Cleaning up, and Moving Past, Simple Swamping

Abstract

AbstractMany philosophers believe that true belief is of epistemic value, but that knowledge is of even more epistemic value. Some claim that this surplus value is instrumentally valuable to the value of true belief. I call the conjunction of these claims the instrumentalist's conjunction. The so‐called swamping problem is meant to show that instrumentalist's conjunction is inconsistent. Crudely put, the problem is that if knowledge only has surplus value to the value of true belief, and a belief is true because known, then knowledge cannot be of any more value than true belief. Given the inconsistency, most philosopher reject the claim the surplus value of knowledge is instrumental to the value of true belief. This paper argues that the Swamping Problem is illusory. Once we clean up the problem and pay attention to the distinction between token/type properties, we can see that instrumentalist's conjunction is perfectly coherent.