The Value of Knowledge

Abstract

Why care about knowledge?

One of the questions that is very rarely asked in epistemology concerns what is perhaps the most central issue for this area of philosophy. It is this: Why we should care about whether or not we have knowledge? Put another way: Is knowledge valuable and, if so, why? The importance of this question resides in the fact that it could well be that it is only if the primary focus of epistemological theorising—i.e., knowledge— is valuable that the epistemological enterprise is itself a worthwhile undertaking. The goal of this paper is to examine this issue in more detail. We will discover, perhaps surprisingly, that the value of knowledge is far from obvious.