Against swamping

Abstract

Abstract:The Swamping Argument -highlighted by Kvanvig (2003;2010) -purports to show that the epistemic value of truth will always swamp the epistemic value of any non-factive epistemic properties (e.g. justification) so that these properties can never add any epistemic value to an already-true belief. Consequently (and counter-intuitively), knowledge is never more epistemically valuable than mere true belief. We show that the Swamping Argument fails. Parity of reasoning yields the disastrous conclusion that nonfactive epistemic properties -mostly saliently justification -are never epistemically valuable properties of a belief. We close by diagnosing why philosophers have been mistakenly attracted to the argument. rise to an ex ante constraint on the correct theory of knowledge: whatever conditions it places on knowledge (over and above the possession of true belief), a true belief that satisfies all of those conditions must turn out to be more e-valuable than a true belief that doesn't. 2 The problem is how to accommodate this ex ante constraint.Failing to solve this problem provides the ground for an objection. Typically, this objection is levied against reliabilist theories of knowledge, 3 e.g. one according to which there is only one condition for knowledge over and above the possession of true belief: the condition that (put roughly) the belief must be reliably formed. However, the objection has wider scope. Any theorist who is to maintain the ex ante constraint must have some plausible explanation for why the e-value 1 1 As Kvanvig (2003) notes, the insight that knowledge is to be prized above mere true opinion (even if the former is no practically more useful than the latter) has its roots to Plato's Meno. 3 See here Goldman (1992).

In Defence of Swamping

“…The solution explains away Meno's Thesis as resting on a confusion between value and apparent value. So contrary to what Carter and Jarvis (, p. 695) think, rejecting Meno's Thesis is an option that merits serious consideration.…”

“…Time is left out but will be brought back in due course. Pritchard (, p. 248), Carter and Jarvis (, p. 692) and Carter, Jarvis, and Rubin (, p. 252) obviously treat (ST) as a schema meant to hold for suitable substitutes of “value” such as “epistemic value”.…”

“…The thesis is motivated by examples such as the following (Carter and Jarvis , p. 693). You own a ticket in a lottery to be drawn on Friday.…”

“…First, even after lottery has been drawn, your winning ticket remains instrumentally valuable until it is shown and the prize secured (Carter and Jarvis , p. 697). Second, a losing ticket continues to have instrumental value for you even after the draw, as long as you do not know that it is a loser (Carter and Jarvis , p. 697). Third, maintaining one's home well has only instrumental value relative to the good of having a pleasant home.…”

“…26–7). In a couple of recent papers, Carter and Jarvis () and Carter, Jarvis, and Rubin () object to the principle, claiming that it faces counterexamples and has absurd consequences. They conclude that the Swamping Problem is illusory.…”