For example, even if one spends an entire life in pursuit of athletic excellence without any intrinsic desire for knowledge, it would nevertheless be useful and valuable to know all sorts of things (e.g. how to train, how to eat, etc.). While this observation does suggest that knowledge in general is valuable, it fails to offer insight into knowledge's distinctive value. After all, if bringing about these ends is all that matters, isn't it just as good to have mere true beliefs? And so when we ask what the eudaimonic value of knowledge is, we also want to know whether it possesses some value above and beyond mere true belief.Footnote 6
Hazlett concludes that knowledge in general is not, in any non-trivial way, necessary for well-being.Footnote 7 However, his exploration is limited by the fact that it focuses on knowledge's role as a means or end. Rather than reconsider that type of inquiry, I hope to explore another way of thinking about the eudaimonic value of knowledge. After all, being in a certain epistemic state or possessing a certain epistemic status may be constitutive of possessing various eudaimonic goods. For example, it could be proposed that it is constitutive of having meaningful human relationships that both parties know certain facts.
As an example of this alternative mode of inquiry, I shall take for granted that achievements, which we will discuss shortly, have the right sort of eudaimonic value.Footnote 8 And I will argue that since every achievement requires the agent to possess some knowledge, knowing is constitutive of achieving. My hope is that this exploration of the relationship between knowledge and achievement will provide an example of an alternative and fruitful way of exploring the eudaimonic value of knowledge.
2. Achievement and knowledge
My aim is to show that knowledge is necessary for achievement. However, before I turn to this argument, let us briefly consider what achievements are. Gwen Bradford has argued that achievements are the products of our activities, that “have two necessary features … Difficulty is a feature of the activity itself, and competent causation is a relation between the activity and the product that it causes.”Footnote 9 To explore the connection between achievement and knowledge, I want to focus on the latter aspect of achievements.
Achievements must be caused by the agent to whom the achievement is attributed. If Mick, through no effort of his own, is given a successful business, this outcome cannot be viewed as his achievement. Furthermore, it seems clear that the agent must produce the relevant outcome in the right way. Suppose Mick starts a business but has a terrible business mind. Under normal circumstances, his plan would be doomed to failure. However, a wealthy benefactor who has a very specific desire to see Mick's efforts succeed, ensures the business’ success. Even though the successful business would not have come about without Mick's effort (given the benefactor's peculiar desires), his activities did not produce this outcome in the right way. After all, the benefactor has worked behind the scenes to ensure that Mick's business would be a success. The successful business is not Mick's achievement.
Bradford attempts to capture what it means for something to be caused in the right way by appealing to the notion of competent causation. As it pertains to our inquiry about the relationship between achievement and knowledge, she is fairly non-committal about whether knowledge is required above and beyond justified true belief.Footnote 10 Furthermore, since we are not interested in offering a full analysis of achievement, I believe that we can set aside all the complexities of competent causation. Instead, I want to focus on identifying a minimal knowledge condition on achievement, and I propose to do so by thinking about the relationship between achievement, credit, and luck.
2.1 Due credit and pure luck
Achievements are intimately connected to credit and luck.Footnote 11 Serena Williams’ achievement of winning twenty-three grand slam titles entails that she deserves some credit for becoming a champion. Warren Buffet's achievement of being one of the most successful investors of the 20th century entails that he deserves some credit for that success. If one achieves some state of affairs, then one deserves some credit for the fact that this state of affairs obtained. Thus, we have the following
Credit condition on achievement: Achievement entails some due credit.Footnote 12
When we try to evaluate whether credit is due, we naturally turn to the language of luck. Before we specify this connection, it's worth noting that luck comes in degrees, and the degree to which the outcome of an action is lucky is intimately connected to the likelihood of the relevant outcomes given the skill with which one performs a particular action.Footnote 13 Consider the following three cases.
1. The first golf shot one ever takes results in a hole-in-one.
2. An amateur golfer hits a hole-in-one.
3. A professional golfer hits a hole-in-one.
These events are listed in a decreasing order of luck but in an increasing order of likelihood. The first time golfer is clearly much luckier than the professional golfer because given their differing levels of skill, it is much more likely that the professional hits a hole-in-one. So in this case, the relationship between luck and likelihood is fairly clear. The less likely an outcome, the luckier it is.
What is the relationship between luck and credit? At first glance, luck appears to undermine credit. However, that does not mean that you deserve no credit whatsoever if you are lucky to any degree whatsoever. After all, we just noted that luck comes in degrees. The professional golfer cannot hit a hole-in-one every time so that outcome requires quite a bit of luck. Nevertheless, some credit is deserved. While luck and credit pull in opposite directions, they are not incompatible. Rather, the degree to which one deserves credit is inversely related to the degree to which the outcomes of one's actions are lucky. The luckier an outcome, the less credit is deserved. And the degree to which the outcomes of one's actions are lucky have to do with their likelihood given one's skill.
In order to explore what is necessary for due credit, we should thereby consider the extreme case in which an outcome is due to pure luck. After all, the language of pure luck indicates that some outcome was produced solely by chance (and not by the competent causation of the agent). Predicting the outcome of the flip of a fair coin is a matter of pure luck and one deserves no credit for predicting correctly.Footnote 14 This type of case is of interest because if one deserves some credit then the relevant outcome cannot be a matter of pure luck. So this brings us to the connecting question: what conditions must be satisfied for an outcome not to be a matter of pure luck. Such conditions are necessary for achievement since achievement requires some due credit, and due credit entails that the outcome cannot be a matter of pure luck. This brings us to the role that knowledge plays in achievement.
2.2 Credit and knowledge
What makes predicting the outcome of a completely random process (e.g. the toss of a fair coin) a case of pure luck? And why is no credit deserved for predicting correctly?
An interesting feature of this case is that a prediction is true by pure luck regardless of what one believes or has evidence for. Even if a reliable informant told you that the coin was biased and would most likely land heads, this does not make the prediction any less lucky. The outcome, by stipulation, was a random one. What makes this a case of pure luck is the fact that one could not know whether the coin is more likely to land heads or tails. So one could not possess any good reasons (in the knowledge-producing sense) for believing that the reliability of one's predictions are any better than chance. In what follows, I will show that, in the special case of a coin flip, whenever one does not know that one's prediction is more likely than not, then that prediction could only be true by pure luck. This is the relevant bit of knowledge that I will be referring to in these coin prediction cases. A corollary of the above claim is that when a successful prediction is not merely due to luck, then one could deserve some credit and if one does, then one must possess knowledge. Once we have sorted out our thoughts about these simple cases, we will need to remove some idealizations before we generalize our judgments about credit, knowledge, and pure luck so that we can deal with real-life cases like hitting a hole-in-one.
2.2.1 Predicting biased-coin flips
Consider a case where the intended outcome is not a matter of pure luck. For example, what if we have a coin whose toss lands heads 90% of the time.Footnote 15 It's clearly possible to deserve some credit for making a correct prediction. And if one deserves some credit, then what conditions must one satisfy?
Belief in one's prediction is required for the obvious reason that if you predicted heads but believed that the coin would not land heads, then you mistakenly predicted the correct outcome. You don't deserve credit for lucky mistakes. Furthermore, justified belief is required because a prediction that is not based upon good reasons is just as arbitrary as a prediction that is about a randomly produced event. If you lack a reasonable expectation about what will happen, then you deserve as much credit for correctly predicting the outcome as when you know that the outcome is a random one. Finally, knowledge is required because Gettiered beliefs are also true by luck. For example, suppose the coin is a distinctive red color that you have good reason to believe is produced from a factory that makes highly biased coins. Unbeknownst to you, the flipped coin, while highly biased in favor of heads, was not produced by this factory but was by pure accident painted the distinctive red color. Your reasons for believing the coin would land heads is completely disconnected from the facts about the coin. Your prediction is correct by a matter of pure luck.
In the biased coin case, if one is to deserve some credit, then one must know that one's prediction is more likely than not to be true. And if you fail to know this, then your prediction can only be true as a matter of pure luck. Thus, this bit of knowledge appears necessary if the intended outcomes of one's actions – in this case a true prediction – are not to be a matter of pure luck and if one is to deserve some credit for their actualization.
2.2.2 Flipping and predicting
Of course, many of the relevant observations we have just made are specific to this case. So we need to broaden the types of cases that we are considering. One important simplification of these coin tossing cases is that the relevant action is a very simple one, predicting the outcome of a coin toss. Under normal circumstances, the performance of this type of action takes little to no skill. However, in most cases, the relevant actions are more complex. For example, writing a play or building a bridge consists of a more complex set of actions that requires a great deal of skill. Once we countenance more complex actions, it becomes clear to see that there are many reasons why we fail to know how likely the outcomes of our actions will be. Not only might we not know the outcomes of a given action, we also might not know which specific action we will or can perform. Know-how is often opaque.
In order to address this complication, let's revise our coin toss example so that you are the one to both toss the coin and make the prediction.Footnote 16 In each case, we will find that whether we consider cases where our actions and/or their outcomes are transparent or opaque to us, the same result holds. If there is credit, there is knowledge.
Scenario A: No know-how and no know-that. You don't know how to toss a coin so that it is more likely to land on one side rather than the other. So whatever you believe or have evidence for, you simply don't know anything about the likelihood of either outcome. This scenario is akin to the original scenario of guessing the outcome of a random event. Correct predictions would be a matter of pure luck. Furthermore, you don't know that any one set of actions is more likely than not to produce a successful outcome. There is no knowledge and no credit.
Scenario B: Know-how but no know-that. You know how to produce a biased coin toss, but you don't know that you know how to do this. Supposing you don't know anything else, then given your ignorance, you don't know that the coin is more likely to land on one side than another. This case seems to be just like the first. Whether one tosses and predicts heads or tosses and predicts tails, one lacks good reasons to believe that one set of actions is more likely to produce a successful outcome. Thus, any successful outcome seems to be a matter of pure luck.Footnote 17 Again, there is no knowledge and no credit.
Scenario C: Know-how and know-that. You know how to produce a biased coin toss, and you know that you know how to do this. In such cases, one can deserve some credit for correctly predicting the outcome of your own toss. After all, this is akin to the above scenario in which one knows that the coin is biased. As in that previous case, a successful outcome may not be a matter of pure luck so long as you know that your actions (the toss and prediction) are more likely than not to produce the intended outcome (a correct prediction of the toss). Credit entails knowledge.
Scenario D: Unreliable know-how. You aren't very skilled at producing a biased coin toss. You perform the relevant skill some of the time but fail at other times. Unlike scenario A, you have some idea of how to perform the relevant skill. However, unlike scenario B, you don't reliably perform this skill. This scenario is closer to most real life cases since we aren't robots and don't perform the exact right set of actions every time. Our know-how and skills are unreliable. If you don't know anything about your know-how, then we appear to be back in scenario B. Alternatively, suppose that the nature of your skills is completely transparent to you. You know how reliable you are in producing the relevant outcome. Under such circumstances, this case is no different from scenario C. After all, we can simply say that rather than performing a coin toss that produces heads 90% of the time, we are actually performing an action that is the result of a “lottery”, where we perform one particular action some of the time, another particular action some of the time, and so forth and so on. The complications presented by these types of cases pose no problems for our assessment of pure luck in these cases. For you can deserve credit if this unreliable know-how is still, on the whole, biased towards one outcome over the other. Thus, if you deserve some credit for the outcomes of your actions, then such outcomes cannot be a matter of pure luck, which entails that you know that your toss and prediction (however unreliable) is more likely than not to be true.
What if the nature of your skills is somewhat opaque to you? Perhaps you believe, on the basis of some past trials, that you can produce heads about 80% of the time, but in reality, you can only do so roughly 60% of the time. Or perhaps you have a vague sense of what you are capable of – though you are indeed capable of producing heads more than tails. So long as the mismatch between the perception of your skills and the reality is not so stark, it seems possible for you to deserve some credit for a correct prediction. While the assessment of your own skills is not entirely accurate, it is nevertheless clear that you can know that your actions, though unreliably produced, are more likely to produce a successful prediction than not. While you don't know exactly how likely certain outcomes would be, that specific bit of knowledge is not required to satisfy the minimal knowledge condition.
The point of considering these cases is to see whether any problems arise for the proposed connection between credit and knowledge once we consider in more detail the nature of know-how and our understanding of our own know-how. While such detail may be important in determining how much credit a person deserves, these cases show that such detail is irrelevant to the question of whether or not any credit whatsoever is deserved. Therefore, we can ignore such complications when we identify the conditions necessary for due credit and the elimination of pure luck.
2.2.3 Expanding the set of available actions
Finally, we need to add one extra level of complexity before our analysis applies to real life examples. The original coin prediction examples were simple forced choice scenarios in which we are asked to predict either heads or tails. While I've added the additional complexity of flipping the coin to account for the opacity of know-how, I have nevertheless assumed that we were selecting between two given options. We can flip and predict heads or flip and predict tails. So the final complication will be to generalize our analysis to cases where there are more than two available actions and where the available actions are not fixed and given.
Let's first consider a simple case where there are a fixed set of many available choices. A six-sided die is tossed, and one must predict which side will land face up. Suppose the die is weighted so that six comes up slightly more often than the other sides. Knowing this, one may deserve some credit for correctly predicting this outcome despite the fact that one does not know that six will come up more often than not. Rather, what one knows is that six will come up more often than the other sides. At a first pass, it looks as though some credit is due in this case because one knows that it is more likely that one's actions (predicting that six will come up) will produce the intended outcome (true prediction) than the other available actions (predicting that another side will come up) will.
To complicate matters, suppose the die is weighted so that six lands face up the most, five the second most, and the remainder are equally unlikely (less than 10%). Let's suppose you know that six and five are much more likely but mistakenly infer that five is slightly more likely to come up than six. Surely, you can deserve some credit for predicting that the die will land on five even though this prediction is less likely to be true than predicting that the die will land on six. So knowing that your actions are more likely to produce the intended outcome than all the other available actions is not necessary for credit. Rather, I believe that what's going on in these cases is that one can deserve credit so long as one knows that one is doing better than mere chance. So, in the original coin flipping cases, one can deserve credit so long as one knows that one's actions are more likely to be successful than a random guess. As a result, one must simply know that one's predictions are more likely to be true than not. In the flip and predict cases, one can deserve credit so long as one knows that one's flip and prediction does better than a random flip and guess. Thus, in these special cases, one must know that one's actions are more likely than not to produce the intended outcome. But these are merely special cases of the general principle:
Knowledge condition on credit: If one deserves credit for the outcome(s) of one's action(s), then one knows that one's action(s) are more likely to produce the intended outcome(s) than mere chance.Footnote 18
We earlier observed that cases of pure luck are those in which there is no due credit.
The paradigmatic cases of pure luck are games of chance in which an outcome depends solely on chance. Now that we have seen that knowledge is necessary for due credit, it is natural to conclude that what one must know is that one's actions are more likely to be successful than mere chance. But what is this notion of mere chance that is at work here?Footnote 19 It would seem odd to think that our attributions of credit rely upon comparisons of our actions to impersonal stochastic mechanisms or processes. So we need to develop some working understanding of mere chance in order to meaningfully apply our principle. In addition, by thinking more carefully about this notion, we will need to consider cases where we don't know what the intended outcomes are.
2.2.4 Picking and mere chance
Talk of mere chance as a cause is often metaphorical and is used as a heuristic to track something of interest. While we could leave our discussion by appealing to this vague heuristic, I would like to provide a more detailed proposal of how to understand the metaphorical use of ‘mere chance’. The value of this additional detail will become clearer below when I show that my analysis offers some interesting and specific predictions about how we attribute credit.
What does it mean for mere chance to produce a true prediction of the die toss? What sort of agency or causation could we be talking about? If such talk is metaphorical, what actual processes are we tracking by such talk. The first point I'd like to make is that the talk of mere chance is ambiguous and highly sensitive to how we fill out the details of cases. So we aren't always sure how to apply the metaphor. Nevertheless, this ambiguity poses no problems for our purposes. I simply wanted to use this notion of mere chance to help us understand our attributions of credit. And our attributions of credit are also ambiguous and sensitive to how we fill out the details of cases. In the case of the first time golfer hitting a hole-in-one, do we think that this person deserves any credit? Or do we think that it was a matter of pure luck? Our judgments in this case aren't clear and depend upon how we describe the person's abilities and actions. So if the notion of mere chance is intertwined with notions of credit, then any satisfactory account of ‘mere chance’ should allow some freedom as to how we apply it in particular cases.
To provide some approximation of what we mean, I shall appeal to Morgenbesser and Ullmann-Margalit's distinction between choosing and picking. They write, “We speak of choosing among alternatives when the act of taking (doing) one of them is determined by the differences in one's preferences between them. When preferences are completely symmetrical, where one is strictly indifferent with regard to the alternatives, we shall refer to the act of taking (doing) one of them as an act of picking.”Footnote 20 For example, suppose that I look into a bowl of candy. Judging that they are all qualitatively identical, I possess no preference between any of them. I am indifferent. Nevertheless, I select one over the others. When I do so, I pick rather than choose. Thus, when it comes to our actions, picking is akin to the use of a random chance device to make our selection.Footnote 21
So one way to understand what it means for an outcome to be produced by mere chance is to say that the outcome was the product of picking. To be more precise,
Mere chancedf: the selection procedure in which one picks between all the available options.
To explain this proposal in more detail, let's apply this notion of picking to the examples that we have already considered. When we consider whether or not one's prediction of the coin flip deserves credit, we must consider whether or not one knows that this prediction is more likely to be true than mere chance. And I have proposed that one way to understand the mechanism of mere chance is by appealing to picking. In the simplest case, there are two options, predict heads or predict tails. And if one picks, then one selects at random. So one is acting in a way that there is an equal chance of predicting heads and predicting tails. In this special case, picking results in the correct prediction half of the time, regardless of the bias of the coin. So knowing that one's actions are more likely to be successful than mere chance amounts to knowing that one's predictions are more likely than not to be true.
The same result holds when we think about the cases in which we flip and predict. In fact, this is true even if we countenance many different ways of flipping. Since every type of flip comes with two different predictions, relative to each type of flip, picking between heads and tails results in a correct prediction half of the time. And so randomly selecting between the whole set of flips and predictions results in a correct prediction half of the time as well.
How does the notion of picking apply to real-life cases like the golfer's hole-in-one? Consider the swings of both the professional and amateur golfer. Clearly each golfer could have performed many different actions, but it is unclear which set of actions should be considered available to each golfer. As I noted above, the fact that our evaluation of mere chance is sensitive to which set of actions we consider available is meant to be a feature of the analysis. It helps us to understand the context-sensitivity of our attributions of credit. So let's consider just one way of viewing the case. Both golfers could have used many different clubs and aimed for many different spots on the green. Of course, only a very few of these would have resulted in a hole-in-one. So by simply picking between the multitude of options, it is highly unlikely that the golfer would have hit the ball anywhere near the hole, much less in the hole. By choosing the right club and aiming for the right location, these golfers would have increased their chance of success compared with selecting at random. So while the outcome was unlikely, if their actions were more likely to be successful than mere chance, then that leaves open the possibility of receiving some credit.Footnote 22
2.2.5 Ambiguities in attributions of credit
I promised that there would be some fruits to considering the picking account of mere chance. So to conclude our discussion of chance and credit, I'd like to highlight how our attributions of credit can depend upon a variety of factors, and show that this variation is captured by my proposal.
In the case of the first time golfer, it wasn't clear whether or not we should attribute credit. And the picking account of mere chance offers a way of understanding the ambiguity present in the case. We don't know whether to attribute credit because we don't know whether the golfer's actions are better than mere chance. And we don't know the latter because we simply don't know which action the novice performed and what alternatives were available. Did the novice select a club at random? Did the novice hit the ball in a random way at a random point on the course? Both factors are relevant when we judge the actions of the novice golfer and judge whether or not she deserves any credit.Footnote 23
One might remark that given these ambiguities, we can always view actions and their outcomes as credit worthy. For example, the novice can satisfy the knowledge condition on credit by limiting the set of available options. If he is deciding whether to even attempt a swing, simply trying will increase likelihood of hitting a hole-in-one. My account certainly allows for this evaluation. However, I take this to be a feature of the account as it also allows for a more nuanced response. For example, actions can always be viewed from a multitude of perspectives. And clearly the novice can deserve credit for simply trying. However, that's just one component of his actions. He also takes a swing. That's another component. And I doubt in the case of most first time golfers that the swing deserves credit for bringing about a hole-in-one.
The next few cases show that, in addition to what we take to be the available alternatives, varying the goal of one's actions can alter whether or not one deserves any credit for the outcomes. Consider Warren who is a novice at investing. However, he wants to give it a try and in 1997, he invests $5000 in a small startup called Amazon. Defending his choice to friends and family, he retorts, “I like books. And I like the internet.” As Warren becomes busy with his life, he forgets about this investment. Years later, his small investment has turned into a sizable fortune. He's a millionaire!
Does Warren deserve any credit for becoming a millionaire? On my account, Warren deserves credit only if he knows that his action (investing in Amazon) is more likely to produce the intended outcome than mere chance. But to assess whether or not Warren possesses this knowledge, we must resolve two ambiguities. First, what is the intended outcome? Second, what alternative actions were available to Warren?
If the intended outcome is to beat the overall market (e.g. the S&P 500), it's fairly clear that his strategy was not more likely than chance to succeed. Suppose we consider a number of alternative investments that Warren could have made. Given what Warren knew, which was very little, his investment was a huge risk. It would have been highly likely for his investment to have suffered in the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. Picking at random would probably have been a better strategy.
What if the intended outcome is to become a multi-millionaire? Presumably, there are very few ways to take $5000 and turn it into a few million dollars within 15 to 20 years. And despite Warren's lack of expertise, perhaps he knew that the only way to achieve this goal would be to take a huge risk, investing in some dot-com. While I'm not sure how we would judge this case, I think it's safe to say that the lack of clarity in our evaluation of Warren's actions corresponds with the lack of clarity in judging how likely it is that picking a strategy at random produces a few million dollars from a $5000 investment.
Now consider an extreme scenario where Warren buys a ticket to a lottery whose prize is a billion dollars. Furthermore, suppose that Warren has the explicit goal of becoming a billionaire. Lo and behold, Warren wins! In this scenario, almost no alternative strategy would have net Warren a billion dollars. This was his only shot and Warren knew it. He knew that buying a lottery ticket was more likely to make him a billionaire than selecting a strategy at random. Perhaps Warren even knew that he had adopted the optimal strategy. On my account, Warren could deserve some credit, however tiny. While controversial, I think that this result accords with the intuition that when it comes to highly unlikely goals, we give credit to people who at least try to reach them.
What's interesting about these cases is that two individuals who adopt the same risky path that results in the same improbable success can be viewed quite differently. Those with lofty dreams are given credit because of their brave ambitions while those with realistic goals are denied credit because of their risky behavior. My account of credit and knowledge predicts that our attributions of credit are sensitive to what one intends as well as what alternative actions are available.Footnote 24 However, I believe that this tracks our somewhat odd ways of attributing credit.
3. Concluding remarks
One of the aims of epistemology is to explore how our status as epistemic agents pervades our moral, political, and practical lives. I have proposed that when we consider the value of our epistemic lives, we should look beyond the role that various epistemic states have as a means or an end. We should also explore how various facets of our epistemic lives are constitutive of other goods. I have considered just one such exploration by considering the relationship between knowledge and achievement, concluding that knowing is necessary for achieving.
By exploring these constitutive connections, we are able to lay out new arguments for the value of knowledge. Knowledge is not just valuable as a means to our ends. And knowledge is not just valuable as a final end. Possessing knowledge and being a knower is valuable because they are necessary for the possession of certain eudaimonic goods. While I've only discussed achievements, I believe that other eudaimonic goods, such as meaningful relationships, are subject to similar conditions.Footnote 25
Author ORCID
Brian Kim, 0000-0001-9556-5802
