Review Essay on Jonathan Kvanvig’s The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding

Jonathan Kvanvig’s The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (2003) is a pioneering work in ‘‘value-driven epistemology.’’ According to this approach, since certain epistemic goods clearly are valuable or matter to us, our accounts of these goods should at least be sensitive to, and ideally should illuminate or explain, their value. It is natural to think that knowledge is one of the epistemic goods that we value, perhaps even that it is one of the great goods. Some valuable things are what we will call distinctively valuable, in the sense that each essential part or constituent of the thing makes some distinct positive contribution to its value. A state is distinctively valuable, if the value of the state exceeds the value of any proper subset of its constituents. Thus, if it turns out that something we find especially good is valuable only in virtue of the value of some proper subset of its constituents, then however great the value of this thing, it is not distinctively valuable. So is knowledge distinctively valuable? The majority of the book represents Kvanvig’s attempt to identify such a distinctive value. He begins by noting that Plato poses essentially the same question in the Meno. Suppose we take it, along with Meno towards the end of the dialogue, that knowledge is valuable because of its practical usefulness. Perhaps, for example, the reason we value knowing the correct way to