Understanding and veritism

Philosophical Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02271-y Understanding and veritism Duncan Pritchard1 Accepted: 2 December 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract My interest is in an apparent tension between two epistemological theses. The first is veritism, which is roughly the claim that truth is the fundamental epistemic good. The second is the idea that understanding is the proper goal of inquiry. The two theses seem to be in tension because the former seems to imply that the proper goal of inquiry should be truth rather than understanding. And yet there is a strong prima facie case to be made for thinking that properly conducted inquiry aims at an elevated epistemic standing like understanding rather than merely true belief. I suggest that this putative tension is one of the reasons why veritism is these days not widely endorsed. As I show, however, there is in fact no tension between these two claims, at least once they are each properly understood. Indeed, I will be suggesting that there is a plausible conception of veritism which would explain why intellectual exemplars seek out understanding in inquiry. Keywords Epistemology · Inquiry · Intellectual virtue · Understanding · Veritism 1 Introductory remarks I do not doubt that understanding comes in many different guises, depending for example on the object of understanding. Moral understanding or self-understanding will look very different than scientific understanding, say, or mathematical understanding. My primary interest here, however, is on what is common to all forms of understanding, and in particular how this commonality relates to fundamental questions of epistemic normativity. More specifically, I want to show that two epistemic theses that are usually thought to be in direct tension—indeed, such that endorsing the one entails rejecting the other—are in fact, properly understood, entirely compatible. Nonetheless, as we will discover later on, getting a grip on this point will better enable us to capture the multi-faceted nature of understanding. * Duncan Pritchard 1 University of California, Irvine, USA Vol.:(0123456789) D. Pritchard The first of these theses doesn’t relate to understanding at all directly, though as we will see there are some indirect connections once we start to tease out how this thesis should be characterised. This thesis is that of veritism, which in general terms (we will have cause to refine this characterisation as we go along) is the claim that truth is the fundamental epistemic good. This entails that all other epistemic goods (knowledge, justified belief, understanding, and so on) derive their epistemic value derivatively from their positive relationship to the truth.1 The second of these theses is directly related to understanding. It is the idea, quite commonly found in contemporary epistemology, that the proper goal of inquiry is understanding.2 As the thought is often expressed, it is not enough to properly conclude an inquiry when you have the (correct) answer that you seek if you don’t understand that answer. Suppose, for example, that a recognised expert in the field tells you what the answer is (so that you not only have the correct answer in hand, but also know that it is correct), but the answer makes no sense to you. In such a scenario, it seems that one should continue inquiring until understanding is secured. Veritism is not a popular view in epistemology these days, and at least one of the reasons for this—though certainly not the only one (we will be considering some other core objections to veritism below)—is the popularity of the idea that understanding is the goal of inquiry. After all, if veritism is true, then shouldn’t it follow that, from a purely intellectual point of view anyway, an intellectual exemplar ought to be concerned only with seeking out the truth? If that’s right, however, then shouldn’t inquiry—which is a paradigmatic intellectual activity—be geared only towards truth, and not in addition towards something epistemically more demanding like understanding? Accordingly, it seems that the plausibility of the idea that understanding is the goal of inquiry undercuts the plausibility of veritism. I think that this line of argument, while superficially compelling, does not stand up to closer scrutiny. Indeed, I will be claiming that once we capture the specific sense in which understanding is the goal of inquiry, and once we also properly 1 There was a time—roughly, a generation ago—when the thesis that we are here calling ‘veritism’ was almost universally endorsed by epistemologists. David (2001, 151–2), for example, quotes the following esteemed epistemologists embracing this claim (albeit not using this terminology): William Alston, Laurence Bonjour, Roderick Chisholm, Richard Foley, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, Paul Moser, Alvin Plantinga, and Ernest Sosa. These days, however, the position has fallen into disfavour, with most epistemologists disavowing it. This shift in fortunes for veritism has tended to coincide with the position being understood in the very specific (and influential) way offered by Goldman (e.g., 1999, passim; 2002), who also explicitly casts his proposal as ‘veritism’. As we will see, on my view this is not a coincidence, as I think Goldman’s way of characterising veritism is one that we should avoid. Accordingly, we should be reclaiming ‘veritism’ from the specific conception of it offered by Goldman. See also endnote 8. Note too that we are talking about a specific kind of value that is epistemic, just as we might delineate a specific kind of value that is, say, aesthetic. This point is important because some of the epistemological literature uses the terminology of ‘epistemic value’ to also concern more general axiological questions about the value of epistemic goods (such as whether knowledge has eudaimonic value). For further discussion of this distinction between the value of the epistemic and epistemic value proper, see Pritchard (2011, 2014b, 2016a). For a survey of contemporary work on epistemic value, see Carter et al. (2022). 2 For some prominent defences of this claim, see Millar (2011) and Kelp (2014, 2018). More specifically, Millar and Kelp both treat the goal of inquiry as being a certain kind of knowledge, where that kind of knowledge is such that it supports understanding. See also Buckareff (2023). Understanding and veritism characterise what veritism actually involves, then there is no tension at all between these theses. In particular, I will be arguing that to appropriately care about the truth in a manner that would be implied by a credible formulation of veritism is entirely compatible with thinking that one ought to continue inquiring until understanding is secured. Even more strongly, I will be suggesting that to care about the truth is to want to seek understanding from one’s inquiries, such that, far from these two aims being in tension with one another, the latter is in fac (...truncated)