Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Why Knowledge Is Merely True Belief

Author(s): Crispin Sartwell
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Apr., 1992), pp. 167-180
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026639
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WHY KNOWLEDGE IS MERELY TRUE BELIEF*

I

claim that propositionalknowledge is merely true belief, that

an agent knows that p if and only if p is true and the agent

believes that p. Elsewhere, I have attempted to answer the obvious objections to that position.' Here, I want to offer a positive
argument for it.
I. TERMINOLOGICAL GROUNDWORK

One objection that has been raised to the claim that knowledge is
merely true belief is that it seems to leave us without any preanalytic
sense of what knowledge is. That is, it seems to be a question
whether the proffered analysis could possibly be an analysis of
knowledge at all.2 This objection seems to arise because there is a
very widely held intuition that belief and truth could not possibly be
sufficient for knowledge. Then the question of whether the analysis
embodies a theory of knowledge seems to come down to a clash of
intuitions about what notion it is which is being analyzed. For this
reason, I want to offer a way of picking out the notion to be defined.
Here is my proposal: knowledge is our epistemic goal in the generation of particular propositional beliefs. It will be convenient to
have a term to refer to procedures that have as their goal the genera* I would like to thank Jeffrey Tlumak, who commented elaborately on an
earlier version of this paper.
1 "Knowledge

is Merely True Belief," American Philosophical

Quarterly,

xxviii, 2 (April 1991): 157-65. That essay merely lays the groundwork for a
defense of the position; roughly, I try to show there that the claim that knowledge
is merely true belief cannot be refuted by the flick of a counterexample. I refer
those who think it can be so refuted to the earlier paper. I intended in that essay
merely to reply to the claim that our ordinaryuse of the term 'knowledge'committed us to a distinction between knowledge and mere true belief. This appeared
to me to be the only explicit argument in the literature to the effect that at least
some third condition was required, and thus I hoped, by attackingthat argument,
to suspend the question of burden of proof.
2
This objection was brought to my attention by Tim McGrew.
0022-362X/92/8904/167-80

C) 1992 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

167

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tion of belief with regard to particular propositions. Let us refer to

such procedures collectively as inquiry. Knowledge, then, is the
purpose or telos of inquiry. (This minimal conception of knowledge
is, I believe, in keeping with the traditional use of the concept of
knowledge in, for instance, Plato, Descartes, and Hume.)
I say that inquiry comprises procedures that have as their goal the
generation of belief in particular propositions, because there are
wider-ranging epistemic goals than knowledge: for example, rationality and wisdom. But such concepts take beliefs in groups or even
consider the entire structure of beliefs of an epistemic agent. It can
be rational or wise, as part of such an overall structure, to believe
that p. But one cannot have the rationality or wisdom that p, as one
can have the knowledge that p. At any rate, we might think of a
theory of epistemic justification as doing two things: (a) giving general procedures for inquiry, and (b) setting out standards for evaluating the productions of inquiry, that is, particular propositional beliefs. A belief, then, is justified if it is produced (or, alternately,
could have been produced) by a correct procedure for inquiry,3 and
to say that a belief is justified is to evaluate it positively along epistemic lines. I regard both projects as worthwhile. I am by no means
arguing that an account of justification is unnecessary or unimportant; my claim, rather, is that such an account is not part of the
theory of knowledge.
To continue with terminological groundwork, it is possible to distinguish two sorts of epistemological projects: normative and descriptive. Descriptive epistemology is essentially a branch of psychology or cognitive science. It asks: How do we come to believe or to
know? What cognitive mechanisms and causal circumstances operate in the acquisition of belief or knowledge? What, for example, is
the function with regard to belief and other propositional attitudes
of perception, memory, and so forth? Normative epistemology, on
the other hand, is what has usually been thought of as a distinctively
philosophical discipline. It asks: How should we generate beliefs
with regard to achieving knowledge? How should inquiry be conducted and evaluated? And what, exactly, is its goal, i.e., what is
knowledge?
Now, these two sorts of investigations are by no means unconnected.4 For example, it would be ludicrous to recommend (norma3 On internalist views, that agent must be aware that the belief was so produced;
on externalist views, the agent need not be aware of this fact.
4 In fact, I agree with Alvin Goldman that they are very intimately connected
indeed. See Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard, 1986).

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tively) a procedure for generating beliefs which was literally impossible (descriptively) to apply. Thus, the normative project might be
thought of as giving guidelines for the correct or optimal application of the procedures we do use to generate beliefs. I shall be
concerned here with normative epistemology.
II. DEONTOLOGICAL AND TELEOLOGICAL CONCEPTIONS

The most elaborately developed normative theories are in ethics,

and thus normative epistemology often relies on a parallel to ethics.
Ethical systems have been divided into two kinds: deontological and
teleological.5 Proponents of the former think of moral action as
what is done in obedience to principles that serve in turn no end
that could be looked on as an overall moral goal. Obligation and
permission are central concepts here. If I do only what is permissible (possibly, if I do it because it is permissible), or what is demanded by duty (possibly, if I do it because duty demands it), then I
am not subject to ethical disapprobation even if the result of my
action is disastrous. According to proponents of teleological ethics,
on the other hand, an action is morally good when it conduces to
some goal, for example, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or if it is in accordance with some rule the observance of which
so conduces. Similarly, there might be two sorts of normative epistemology: one that prescribes duties and permissions in generating
beliefs (and other propositional attitudes) without regard to any
overarching epistemic goal, and one that prescribes some goal for
epistemic activity and recognizes the legitimacy of any procedure
that conduces to that goal, or, alternately, of any procedure that
accords with certain rules, the observance of which in turn conduces
to that goal. I have asserted that knowledge is the goal of inquiry.
But this supposes that inquiry has some goal, which would be denied
by a proponent of deontological normative epistemology. So we had
better start with a discussion of whether that position is plausible.
The taxonomy of normative epistemology suggested by this particular parallel to ethics has been developed by William Alston.6 Because my discussion follows his to some extent, I should pause here
to differentiate my use of terms from his. Alston uses the term
'deontological' to distinguish systems which epistemically prescribe,
5 My characterizationsof these ethical positions are sketchy and inadequate to
many actual positions. The present point, however, is simplythe parallelto epistemology, so we need not be concerned with capturingthe subtleties of full-fledged
ethical theories.
(Ithaca:
6 "Concepts of Epistemic Justification," in Epistemic Justification
Cornell, 1989), pp. 81-114.

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proscribe, or permit certain beliefs or belief-generating procedures,

from systems he terms 'evaluative' which merely assess certain beliefs and procedures from the standpoint of some standard. He
points out that it is not the case that all standards of evaluation
depend on such concepts as obligation and permission, that not all
standards carry with them the implication that the subject is praiseworthy for meeting them or blameworthy for violating them. For
example, to say that some person is beautiful is to evaluate her
appearance positively, but it is not to say that she is praiseworthy for
her appearance, since she may not be responsible for it; it may be a
genetic endowment (ibid., p. 96). The relevant point here is that
both sorts of systems (Alston's 'deontological' and 'evaluative') are
what I term 'teleological'; he describes both as being directed to the
goal of generating true belief and avoiding false belief.
It may be a question, then, whether any philosopher has seriously
held a deontological position in my sense, has seriously held that we
have some epistemic obligations, but that there is no overarching
goal of inquiry. Some extreme idealists and positivists, who identify
truth and justification, may harbor such a view. If one has a coherence theory of truth and also a coherence theory ofjustification, for
example, then one may simply count as knowledge whatever beliefs
are generated by whatever procedures turn out to embody justification; if it was supposed to be a sheer fact that we ought to follow
such procedures, if there were no further goal in mind, this would
be a deontological position in my sense. The notion of knowledge is
in some sense superfluous on this position; at least, it does not
describe a distinctive purpose for inquiry above the fulfillment of
certain duties or obedience to certain rules. Clearer examples of
deontological views could be proposed: for example, believe all
and only the propositions contained in the Bible, or in the writings
of Mao.
Deontological views in my sense have, these days, few proponents,
and seem on the face of it extreme and implausible. Their implausibility can be brought out in the following way. What is the source of
our epistemic obligations? Or, to put it another way, is there any
good reason to think that we have any distinctively epistemic obligations at all, in the absence of some overarching purpose for inquiry?
The same problem arises for deontological moral theories, but here
there are plausible, or at least fairly widely proffered, answers: our
moral obligations derive from God, for example, or from the state.
Again, it is possible that the very same sources yield our epistemic
obligations. But to establish this, we would have to give good rea-

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IS MERELYTRUEBELIEF

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sons to think that God does impose epistemic obligations, or to give

an account of the "epistemic legitimacy" of the state. Furthermore,
there no longer appears to be any distinction between moral and
epistemic constraints on the generation of beliefs. There no longer
appears to be any distinctively epistemological enterprise.
I shall take it, until such objections can be answered, that a purely
deontological conception of epistemic norms is highly implausible.
Indeed, no contemporary philosopher with whose work I am
acquainted holds such a view. It might be asked, then, why I have
bothered to discuss it at all. The point is just this: inquiry does have a
purpose; only teleological conceptions of normative epistemology
are plausible. But what about deontological conceptions in Alston 's
sense? Such conceptions formulate obligations and permissions, and
award praise and blame, with regard to the way these obligations
and permissions conduce to an overarching epistemic goal. I shall
call such views, in keeping with my own rather than Alston's use of
terms, injunctive teleological accounts of normative epistemology.
They might be thought of by analogy to rule utilitarianism, where
one's obligations are to follow rules, the observance of which tends
to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Rule utilitarianism
has the advantage over act utilitarianism that it can yield relatively
detailed injunctions on conduct, rather than the huge amorphous
injunction to act so as to create the greatest good of the greatest
number, which might be extremely difficult to apply in individual
cases. Likewise, injunctive teleological views yield duties or permissions which, if observed, will conduce to knowledge, rather than the
huge amorphous duty to generate beliefs so as to gain knowledge.
Alston attacks injunctive teleological accounts as presupposing
what has been called "doxastic voluntarism," the view that our beliefs are, in one sense or another, under our voluntary control. After
all, I cannot have an obligation to do something or to refrain from
doing it if it is not up to me whether I do it or not. Injunctive
teleological conceptions of justification indeed suppose doxastic
voluntarism. And Alston's objections to doxastic voluntarism appear
to me devastating. For a detailed discussion of the issue, I refer the
reader to Alston.7 Here, I recount a single example: when I seem to
see a tree before me, and have no reason to think that, for example,
I am dreaming, or that the perceptual situation is grossly abnormal,
or that someone is replacing trees in my neighborhood with plastic
7 See esp. "The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification," in Epistemic Justification, sect. II-VI.

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replicas, it is simply not up to me whether I believe there is a tree

before me; like it or not, I shall believe it. So I should hardly be
praised or blamed for doing so. It should be noted that this criticism
applies not only to injunctive teleological accounts but also to deontological accounts in my sense.
If this criticism is plausible, we are left with a conception of justification that Alston calls an "evaluative" or "strong position" account. These terms describe justification from the two angles mentioned above; to say that it is desirable to get into a strong position is
to give a view about (a) the correct procedures for inquiry, while to
evaluate someone's epistemic position positively (though not in
deontological terms) is to apply (b) some account of evaluation with
regard to these procedures. We ought not, on Alston's view, to alot
praise and blame in epistemic matters, but some epistemic situations
are better than others. (It is better to be beautiful than ugly, but,
again, one is not usually praiseworthy or blameworthy in this regard.) On Alston's view, the most plausible way to formulate this
conception is that one's belief is justified if it is based on adequate
grounds, and having adequate grounds is a matter of being in a
strong position to generate a true belief on the matter. It is a good
thing to be in such a position, but one is not, or at least one is not
always, responsible for getting into such a position. Now, it is not
part of my current project to defend this conception of justification
(though I regard it as plausible); rather, I want to use it in a certain
way to elucidate what, on it, would be a plausible view of our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions, that is, what would
be a plausible theory of propositional knowledge.
III. TRUTH CONDUCIVENESS

It is widely held that our epistemic goal is achieving true beliefs and
avoiding false ones about propositions with which we are epistemically concerned. (We have seen that Alston, for one, endorses that
view.) That is, it is widely admitted that, on any good account of
justification, there must be reason to think that the beliefs justified
on the account are likely to be true. Indeed, proponents of all the
major conceptions of justification hold this position. For example,
the foundationalist Paul Moser8 writes:
[E]pistemicjustificationis essentiallyrelated to the so-calledcognitive
goal of truth, insofar as an individualbelief is epistemicallyjustified
only if it is appropriatelydirectedtowardthe goal of truth.Morespecif8

Empirical Justification

(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985).

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ically, on the present conception, one is epistemically justified in believing a proposition only if one has good reason to believe it is true (ibid.,
p. 4).
The reliabilist Alvin Goldman claims, similarly, that
an account of justification is that beliefs justified on
likely to be true; he says that a plausible conception
will be "truth-linked" (op. cit., pp. 116-21). And
Laurence BonJour9 puts it even more strongly:

a condition on
the account be
of justification
the coherentist

If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if

finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the
likelihood of finding true ones, epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we
have some reason to think that epistemic justification constitutes a path
to truth that we as cognitive human beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones.
Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one (ibid., p. 8).
In fact, it is often enough taken to be the distinguishing mark of
the fact that we are epistemically concerned with a proposition that
we are concerned with its truth or falsity. That is what, on the view
of many philosophers, distinguishes epistemic from moral or prudential constraints on belief, what distinguishes inquiry from other
belief-generating procedures.'0 I have argued that a plausible normative epistemology will be teleological. And I have claimed that the
conception that accounts of knowledge are attempting to analyze or
describe is that of the epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions. It would follow that, if a philosopher holds that the epistemic telos is merely true belief, that philosopher implicitly commits
himself, his own asservations to the contrary, to the view that knowledge is merely true belief.
I think that this is the case. That is, I think that, in the above
passages, these philosophers have committed themselves implicitly
to the view that knowledge is merely true belief, and that justification is a criterion rather than a logically necessary condition of

9 The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard, 1985).

10
I hope to argue elsewhere that there are no non-epistemic belief-generating
procedures in the relevant sense, that believing p and taking p to be true are the
same thing. If this case can be made, then I think it can be shown to follow that
knowledge is the telos of inquiry. So, though I take the latter claim here as an
unargued premise, I think it can be decisively established.

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knowledge. By a criterion, I mean a test for whether some item has

some property that is not itself a logically necessary condition of that
item having that property. Justification on the present view is, first
of all, a means by which we achieve knowledge, that is, by which we
arrive at true beliefs, and, second, it provides a test of whether
someone has knowledge, that is, whether her beliefs are true. So,
again, the present view does not make accounts of justification trivial, or unconnected with the assessment of claims to know. If our
epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief,
then justification (a) gives procedures by which true beliefs are obtained, and (b) gives standards for evaluating the products of such
procedures with regard to that goal. From the point of view of (a),
justification prescribes techniques by which knowledge is gained.
From the point of view of (b), it gives a criterion for knowledge. But
in neither case does it describe a logically necessary condition for
knowledge.
Another way of putting the matter is this. If we describe justification as of merely instrumental value with regard to arriving at truth,
as Bonjour does explicitly, we can no longer maintain both that
knowledge is the telos of inquiry and that justification is a necessary
condition of knowledge. It is incoherent to build a specification of
something regarded merely as a means of achieving some goal into
the description of the goal itself; in such circumstances, the goal can
be described independently of the means. So, if justification is demanded because it is instrumental to true belief, it cannot also be
maintained that knowledge is justified true belief.
I shall now certainly be accused of begging the question by assuming that knowledge is the goal of inquiry. There is justice in this
claim in that I have not gone very far toward establishing the
point." But I would ask my accusers at this point whether they can
do better in describing the conception that theories of knowledge
set out to analyze or describe without begging the question in favor
of some such theory. And I ask also, if knowledge is not the overarching epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions, why
such tremendous emphasis has been placed on the theory of knowledge in the history of philosophy, and just what function that notion
serves within that history. If knowledge is not the overarching purpose of inquiry, then why is the notion important, and why should

IITo repeat, however, I hope to establish this claim on completely independent

grounds.

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we continue to be concerned in normative epistemology above all

with what knowledge is and how it can be achieved? If we want to
withhold the term 'knowledge' from mere true belief, but also want
to hold that mere true belief is the purpose of inquiry, then, first of
all, I think that 'knowledge' will now merely be a technical term with
a stipulated definition. And, second, I do not think it will be central
to epistemology, since it no longer represents our epistemic goal.
And, third, I think the stipulated definition will either be redundant
(if justification is held to be truth conducive) or, as I shall argue,
incoherent (if it is not).
Now, it may well be held that justification is of more than instrumental value, because if we are not justified in believing p, though p
is true and we in fact believe it, we may have false beliefs that lead us
to p, and we may continue to generate false beliefs in the future. All
of this is true, but it is irrelevant to the present point. Recall that I
have characterized knowledge as our epistemic goal with regard to
particular propositions. Insofar as p is concerned, this goal has
been realized if p is true and we believe it. Insofar as we also have
such goals as continuing to generate true beliefs, rendering our
system of beliefs coherent, and so forth, it is desirable to have justified beliefs. But with regard to any particular proposition, our goal
has been reached if we believe that proposition and it is true.
But I do not want simply to let the matter rest on a supposed
agreement among some contemporary epistemologists that our
epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief.
Such epistemologists are agreed that knowledge is at least justified
true belief. I think that Alston is right to think that the only plausible
way to construe this claim is that knowledge is at least true belief
based on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong
position. So perhaps the figures in question, on reflection, would
describe the epistemic telos not as true belief but as true belief based
on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong position.
It must now be asked, however, why do we want to have adequate
grounds? Why do we want to be in a strong position? This question
ought to be misguided if true belief based on adequate grounds or
true belief reached from a strong position is in fact the purpose of
inquiry. For there is no good answer to the question of why we
desire our ultimate ends. But the question is hardly misguided. In
fact, we cannot even specify what it is to have adequate grounds
except that these grounds tend to establish that the proposition in
question is true; we cannot even specify what it is to be in a strong
position except as being in a strong position to get the truth. This

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indicates that the purpose of inquiry can be formulated without

reference to the notions of ground or position. Thus, on the views in
question, believing the truth is in fact our overarching epistemic
telos with regard to particular propositions, on the only plausible
conception of justification. Hence, on these views, knowledge is
merely true belief.
IV. LYCAN'S EXPLANATIONISM

The only fully developed, contemporary account of justification of

which I am aware that appears to steer clear of this consequence is
that expressed by William Lycan in Judgement and Justification. '2
He proceeds by denying that truth is the only or the overall purpose
of inquiry. His claim is that beliefs are justified in virtue of their
explanatory role; they are justified by their coherence with previously held beliefs, by their simplicity, their scope in an explanatory
framework, and so forth. And Lycan even argues that all inference
relies on a (perhaps implicit) appeal to best explanation. For example, even in a simple modus ponens deduction, we are not forced to
accept the conclusion; we always have the option of rejecting one of
the premises. So Lycan concludes that all reasoning involves comparisons of plausibility. He describes justified beliefs as those which
increase the overall explanatory coherence of one's system of
beliefs.
Lycan's position is in some respects similar to Bonjour's; he holds
that we have "spontaneous," that is, noninferred beliefs that have
some degree of prima facie justification (due to the explanatory
virtue of conservatism, which states that we should not without some
explanatory motivation change the beliefs we already do have). But
Lycan's position differs in two crucial respects from BonJour's.
First, Lycan goes further toward elucidating the notion of coherence in his description of the explanatory virtues. Second, whereas
Bonjour holds that any coherence theorist must give a "metajustification" of his view, that is, he must give reasons to think that beliefs
that are justified on the view are likely to be true, Lycan demands no
such thing. In fact, Lycan goes so far as to say:
[I]f ... appeal to simplicity[e.g.] is a fundamentalepistemic method,
then it is fundamental;no further question can arise regarding its
"connectionto truth." . . . For that matter, I do not in the first place
accept the a priori assumptionthat epistemicjustification must be a
matter of quantitativerelation to truth (ibid., p. 148).
Lycan does indeed give a "metajustification" of his account, however. Simplicity, power, and the rest are useful on the evolutionary
12

New York: Cambridge, 1988.

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scale. They are adaptive. I am not sure how plausible this is, but the
point is that, if we are to hold that justification is a component of
knowledge, we need to take Lycan's general approach. That is, we
must describe justification as conducing to some goal other than
truth, or else lay down justification as a deontological desideratum.
We cannot, as we have seen, coherently maintain that knowledge is
the telos of inquiry, that justification is logically required for knowledge, and that accounts ofjustification must in turn be metajustified
by their conduciveness to truth. And Lycan manages to avoid also
the dangers of a deontological epistemology; he does not in fact
regard simplicity or power as sheer desiderata, but as useful adaptations. Nor does his view assume doxastic voluntarism.
Nevertheless, the view has severe drawbacks. To begin with, it
makes the distinction between epistemic and other values obscure.
In fact, it absorbs epistemic value into sheer utility, and it is not at all
clear that this is a plausible line. It is true, as Lycan admits, that
there is no a priori reason to think that a simple hypothesis is more
likely to be true than an extremely complex one. But a simple hypothesis has less cognitive cost; it is efficient as an explanation. That
may make it seem that it is better in the long run to believe simple
hypotheses. But it is not clear that it is in fact, better, epistemically
speaking, to believe simple hypotheses.
To get clear on the point, let us suppose (as seems likely, though
Lycan is reticent here) that Lycan holds justification in his sense to
be a necessary condition of knowledge, and that he holds truth also
to be a necessary condition.'3 Then knowledge turns out to be (at
least) true belief that is generated by adaptive explanatory techniques. But this seems odd; now that we recognize two primitive
epistemic values, they may well conflict. For example, is it good to
believe, in some circumstances, highly explanatory falsehoods? The
account surely leaves some such cases strictly undecidable, since it
describes both elegance and truth as intrinsic values. But is this
plausible? Surely, we might want to say, though it can be useful to
believe all sorts of falsehoods, it is always epistemically good to believe the truth. It may be useful, for example, for me to have a
cognitive technique that causes me to believe that I have all sorts of
positive qualities to an extremely high degree; I may be happier and
more efficient if I believe myself to be extraordinarily intelligent,
good-looking, humble, and so forth. But it is not a good thing epi1 It is only on this assumption that Lycan's position constitutes an alternative
to the views described in the previous section. So I shall talk as though this is
Lycan'sposition, though, again, he does not explicitly endorse it.

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stemically to believe such things if they are false. (Fortunately, however, in my case they are all true.) In short, we seem to have a notion
of epistemic value that is radically divorced from utility.
This raises the fundamental difficulty with Lycan's strategy; it
makes prudential justification a component of knowledge. But if, as
I say, we have a notion of epistemic justification in distinction from
prudential justification, and if knowledge is essentially an epistemic
matter, then Lycan's account leaves us confused. Either we ought to
believe what is produced by procedures that are adaptive or else we
ought to believe what is produced by procedures that are likely to
yield true beliefs. But we cannot coherently demand that we follow
both of these as ultimate aims, because they may and in fact will
conflict. Then we are left with an internally incoherent concept of
knowledge. Of course, we can subsume one to the other; we can
assert that the truth is adaptive and that is why it should be believed,
or that we should believe what works on explanatory grounds because it is likely to be true. But then, first of all, we need an account
of why this should be so. And, second, we should now characterize
knowledge univocally as belief in what is true, or belief in what is
adaptive. If we take the second road, then I assert that we are going
to hold all sorts of falsehoods to be known, and that is prima facie
implausible.
In fact, Lycan keeps coming back to the suggestion that explanatory virtues are truth-conducive, although he often enough admits
that there is no reason why this should be the case. This is because, I
think, he shares the deep-seated intuition that knowledge and truth
are bound up, that knowledge is a distinctively epistemic notion. He
writes:
Nor, please note, do I understand "rational"here as "likelyto yield
truth," for this would be ... to introduce "true" at the beginning of
our epistemologicalquest rather than see it fall out at the end. ...
[I]ntroducing"true" at this point would both threaten circularityor
regressagain and invite questionsof the form "But what reasons have
you to think that U leads to truth?" where U is a posited ultimate
principle of theory choice.

. .

. In the beginning, "rational" is a primi-

tive term used to evaluateepistemicacts;particularprinciplesare later

seen to "tend toward truth," because the beliefs they produce are
rational-not the other way around (op. cit., pp. 155-6).
This passage strikes me as wanting to have it both ways. It seems that
we simply ought to believe what is rational (simple, powerful, etc.),
and then, as a sort of added bonus, as a matter of fact what we

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WHY KNOWLEDGE IS MERELY TRUE BELIEF

179

believe will happen to be true. But this is odd if, as Lycan admits,
there is no reason to think that a simple explanation is more likely to
be true than a very complex one. Now, as a matter of fact, the
notion of truth itself here may well be disintegrating; Lycan's pragmatist tendencies might be extending toward taking truth to be
warranted assertibility. The view would then face familiar and, I
think, devastating problems, but I shall not address those here.'4
But there is a further argument that Lycan gives for his position.
He argues that we cannot be enjoined from doing what we cannot
but do, and that we cannot fail to use explanatory criteria in generating beliefs:
I suspect that it is biologicallynecessaryto a sentient organism'ssurvival that the organism organize its experience in the simplest, most
coherent and expedient, and yet most powerful and comprehensive
way that it can. . . . It thus comes to be lawlikethat a viable organism
operates, epistemically, according to the elegance principles ... or
something like them. . . . If the suspicion I have expressed is wellfounded, the point is this: A normal human being cannot keep from
formingbeliefs in waysthat have survivalvalue, or from makinguse of
the elegance principlesin doing so-at least up to a point. And if that
is so, then no one is obligated in any way to refrain from following
those primitiveprocedures (op. cit., pp. 126-7).
I would like to make several remarks about this passage. First of all,
there is no reason whatever to believe that it is true that we are
under adaptive necessity of adopting the most elegant explanation
we can come up with, which is exactly what Lycan implies. In fact,
that is a bizarre assertion; it claims quite generally that people never,
or at any rate very rarely, adopt a less elegant hypothesis when a
more elegant one is available, which is obviously false. Aside from
the questions about the nature of simplicity (which Lycan leaves
more or less completely obscure, and which I suspect cannot be
clarified), I can surely resolve to adopt whatever hypothesis seems
most likely to be true, however inelegant it may seem to be. It might
be very elegant indeed, for example, to believe that the extinction of
the dinosaurs resulted from a nuclear test on this planet by aliens,
but a nice messy hypothesis involving climactic changes and disease
might seem more likely to be true.
14 All that would be necessary to refute this view is the description of a single
case in which some agent is warrantedin assertingp and p is false. Such cases are
not hard to devise.

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180

THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

In fact, Lycan here goes further in his doxastic determinism than

does even a rabid determinist, such as Alston. For Alston admits that
we can do our best to apply conscientious techniques of belief formation. He simply denies that the fact that this is to some extent
under our control is enough to render the beliefs that such techniques generate voluntary and hence subject to praise and blame.
But Lycan asserts that we simply must use the techniques of belief
formation that we do use. But this is false. Advances in methodology
have been made, and can be voluntarily adopted. Nor do they all
yield increases in elegance.
V. CONCLUSION

Finally, I would like to formulate the argument that knowledge is

merely true belief as a dilemma. If accounts of justification themselves must be metajustified by an argument to the effect that beliefs
justified on the account are likely to be true, then justification is of
instrumental rather than intrinsic value. That is, we want justification with regard to particular propositions not because of its intrinsic worth, but because it is a means to what we regard as having
intrinsic worth, namely, true belief. If knowledge is the epistemic
telos with regard to particular propositions, then it follows from
such a position that knowledge is merely true belief. On the other
hand, if justification is valued not for its truth conduciveness, but
for its conduciveness to some other goal, for example, successful
adaptation, or for that matter, if justification is itself proposed as an
intrinsic goal (a demand of reason, for example), then knowledge is
an incoherent notion. It gives us two goals for inquiry, which cannot
always be realized simultaneously. As far as I can see, these two
possibilities exhaust the possible accounts of knowledge as (at least)
justified true belief. Again, either justification is instrumental to
truth or it is not. If it is, then knowledge is merely true belief. If it is
not, there is no longer a coherent concept of knowledge. Thus
knowledge is merely true belief. Q.E.D.
CRISPIN SARTWELL

Vanderbilt University

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