A defense of the veritist account of the goal of inquiry

ABSTRACT

Veritists hold that the goal of inquiry is true belief, while justificationists contend that the goal of inquiry is justified belief. Recently, Christoph Kelp makes two new objections to both veritism and justificationism. Further, he claims that the two objections suggest that the goal of inquiry is knowledge. This paper defends a sophisticated version of veritism against Kelp's two objections.

KEYWORDS:

• The goal of inquiry
• knowledge
• belief
• veritism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is widely agreed that such misleading defeaters do not undermine knowledge. For a recent discussion, see de Almeida and Fett (2016). To be sure, some philosophers (e.g. Harman 1973, 143–144) suggest that misleading defeaters can undermine knowledge if the agent should have been aware of them – it would be epistemically irresponsible for the agent to be unaware of them. If they are right, we may tweak the Hire 2.0 case so that it would not be epistemically irresponsible for you to be unaware of the breaking news.

2 If I ignored the news and firmly believed that D on the basis of your testimony, then you would be released from your contractual commitment. But if I doubted your testimony without good reasons, would you be released from your contractual commitment? This is a complicated issue that I will not discuss here.

3 For instance, even though you never intend to inquire into your boss’ sex life, you may form some true beliefs about your boss’ sex life because of your colleague’s gossip.

4 Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (2007, 196) provide a nice example:

What would it be like to believe that there's milk in the refrigerator, and nothing else? It seems as impossible as having money without the social and economic circumstances that give sense to something being money. To believe that there is milk in the refrigerator, you have to have enough by way of belief to count as understanding what milk is, what a refrigerator is, and what it is for one thing to be inside another. It takes a lot of belief to be any amount of belief.

5 What is implicit belief? Philosophers such as Gareth Evans and Richard Moran think that belief is transparent in the sense that one can discover whether one believes that p simply by considering whether p. There might be some counterexamples to this principle, but it seems highly reliable. Thus, generally speaking, we implicitly believe that p if the belief that p is not occurrent, but we would assent to that p simply by considering whether p.