Good evening, everybody. Thank you very much for coming and welcome to the slightly delayed 2023.
You hear lectures on knowledge and achievement to be given by an old friend of many of us here and certainly of Oxford.
Tom Hooker, it's a great pleasure to have you here, Tom.
I would like to thank the you were here a foundation on ethics and education
for making all our events and in particular this series of lectures possible.
And also Oxford University Press for publishing many of the lectures in the series of monographs, which you may know.
Which now go back nearly two decades. And I should also thank a wonderful admin team, Rachel and others who've done so much to make.
These lectures run smoothly, as I hope they will.
We will have a lecture from Tom for probably a little bit under an hour.
I will then ensure there's a short break for the, I hope, small minority of people who have to leave immediately after that.
And then we'll have time for discussion until around 615 when everybody is invited upstairs to a reception.
And you will then have the chance to ask further questions of Tom.
The lectures are being recorded, but the questions are not.
So feel free in that period. And so, as I say, Tom, Tom is an old friend of Oxford.
He took the befell here in 1977.
And the Dphil in 1980, supervised by the great R.M. had.
He started working at Calgary, the University of Calgary, in 1978, becoming a professor.
And then the Henry Jackman distinguished chair in Philosophical studies in 2003 and a university professor in 2013.
He's been awarded many fellowships and prizes from the John Locke Prize.
In sort of course, in 1976 to the Killam Prize in Canada in 2017.
Tom has written many articles and books.
Including perfectionism. 1993 Virtue, Vice and Value.
2001. And British ethical theorists from Sedgwick to Ewing.
2014. Tom is not only a brilliant thinker, but also independent.
He is a follower of no school.
He is to use one of his own distinctions, an intellectual rather than a highbrow.
Bringing insight into whatever issue he is discussing, whether it be Aristotelian ethics, just war theory.
The Flintstones or the origins of soul music.
Thank you for being here, Tom. And I'd now like to invite you to present your first lecture.
Knowledge and achievement. Their value in nature. Thank you, Roger, for that introduction.
When you listen to yourself be described like that, there's a mixture of mixed emotions, part pleasure and part embarrassment.
But some of it was actually true. So thank you.
Also, thank you to the U. Hero Foundation for inviting me to give give these lectures.
I do have a past with Oxford. I think, you know, my full philosophical career was made here by the B Phil and you mentioned the John Locke Prize,
which I don't think anyone writes anymore, but I think my first job was based on fluke into success.
People know what that exam was for.
First, we are exams in two days, and the fourth one there were three one word topics and you had to pick one and write about it for 3 hours.
As Jerry Lee Lewis said, there's a whole lot of faking going on. And also thank you to Roger for the invitation, but I should begin.
So my topic is the intrinsic ethical goods as I take them to be of knowledge and achievement.
To me, these are objective or perfectionist goods, ones that make a life better and that we have ethical reasons to promote in ourselves and others,
apart from any pleasure they may cause or any desire there may be for them a central theme of this lecture.
Actually, all of them will be that knowledge and achievement are parallel goods with parallel elements related in parallel always,
and so a similar basis for their value. But they're also distinct goods.
It's not that one of them is an instance of the other,
as some virtue epistemology is think the value of knowledge derives from its being an instance of achievement,
namely the achievement of arriving at a true belief,
their coordinate goods and separated by a fundamental difference in their directions of fit is a cognitive state.
A knowledge has the mind to world direction of fit.
The world is a certain way, and to know it you must make your mind match the world by forming beliefs about it that are true.
But achievement is a cognitive state with the opposite world to mind.
Direction of set here a goal in your mind comes first and you make the world match your mind by realising your goal In it,
though the two goods have parallel elements, their elements are different and when they involve relations, the relations run in opposite directions.
That knowledge is intrinsically good has been held by philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas,
Spinoza and Hegel to Hastings, Rational W.D. Ross and many objective list theorists today.
Achievement has been less often valued. Though Marx and Nature had something like it in mind,
when the equated are good with transforming nature through productive labour or exercising a will to power.
And as Gwenda Bradford has noted, achievement is prominent in everyday conceptions of the good life,
which include accomplishing things or meeting challenges and having an impact on the world.
But these states are good is also a lesson of Robert Novak's famous example of an experience machine
that can give you the inner feelings and therefore the pleasures of any activity you choose.
If life on this machine isn't isn't ideal, it's largely because it lacks two forms of what knows.
It calls contact with reality instead of knowledge, especially of your place in the world.
You have false beliefs, nor do you achieve any goals. You don't actually bring about the things you think you're bringing about.
Now, since any value in knowledge depends on what knowledge is,
part of my topic overlaps with the familiar and perhaps all too familiar one from epistemology.
This is especially so given the recent value turn as it's called,
in that discipline expressed in the demand that an acceptable account of what knowledge is be consistent with its having the value we take it to have.
Here, some say an acceptable account of knowledge must explain why it's better than
merely true belief and also why it's better than merely then justify true belief.
Others say an analysis of knowledge that's gerrymandered or an ad hoc sprawl won't fit that value.
If no simpler analysis is available, they conclude either knowledge isn't isn't the main cognitive good.
Something else like understanding is, or it's a non analyse of a primitive.
Now these these demands can consider different kinds of value. What is instrumental value?
Is it Plato's question whether knowing the way to Larisa will get you there any more effectively than a merely true belief about the way,
but whether or not it's instrumentally better knowledge can also be intrinsically better or have more value in itself.
And that was a view not only that, not only was that the view of Aristotle, Ross and the others,
but it seems to be the concern of those who object to gerrymandered analyses.
What's good instrumentally is an empirical question, and there's no reason why it can't have a complicated answer.
But the demand that an intrinsic good have a comparatively simple rationale has considerable intuitive force, and I'm going to accept it.
Now, if knowledge has intrinsic value, this can be the ethical value I want to discuss.
But some are associated with a different specifically epistemic value.
Even if it has that value. However, knowledge can also have ethical value in an account of what it is to be able to explain how.
So that's my project to explain how, given their natures, knowledge and achievement,
have the kind of intrinsic value that gives us ethical reasons to desire and promote them.
But in fact the explanations will just as much run in the opposite direction from the states of value to what they are.
To me, the concept of knowledge, the concepts of knowledge and achievement are essentially valid.
Evaluative one is the concept of what is in some sense the best or especially valuable belief or cognitive state.
The other that especially valuable action given a fixed kind of value, say, intrinsic ethical value,
there can be competing views about which properties of a belief or action make for this value, and so are needed for knowledge or achievement.
But the claim that a given property is necessary for one of the two is at bottom the claim that it's necessary from some kind of value.
So explaining what knowledge or achievement is and explaining why it's good are essentially the same.
Because that's the proposal that a big chunk of epistemology is really part of ethics.
That's the. The claim being made.
Just I want to see how far these explanations can go. I'll assume, if only as a tentative working hypothesis.
The traditional view that knowledge and like an achievement can be understood as compounds of more basic elements in whose terms they can be analysed,
reductively analysed, and their values can derive from the values of these elements and the way they are combined.
But much of what I say will be consistent with the view that these states can only
be non reductively analysed in ways that reveal some of their inner structure,
but make an element of all reference to the concept being analysed and some may even be relevant given a knowledge.
First view on which knowledge is analysed or a parallel achievement.
First view. Even if the two states are primitives,
they entail many elements of a traditional analysis and my remarks can be read as bearing on these entitlements in their value.
Still, my hope is that taking knowledge and achievement to have specifically ethical value and using tools from ethical theory
to explain that value may new may suggest new possibilities for understanding them kind of traditionally as compounds.
So if knowledge is a compound, its first elements are belief in truth.
So to know that p you have to believe that p p must be true.
The parallel elements for achievement are the active pursuit of a goal P or an intention to make it the
case that P and the successful realisation of P in both pairs true belief and successful intention.
There's a match between your mind and the state of the world, though the matches run in opposite directions.
For you to know that P you believe that P must also be formed in the right way.
R must also be justified here, I assume. Perhaps again, traditionally the justification is a matter of evidence.
So you believe that P is justified If you have evidence that gives P a certain probability 3.95 and you believe P because of that evidence.
One reason for adopting this view is just its connection with ethical value.
Forming a belief on the basis of evidence involves the exercise of rationality, not necessarily because you engage in conscious conscious reasoning,
but just because you believe what you have reason to believe because you have reason to.
Philosophers from Plato and Aristotle on have valued rationality intrinsically,
often making it their chief human good at equating justification with responsiveness to evidence connects with that good.
But this connection isn't present.
Given the alternative reliable list view that a belief is justified if it was formed by a process that usually results in untrue beliefs.
A reliable cognitive process is like a thermometer that reliably gives accurate readings.
And just as I don't think the world is any or much better for containing reliable thermometers,
so I don't see much intrinsic value in the operation of reliable cognitive processes as such.
If justification is to contribute to intrinsic ethical value,
it's best understood in a way that directly invokes rationality as an evidence based one.
Does. For you to achieve P, you must likewise pursue P in the right way or what's called competently.
I'll again understand this in probabilistic terms. So to pursue p competently you have to choose a means are to p that has a
certain probability of realising P and choose it because of that probability.
More specifically,
you have to choose R because it has a property F that gives it some probability of realising p A choose it because as F it has that probability.
But there's a decent allergy here with justified belief. For believed to be justified, your evidence has to give it a high probability.
So .95 of being true, but sometimes to act competently, your means needn't make success anything like that.
Probable in an example adopted from adapted from Gwenn Bradford, imagine that you're one of three co favourites in the Olympic 100 metre final,
so if you run the best race you can,
you have a point three chance of winning if you do run your best and because the others don't do quite the same, you win.
That's surely an achievement, even though the antecedent probability of your winning was only point three.
Bradford's response to this type of example is to abandon anything like a probability based view of competence and say it involves knowing what
you're doing in the sense of having some large percentage of the justified true beliefs it's possible to have about the components of your activity.
As she recognised, however, this has.
This implies, counterintuitively, that you will if you realise goal p by realising means Q means R and means S in turn.
And you know what you're doing in each of Q are in S, but you have no idea how or even that they'll result in P you realise P competently on her view.
And there's a simpler response to the example.
It says that to pursue P competently you have to choose means to it that even if they don't have a high absolute probability
of realising P do have among those available to you the highest or close to the highest probability of doing so.
So you pursue P as effectively as you can.
This condition is satisfied in 100 metres example like you run in the way that's most likely to make you win.
And also in another of Bradford's were a chemist who's trying to create a new compound,
doubts that she'll succeed but precedes in what she knows would be the right way if there were one.
In addition though, is needed for you to pursue P competently, your means must also have some minimum probability of realising your goal.
Otherwise winning a lottery would be an achievement since buying a ticket is the best way of doing so.
But assuming some minimal probability of success, which may sometimes be less than point five or even point three,
you pursue a goal competently if you choose means with at least close to the highest probability of realising it and choose.
And because of that fact, then competence like evidentially justified belief involves the exercise of rationality and more
plausibly contributes to intrinsic ethical value than if it was defined in reliable as terms.
So knowledge and achievement involve parallel trios of elements justified true belief in the one case and competent successful pursuit in the other.
But there's a further parallel I need briefly dimension mention Even if knowledge and achievement are intrinsically good,
their instances aren't all equally so. Some truths, for example, about a fundamental scientific law are very worth knowing in themselves.
But others, such as about the number of blades of grass in the lawn art,
there's significant versus trivial knowledge, and they're also significant versus trivial achievements.
A goal like climbing Mount Everest or finding a cure for cancer is worth realising.
Apart from any further effect, the tying of shoelaces and some instances of each good are better than others,
with the difference in each case resting on one between significance and triviality, as I call them.
And what makes for significance in the two cases. Also I propose is also I propose parallel.
I take the degree of value of an item of knowledge, depend on what WD Ross called it, a generality where one central sense of truth is general.
If you used it to explain and understand a great many other truths,
your beliefs are then connected in an explanatory structure with those higher up in the structure.
Explaining those lower down in the most valuable items are knowledge.
Are those with the most others below them in a structure of this kind or that explain the most other things.
You know, a similar structuring makes for degrees of value in achievement.
Here the goals lower down are realised as means to ones higher up, which they help bring about,
and goals have more value as they have more others achieved as a means to them.
So the process of realising them is more complex and difficult.
So for both good significant rests on generality or on a structuring that makes for
integrated and understanding in the one case in complex difficult achievement in the other.
And that idea that significance depends on generality.
That's the topic of the second lecture. It'll be entirely about that.
And then the third lecture will be kind of applied ethics implications, in particular from the valuing of knowledge and achievement that follows.
If you think that significance is a matter of generality in the ways discussed in the second lecture.
But that's. The future. To return to knowledge and achievement.
As such, if each is a compound of elements, its value depends at least in part, on the values that those elements have on their own.
Now, here, I assume that a mere belief or intention has no intrinsic value,
but the both justification of truth on their own and also competence and success on their own do have value.
So each is to some degree good in itself. Though this is an essential to my main argument,
I tend to think that justification and competence on their own have more intrinsic value than truth and success on their own.
A scientist who carefully examines his evidence and develops a theory that fits that evidence but is false,
has to me done better cognitively than one who proposes a theory for which he has no evidence.
But it turns out by some fluke to be true.
The exercise of rationality in merely competent pursuit is likewise better to me than the lucky world matching in mere success.
These claims, however, concern only the values these elements have on their own.
Apart from issues of significance and unjustified true belief in something of great significance,
such as the existence of God may have more value than a justified false one about some triviality or even the knowledge of that triviality.
Incompetently realising a significant goal may likewise be better than competently failing and a trivial one holding significance constant.
Though my tentative view is that justification or competence alone is better than truth or success alone.
Well, however, their values compare if knowledge involves both justification and truth.
There's an initial explanation of why knowledge is intrinsically better than merely to believe.
It involves, in addition, the exercise of rationality and evidence based belief.
A similar, similar explanation says knowledge is better than merely justified belief because it also involves truth.
But neither explains why knowledge is better than justify true belief.
Nor do the parallel claims explain why achievement is better than competence.
Successful pursuit. Doing that requires more.
But now that knowledge is more than justified, true belief is shown most clearly and famously by classical guitar cases.
Once with the structure of the two in Edmund Getty, his famous article in which I take two at bottom concern value or at bottom to show that
a belief that's merely justified and true doesn't have the full value of knowledge.
This is my view that epistemology is part of ethics.
In one of many cases, you have evidence that Jones owns a Ford from the justified belief that he owns a Ford.
And it the further justified belief that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona.
In fact, Jones doesn't own a Ford. But as you couldn't have known, Brown is in Barcelona.
So your belief that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona is therefore justified and true.
But intuitively, it isn't knowledge or as good as knowledge.
I take it everybody knows that example. But there's a parallel classical case, though, running the opposite direction for achievement.
So here you start by intending to make a disjunction to say that you impress either Jones or Brown.
You decide to do that by impressing Jones and to do that by talking to him about art,
which your evidence says is the best way to impress it as it happens.
Your talk of art leaves, Jones called, but something you had no idea would have this effect.
Maybe your tone of voice when you're talking to Jones does impress Brown.
So your goal is to impress either Jones or Brown,
and you pursue it competently because you confidently pursue impressing Jones, and you also pursue it successfully.
But intuitively you're doing so doesn't have the full value of achievement.
I kind of like that. It's just kind of a.
That's going to a disjunction, but starting from a disjunction for the value that has the opposite direction of it anyway.
If we ask why these cases don't involve knowledge or achievement.
A natural answer is that while in them the relevant elements either justification of truth or competence and success, are both present.
They aren't connected in the knowledge case.
Your belief is justified by evidence about Jones, but it's made true by Brown's being in Barcelona with nothing tying those two.
This seems to have been getting his own diagnosis.
He said a belief can't be knowledge if it's true in virtue of facts about one person, but is based on evidence about a different person.
And others have made similar claims since a parallel lack of connection is present in the achievement case.
They're What makes your effort to impress Jones or Brown competent is the probability that talking about art will impress Jones.
But what makes it succeed is your voice is impressing Brown.
Here, success and competence are connected.
Well, if that's the right diagnosis, an obvious response is to supplement the analyses of knowledge and achievement with further conditions,
requiring a connection between either justification and truth or competence and success.
The result will be analyses that aren't mere conjunctions of independent elements, but also require some relation between them.
And there will be a similar effect on the state's values. These now won't be atomistic or just the sum of the values of independent elements,
but will be organic in the sense of Gilmore's principle of organic unities.
According to this principle, the value of a whole needn't equal the sum of the values its parts would have on their own,
but can instead be either greater or smaller.
So to take an example of states and be each with five units of value on its own, are joined by relation are to form the whole RB.
The resulting value needn't be ten, but may instead be say 15.
As so stated, the principle allows the additional five units of organic value to be located in different places, maybe in one or both of A and B, or.
And this was Moore's own view in the whole RB as a whole or as an entity distinct from its parts.
But nothing substantive turns on these differences.
The principles main point is that the obtaining of relation are between A and B can make for more value than if the two were apart.
And this is the posed possibility I propose to explore for knowledge and achievement that they are murine organic
unities which involve not just the initial goods of justified and true belief or competent and successful intention,
but also in each case, some relevant relation between them.
In fact, the initial goods already involve organic unities.
You have a true belief when you believe P and P is the case, but it's on on its own.
That belief has no value. And often the fact that P has no value yet given a match between the two a relation, there is value.
There's likewise no value in mere belief, and there may be none in merely having evidence.
Only when you base a belief on the evidence is the good of justified belief.
But the possibility I now want to explore involves different organic unities.
One's requiring and valuing some further relation between truth and justification,
or between success and competence and making knowledge and achievement at those later points.
Also, organic goods. And this is actually a pretty common view about achievement.
Bradford takes a classical get a guitar case,
she describes to show that achievement requires not only that there be a process that's competent and causes a product,
but also that the competence cause the product. So the two are causally connected.
So there's the competence, the product is the success. And so the competence has to explain the success.
Virtue epistemology is likewise say that for a performance to be an achievement,
the fact that it was competent must explain why it succeeded in earnest.
So this terminology of performance is accurate if it realises its aim.
That's success. Adroit If it's done competently and apt if it's appear accurate because it's adroit.
So the confidence explains that success. Only performance.
Then meet this last condition where the competence explains the success counts for him as achievements,
though they're not usually described in these terms. These are organic as against atomistic views of the nature and value of achievement,
because they require a relation, in particular an explanatory one between competence and success,
and both handle the classical getting case above where you're confidently trying
to impress Jones or Brown by discussing art with Jones doesn't explain a success.
That depends on the way your voice impresses Brown.
Virtue epistemology then extend this view to knowledge whose value they take to rise from that of achievement.
For you to know that P they say you're coming to leave. P must involve competence or intellectual virtue,
a condition that plays a similar role to that of justification in which they often understand in reliable as terms and you're believing p virtuously,
you must explain why the result was a true belief, but this last condition isn't satisfied in get.
Here's Jones Brown Jones Brown case.
Since you're virtuously basing a belief on evidence about Jones doesn't explain your beliefs truth when that depends on a fact about Brown.
The same organic condition that blocks classical cases for achievement now does the same for ones about knowledge.
But to me this is the wrong organic condition for knowledge because in several ways wrong to
value knowledge as an instance of achievement rather than as a parallel but distinct good.
You remember at the very beginning I said virtual epistemology is value.
Knowledge is an instance of achievement, and I think that's a mistake.
They should be understood as parallel goods, but distinct. Why?
Well, first, if knowledge is an instance of achievement,
then coming to believe must be an intentional process where you form the goal of having a certain type of belief in belief and then realise that goal.
But there's some virtue of thought of as a first of all, just accept this implication.
To me it's implausible. We don't usually form beliefs intentionally.
We have a perceptual experience who require evidence and just find ourselves believing.
Forming beliefs can be a rational process if it's based on evidence, but it isn't typically intentional.
Second,
valuing knowledge as an instance of achievement ignores the large differences in what makes concretely for degrees of value or significance in the.
Now, Bryce said that the most valuable knowledge is the most explanatory, while the best achievements are the most complex and difficult.
But acquiring some highly valuable knowledge save a scientific law can be relatively simple,
involving just reading a book or hearing a lecture, and therefore not much of an achievement.
Conversely, some trivial knowledge about the number of blades of grass in a lawn 100 years ago can be immensely difficult to acquire.
So doing so would be a major achievement if knowledge were an instance of achievement.
Degrees of value in the two would always coincide.
But they don't even remotely.
Finally, and most fundamentally, deriving, the value of knowledge from that of achievement ignores their different because opposite directions of fit.
So achievement has the world to mine direction of fit where an interstate a goal
in your mind is the anchor and a state of the world is changed to match it.
So the influence is from inside out. It's therefore appropriate if an organic condition for achievement requires a
connection that likewise runs from inside out with the internal element of competence,
explaining the external one of success.
But then a condition with that form isn't appropriate for knowledge, which has the opposite mind to world direction to fit there.
The outer element of truth is the anchor in the inner one of belief changes to match it in organic condition for knowledge should
therefore require an opposite connection running from outside in or requiring the truth of your belief or the facts that make it true.
To help explain why your belief is justified.
For example, for example, by explaining why you have the evidence or significant or significant part of the evidence for it, you do so.
Whereas in the one case, the inner element of competence should explain the outer one of success.
Here, the outer one of truth should explain the inner one of justification.
At least that's the contrary. Outside, in organic, at least at the least is contrary outside.
An organic view of knowledge seems worth exploring.
Just as an initial merit. This you can no less than the virtue epistemology.
Just explain why you don't know and get here's Jones Brown case since the fact about Brown that makes you believe true plays no role in explaining
why a belief based on evidence about Jones is justified in fact is that explanation is arguably more persuasive than the virtue epistemology.
To me, it's simpler and closer to get your diagnosis.
To say you're having evidence for your belief isn't explained by what makes the belief true than to say
you're forming the belief in the competent way you did doesn't explain why you ended up believing.
Truly, the first explanation cites to me the more salient lack.
But the outside in condition also makes knowledge a good that, though parallel to achievement, is distinct from it.
More generally, it points to a view on which knowledge and achievement are both boring and
organic goods in virtue of requiring connection between two of their elements,
but in which the connections run in opposite directions as mandated by their opposite directions of fit.
And that view seems, at least in the abstract, intuitively appealing.
I'm just you. That's the big idea. I shouldn't call my own idea big.
That's the idea in this paper that you think of knowledge and achievement as Murray Inorganic goods,
each of which involves an explanatory connection between two independently good making properties,
but which in the in which the explanations run in the opposite directions as
to reflect the opposite direction of fit of cognitive and cognitive states.
And I will say when I look at the epistemology literature, for example,
about the value of knowledge, I don't see any consideration of that view at all.
But if I approach the issue for moral philosophy, that's a view that just springs naturally to mind.
So I want to see, you know, can this view be defended?
Can I just I think it's really beautiful and, you know, parallel goods, know relations, running the opposite direction.
So I want to see whether it can be made defensible.
So to do that, let's look more closely at what I call the outside in condition for knowledge.
So this condition requires that the facts that make a belief true to help explain why the belief is justified.
But different types of fact can play this role.
Sometimes the fact that makes you believe that P true is P itself as most simply in perceptual knowledge.
There's a sheep in a field. When you look at the field field, you have a visual expression is as of a sheep and you believe there's a sheep here.
The fact that there's a sheep causes the experiences of the sheep. That's the evidence for your belief.
And so explains why the belief is justified. The fact that P can also explain justification in knowledge of the past.
You see fresh sheep droppings in the field and conclude that sheep was there earlier that day.
If a sheep was there and left the droppings, its being there again explains the evidence that makes your belief justified.
But the fact that P can't always play this role most obviously in knowledge of the future,
the other facts that make you believe that be true must be facts about the causes of P and they must independently cause and explain your evidence.
Seeing a farmer leading a sheep toward the field, you conclude that it will be there later.
Here his leading the sheep will cause it to be in the field and also causes the perception of him.
Now that's a key part of your evidence of that will be so the sheep's later presence
in the field and your current evidence are joint effects of a common cause,
and in that way connected and in justification and truth,
can also share a common cause in knowledge of the present or past,
as when you know the sheep is now in the field because you see the farmer returning home and reason
that both his current location and that of the sheep must result from his just having taken it there.
And finally the outside in condition can be satisfied in a priori knowledge.
On one view, a truth is knowable a priori.
If it's self-evident and it's self-evident if understanding it is sufficient for being justified in believing it.
Um, then there's some property of the truth, such as some relation among its constituents that both makes it self-evidently true and explains why,
if you understand and believe it, your belief is justified.
So as so elaborated the outside in organic view shares features with Alvin Goldman's early causal theory of knowledge,
which says that facts that make p true must cause your belief that P.
But there are important differences between the two.
The organic condition I've proposed requires a connection that's explanatory rather than more narrowly causal,
and it can therefore, unlike Goldman's, be satisfied in a priori as well as empirical knowledge.
More importantly, what the condition requires.
The facts that may be true to explain isn't the belief that p as in Goldman, but that beliefs being justified.
The required connection is between truth and justification, not truth and belief.
So whereas Goldman thought his causal condition meant he could dispense with any justification condition,
the augmented view I proposed retains that kind of condition and makes it essential if the fact that
P somehow causes you to believe P without giving you any evidence that P you don't understand,
you know that P. Nor do you know that P if you come to believe P by some reliable process, but have strong,
have strong though misleading evidence that not P to count is knowledge, a belief must be justified by evidence.
The view says and you're having that evidence is what the facts that make Petrie must explain.
So rather than being jettisoned, justification pays to vital rules.
It's true that often what gives you evidence that p also causes you to believe P But that's not so in a priori knowledge.
There's what's there.
What's explained is only your beliefs being justified and even what it is when it is what's initially required is an explanation of the justification.
The outside view therefore also differs from all those that explain knowledge in terms of
some modal or counterfactual connection between belief and truth such as sensitivity.
If P weren't true, you wouldn't believe it. And safety in all the close possible worlds where you believe P is true, like the causal theories,
like the causal theory, these views all relate truth and belief rather than is the view.
I'm proposing truth and justification.
And unlike Goldman's and many of these others, the organic view is motivated primarily by a thought about value,
namely the Murray in thought that full value of the cognitive state requires not only the presence of the initial goods of true and justified belief,
but also when appropriate here outside in connection between them.
The View therefore gives a simple explanation of why knowledge is better than justify true belief.
It involves, alongside these initial goods, an additional organic one based on the relation between them.
The View also seems to yield off audit. It also, by the way, does the same thing for achievement.
Why is achievement better than merely competent, successful pursuit?
Well, there's an additional organic good, namely. But of course, that's what everybody believes that about achievement.
Okay. So the explanation is that there's an additional organic good.
And if you also seems to yield off another distinctive basis,
the intuitive verdicts in several other cases from the epistemology epistemological from the epistemology literature,
which I again read as at bottom about value. So one is the lottery case.
You bought a ticket for a lottery with a thousand tickets and the draw was yesterday, but you haven't heard the result.
Knowing the odds, you believe your ticket lost and you did lose. But intuitively, you don't know that your ticket lost.
The reason the organic view says,
is that your evidence is only general statistical and not connected to or caused by the specific fact that made your ticket lose,
namely the result of the draw. So in the lottery case, the organic condition is not satisfied.
The organic good is missing, but another case with exactly the same probability.
The view says you do know you dropped a bag down a garbage chute where you know that 990 time,
nine times out of 1000 what's dropped reaches the ground.
But the one other time it gets snagged. You believe your bag reached the ground.
And if it did, then intuitively, you know this. That's what people in the literature say.
Here, the outside condition is satisfied since you perceive the dropping of the bag that was a cause of its ending where it did on a similar base.
The view implies what's intuitive, but can seem puzzling that in the lottery case, where you don't know that your ticket lost,
you do or can know that you won't be able to afford an expensive African safari this year is of course you could if your lottery ticket won.
Some of your evidence for this belief that you can't afford the expensive safari is the statistical facts about the lottery.
But some derives from present facts such as your low bank balance and modest salary
that will persist through the year and help cause your later inability to pay.
Insofar as your belief rests in part on these causally relevant facts, the outside in condition is satisfied and you know, how are we doing for time?
Bad. Well, okay. I'm sorry.
I'm just showing that this view, which I come at from ethics, actually handles all these weird cases from the epistemology literature.
So the organic view also explains the verdicts in two proposed counterexamples to the very popular
view that safety were in all close possible worlds where you believe P on a similar basis.
P is true is either necessary or sufficient for knowing that P These are counterexamples to the claim that safety is either necessary or sufficient.
In both cases you see that a thermometer you have every reason to believe is reliable, says the temperature is 20 degrees.
So you believe it's 20 and it is 20. So your belief is true.
In the case against the necessity of safety, A demon wants you to believe that the temperature is 20 degrees, whatever, in fact it is.
He would therefore have changed the thermometer read to to 20 if the temperature hadn't been 20.
But he didn't need to because the temperature was 20. And here your belief isn't safe.
Since there are close possible worlds where you believe the temperature is 20 and it's not.
But intuitively, people say you do know that the temperature is 20.
The reason the organic view says is that in the actual world you're evidence that it's 20, namely the thermometer reading is caused by it being 20.
In the case against efficiency, the thermometer fluctuates randomly, independently of the actual temperature.
But an angel who wants you always to have two beliefs about the temperature changes the temperature to match whatever the thermometer says,
as he's just done seeing a reading of 20. He quickly made the temperature 20.
Here, your belief is safe because in every close possible world you have a true belief about the temperature.
But intuitively you don't know that the temperature is 20.
The explanation is that here the connection between truth and justification runs in the wrong direction.
It's not the facts about the temperature that explain the reading on the thermometer.
It's the reading on the thermometer that explains the facts in the room.
So while it yields the intuitive verdicts in, among others, the Jones Brown lottery and thermometer cases,
the outside end of knowledge isn't so far stated gerrymandered.
It derives all these verdicts from the same simple idea that it's intrinsically better when to good making properties,
justification and truth are connected when they're not.
And since the required connection mirrors though in the opposite direction one common in accounts of achievement,
it extends the parallel between these goods with a similar similarities going even further.
If, as I've suggested, the factors that make for the significance are degrees of value and the two are also alike.
One can in fact see knowledge and achievement as paired organic goods that both
instantiate a more abstract good of something like rationally based contact with reality,
where that involves parallel little distinct good making elements combined in
parallel though distinct ways in the two realms of cognition and cognition.
I'm just telling you again that I think this is beautiful.
I never thought I would think Keats was right. Beauty is truth.
Truth is beauty. That is all you know on earth and all you need to know anyways.
So one can also ask why the mandated relations have value,
or what explains why it's better when truth and justification or competence and success are connected, but can also.
One can also ask why the relations that make for the prior organic goods of true belief
and justified belief have value or why a non relational state such as pleasure has value?
And to me it's just attractive in itself to say there's more value when two other goods, either of belief or of action are united,
especially when the way they're united matches the direction of definitive of their domain.
This last fact makes for even more compelling organic communities and more persuasive explanations of the extra value knowledge and achievement have.
It remains an open question how significant the extra value is or how much difference it makes.
It may be that the vast majority of the intrinsic value of, say, knowledge comes from its individual elements,
such as justification with the organic connection adding just a little to that then knowledge,
though intrinsically better than justified true belief is only a little better.
Alternatively, the organic connection may add a great deal of value, so knowledge is much better than justified true belief.
The general idea that knowledge and achievement are organic goods leaves both of these possibilities open, and I won't decide between them.
So I'm kind of neutral on the question whether the organic element of knowledge
and achievement is responsible for a huge part of the value of those two.
Or just a little bit. But. It was okay.
So I set the outside in condition for knowledge yields the intuitive verdict in many cases from the epistemology literature.
I haven't said that it yields in all such cases, and it doesn't because it doesn't yield the intuitive verdicts in fake burn cases.
Here you see what looks like a barn and believe truly as it happens,
that there's a barn in front of you that unbeknown to you all around, or many visually indistinguishable barn facades here,
the outside in condition is satisfied since the fact that there's a barn causes your experience as of a barn, as for that matter is the virtue.
Epistemology is conditioned as initially stated, since your competent use of vision explains you're having true belief about the barn.
Yet many say that given all the nearby facades you don't know there's a barn.
So the judgement that you don't know in these cases isn't as robust or as widely shared as the verdicts in classical guitar cases.
In surveys, both a philosopher and a philosophers responses to the cases are mixed with it sometimes,
but with majority sometimes saying You do know there's a bar and some virtue.
Apollo epistemology is another.
Other philosophers likewise say, you know, and that's at least a possible view that you actually do know in fact, barred cases.
But organic. You can also try to agree that you don't know, for example, by denying that your belief about the barn really is justified.
This would parallel the claim of some virtue epistemology,
just that in fake barn cases you either don't have or don't manifest your normal visual competence.
One possible ground for this denial is that evidence you don't have, namely about the nearby facades,
undermines your visual evidence and makes your undermines or defeats your visual evidence and makes you believe that there's a barn on unjustified.
Another is that whether your belief is justified depends not only the probability on the probability that the barn,
given your visual experience and what you know,
but also on the more objective probability than this area, there's a barn at a location given an experience as of one there.
And that last claim actually has a kind of attractive analogue for confidence.
But I'm not sure how best to treat fake barn cases and I'm therefore going to set them aside.
I note, though, that they pose a similar difficulty for virtue epistemological views as those of use recognise,
and that the possible responses to them by the two views are also similar.
There are, however, some cases that the organic view is so far stated doesn't handle and that need discussion.
The. Those pure value theories.
I'm sorry about this kind of. Traipsing through epistemology.
But I've got this kind of value account and it's got to it's got to fit certain data.
There are, however, some cases that the organic view is so far stated doesn't handle them that need discussion.
These are deviant cause getting cases, ones where, unlike in classical cases,
the relevant organic condition is satisfied but not in the right way for knowledge or achievement in a case for knowledge.
You see a white furry animal in a field and believe, let's assume justifiably, that there's a sheep there.
The animal you see actually is actually a sheep dog, but hidden behind it is a sheep.
And the sheep dog is where it is because its job is to guard the sheep, which it followed into the field.
This is You got this right. It looks like a sheep.
It actually is a sheep dog. But it is where it is because it's following the sheep, which is behind it.
And so the fact that there's a sheep in the field causes indirectly your evidence here, your belief is justified and true.
And the fact that makes it true the sheep's being in the field helps explain why it's
justified since it caused the presence of the dog that caused you a visual experience.
Yet surely you don't know there's a sheep. So there's causation is not of the right kind.
In a case for achievement failure one you aim an error correctly at the centre of a target and release it on its way.
The error was blown first to the right by unexpected strong gust of wind and
then the same distance back to the left by an equally strong opposite gust.
So it ends up hitting the target. You aimed competently hit your target and did so because of your competence.
Since if you'd aimed any differently, the arrow wouldn't have ended where it did.
But intuitively you're hitting the target wasn't an achievement again, because the connection wasn't of the right kind.
Here, some mice may say the right connections can't be identified other than as those characteristic of knowledge and achievement,
which means these concept can't be analysed. Reductively.
In some proposed treatments of deviant cause achievement cases may not really avoid that critique.
So Bradford takes cases of this kind to show that achievement requires not only that your competence cause your success,
but also that it competently causes it. Not just cause the success, but cause it competently.
Some virtue Epistemology. Say your success must not only be because of competence, but must also manifest confidence.
Competence. As I say, it doesn't in the blown arrow case.
But can we really distinguish competently cause from merely cause or manifest competence from just result
from competence without tacitly relying on a prior understanding of what is and isn't an achievement?
Well, if knowledge and achievement couldn't be analysed productively,
the accounts I propose would still bring out important aspects of their
structure or entanglements and still highlight the many parallels between them.
But another treatment of deviant cause cases may be possible using materials from this organic account that I've proposed.
Consider the blown arrow case. If you think aiming the arrow directly at the target gives you the highest probability of hitting it.
You must believe or more realistically assume something about how aiming this way will if it's successful.
Realise that goal. More specifically, you must assume it will make the arrow fly in a roughly straight line to the target.
If you knew that wasn't going to happen, say, because strong winds would blow it significantly on track.
You wouldn't think that way of aiming any more likely to succeed than another.
In choosing a means for its probability of realising a goal, you'll always make some assumption about how it will do so,
or about what the causal route from competence to success success will.
If the means work be but in deviant cause cases, this assumption isn't true.
In the blown arrow case, the two gusts prevent the arrow from flying in a straight line.
So though your competence causes your success, it doesn't do so in the way you envisaged.
Something similar occurs in knowledge cases. When you take your experience as of a fairly wide animal to be evidence for the presence of a sheep,
you assume that you're perceiving the sheep with the proximate cause of your visual experience as the animal whose presence your belief is about.
But again, that's not how your evidence is caused. There's a sheep, but you're not directly seeing it.
Or imagine that after you see a farmer leading a sheep, thieves steal the sheep and take it to what they think is a distant field.
But because they got lost in the same field, he was taking it to hear the cause of your evidence.
The farmers leading a sheep is also a cause of the sheep's later presence in the field.
Since if he had been leading it, he wouldn't have been robbed. But the route from that cause to its effect isn't as you assumed.
Instead of a simple walk, a farmer and farmer and sheep to field, there's a there's an outside intervention and a different, more complex route.
So this suggests the following account of deviant cause cases.
When you form a justified belief or competently choose a means,
you make an assumption often run rough rather than precise about how the required connection does or will go in a belief case.
The assumption concerns how the effects that may be true.
Explain your evidence for P and also in common cause cases how they did or will cause P in an action case.
It concerns how your means or the property f for which you to choose the means will
realise your goal and a possible added condition for knowledge or achievement.
It's just that this assumption be true and justified. So what you assume about justification and truth or competence and success.
So about how justification and truth or competence success successor connected is warranted and accurate.
So actually, Goldman's causal theory included a similar, similar condition requiring that for you to know that p,
you must be able to correctly reconstruct the causal chain linking the facts.
That may be true to your belief that P and the condition is needed for another reason.
If all facts are ultimately effects of the Big Bang, then all of them are.
If one goes back far enough joint effects of a common cause,
this threatens to make all justified True beliefs satisfy the outside in condition and so all to count as knowledge.
This implication is avoided if not only must there be a connection between truth and justification,
but you must have a roughly accurate, even if tacit picture of what it is.
Something must most of us have no further back than the very recent past.
And the added condition. How am I? Let's talk.
The added condition is also needed to yield the intuitive verdict in a more complex lottery like case.
I feel like apologising, but. Now, when your view handles these cases, you can't resist the temptation.
Okay. A more complex lottery like case of 100 prisoners in a jail.
99 participated in a riot. But the authorities have no evidence of any individual prisoner that he did or that he was among the 99.
They then can't, it's often said, legitimately convict any one of them of variety rioting,
even though they could if they had eyewitness testimony of his doing.
So That was only say, 0.95 reliable that they've got evidence to make the .99 likely that any prisoner participated in the riot.
But the view is that they can't convict anyone of doing that.
The reason Sarah Moss has argued in a recent paper is that with only the statistical statistical evidence,
they can't know of any individual that he participated.
The outside in view agrees that they they can't know since the statistical evidence isn't causally connected
to the specific fact of that individual's participating as an accurate eyewitness report would be.
As Moss points out, however, there can be cases where that evidence is causally connected to the relevant fact.
For example, if the prisoner being tried is the one who initiated the riot,
inducing the other 98 prisoners to join him and thereby making this a statistical fact.
True, that looks like one with a causal connection is present.
But if the authorities aren't aware of this fact about his causal role as in the example they
are and what I'm calling this additional accurate assumption condition isn't satisfied.
The authorities don't know and they can't legitimately convict.
So I've said that in deviant cause cases,
your assumption about the route from truth to the justification or from competence to success must be true and justified.
But some may object if that's not enough. The assumption must, in addition, be knowledge, and that makes the proposed analysis at least of knowledge.
Again, circular. It makes it presuppose what it's meant to explain.
But it's not in general true that when a belief that power rests on the assumption of Q It can't be knowledge unless you have knowledge of.
Q Consider the lottery case. They're human to know or to be capable of knowing that you won't be able to afford an expensive safari this year.
But in believing that you have to be assuming that you didn't or won't win the lottery is not right.
If you believe that I can't afford a safari later this year. You have to be assuming that you won't win the lottery.
And that isn't something, you know. The whole point of the example is that you don't know that your ticket, your lottery ticket lost.
And if in this case, a belief can be knowledge, despite resting on an assumption that isn't knowledge, though it has to be justified and true.
It's hard to see why that can also be true in deviant cause cases.
So I'm getting to the end. So adding this accurate assumption condition that I proposed to deal with the deviant cause
cases makes the analysis of knowledge and achievement less simple than they were before.
But are they now objectionable? Gerrymandered or ad hoc?
That seems an exaggeration.
An analysis is gerrymandered if it contains ad hoc additions that don't relate either to its previous content or to each other.
But that's not the case here. The added conditions involve further relations among the analyses initial elements, for example,
between belief, truth, justification and the connection between the last two deaths.
A condition for knowledge requires the connection between truth and justification to itself be the object of a justified true belief or assumption.
It therefore extends the matching of mind and world that it's the heart that's at the heart of knowing.
So not only must you believe that P match the external effect that P,
but an assumption about the relation between that fact and your evidence must also match that relation as it externally is.
This is more an elaboration of the account's initial claims than an unrelated attack on to them.
Nor do the additions address just a single issue as ad hoc ones typically do like writing in an ad hoc modification.
You have one difficulty ad one patch to deal with that and that a different patch for this one and a different patch for this one.
Thus, though, the addition for knowledge yields the intuitive verdicts not only in deviant cost cases,
but also in ones like the prisoner riot case where merely statistical evidence can be caused.
But what makes your belief true? So though there's some loss of simplicity, it doesn't seem to me enormous.
I said at the beginning, I think it's a reasonable demand that a serious intrinsic value have not some ramshackle definition,
but something relatively simple. And unified.
So I'm proposing that this account of what knowledge and achievement are, even with the add ons, is still pretty simple.
So to conclude. I haven't argued at length that knowledge and achievement are intrinsically good, intrinsically, ethically good.
If anyone denies wants to deny that, I haven't said a word.
Convince you otherwise. My aim has been more to show how. If they're good, their value can rest on their nature.
Given that it's more plausible that something is intrinsically good, if its nature is comparatively simple and if it's ramshackle or complex,
I've suggested that this condition may be satisfied if borrowing from ethical theory,
we see knowledge and achievement as Murray and organic unities,
the devout not just a conjunction of independent elements, but in each case a certain connection between them.
This views persuasiveness is heightened for me by the many parallels between the two
goods that their elements belief truth and justification in the one case in intention,
success and competence, and the other mirror each other as do albeit albeit in different directions.
The required conditions in a needed addition to them,
and is heightened further by the fact that in each case the required connection matches the direction of fit of the relevant state, so to speak.
So it's especially appropriate to that state. I haven't, in this lecture,
given a complete account of these goods since I've only briefly described the factors that make
for degrees of goodness in them or for more versus less valuable knowledge or achievement.
That's the subject of Wednesday's Lectures lecture.
I should say that the account of significance in the lecture,
that lecture can go with the organic view in this lecture, but it's also independent of it.
Suppose we independently interesting what makes for the most valuable knowledge and the most valuable achievements.
But anyways,
in this lecture I hope to have suggested a view of knowledge and achievement on which their having ethical value as a possibly persuasive rationale.
Thanks very much.