. a Basic Model of Performance Assessment

This paper enhances and extends a powerful and promising research program, performance-based epistemology, which stands at the crossroads of many important currents in contemporary epistemology, including the value problem, epistemic normativity, virtue epistemology, and the nature of knowledge. Performance-based epistemology offers at least three outstanding benefits: it explains knowledge’s distinctive value, it places epistemic evaluation into a familiar and ubiquitous pattern of evaluation, and it solves the Gettier problem. But extant versions of performancebased epistemology have attracted serious criticism. This paper shows how to meet the objections without sacrificing the aforementioned benefits. The paper proceeds as follows. Section 1 introduces the basic model of performance assessment. Section 2 introduces the leading version of performance-based epistemology, the achievement account of knowledge. Section 3 considers the objection that the achievement account is too weak, and shows how to strengthen it. Section 4 considers the objection that the achievement account is too strong, and shows how to weaken it. Section 5 shows how to adjust performance-based epistemology if it turns out that knowledge doesn’t require truth. Section 6 briefly concludes. * This is a draft. Comments welcome. Please don’t cite or quote without permission. Knowledge as achievement | 2 1. A basic model of performance assessment A raging Achilles leads the Greek charge, driving the Trojans all the way to the Scaean gate. The siege of Troy might have ended this day, but for one fateful shot. The Trojan prince Paris, perched in the tower high above the gate, places an arrow on his bow, surveys the bloody chaos below, identifies the indomitable Greek hero, takes aim and lets the shot fly. Apollo guides the arrow through the mass of bodies and trampling feet to bury deep into Achilles’s ankle, just below his leg armor. Only in that very spot could Achilles receive his death blow. Blood gushing, strength failing, eyes dimming, Achilles staggers forward in one last feeble defiant gesture before toppling dead to the ground. We might assess Paris’s shot along any number of dimensions. We might think it cowardly that he assailed Achilles from afar. Or we might think it foolish to shoot from the tower rather than help rally flagging Trojan spirits down at the gate, or unwise to shoot at the nearly invincible Achilles rather a more vulnerable Greek soldier. But setting aside such evaluation that places Paris’s shot in a broader critical context, be it moral, political or strategic, we can assess it more narrowly as an archery shot in battle, as a martial shot qua shot. First, we might assess whether it attained its aim, that is, hit its target, Achilles’s vulnerable heel. Here it scores perfectly. In virtue of this, call it accurate. Second, we might assess it for skillfulness, that is, whether it manifests relevant archery skill or competence. Here our myth-