ABSTRACT
One of the central tasks of epistemology is to explain the value of knowledge. One way of accounting for the value of knowledge is to note that if you know a proposition, then you have a true belief in that proposition, and true beliefs are clearly instrumentally valuable. A difficulty with this proposal is that it is not obvious that all true beliefs are instrumentally valuable. Moreover, even if we could evade this problem, another difficulty would remain, which is that, intuitively, knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, so we can’t account for the value of knowledge solely in terms of true belief. One option is to say that knowledge is of greater instrumental value than mere true belief, since it is more useful to us. We also explore another suggestion, which is that some knowledge – e.g. wisdom – is of non-instrumental value (i.e. is valuable for its own sake).
