Abstract
There has been much recent interest in questions of value in epistemology (for a thorough overview of this work, see Pritchard 2007), and in what follows I argue that epistemologists concerned with the value of true beliefs and knowledge would do well to devote attention to the enduring nature of beliefs, and in particular to the essential role that they play in constituting agents themselves.I begin by considering an analogy commonly drawn by epistemologists between acts in the domain of ethics and beliefs in the domain of epistemology, and argue that it is fl awed in important respects. I propose that a better, more fruitful analogue for belief would be desire, or a similarly enduring state of an agent. This revision of a commonly used analogy may be of some value in itself, but I further consider how focusing excessively upon the belief-act analogy (with its implicit emphasis on the process of belief-formation) can lead to flaws or shortcomings in our epistemic value theorizing.
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