Richard Pettigrew (2025), PhilArchive preprint (listed as “In Preparation” on the author’s homepage) — https://philpapers.org/rec/PETKIN-2
Key takeaways
- Knowledge is not always more valuable than mere true belief — we do not always want it for those we care about even when it costs nothing — and veritism, on which truth is the only fundamental epistemic value, predicts exactly when it is and is not.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
If knowledge were always more valuable than mere true belief, we would want those we care about to have it whenever it is effortless to get, hope they have it when unsure, and feel relief on learning they do. Pettigrew observes that we do not always have these attitudes, nor think we should. He argues that veritism — the view that truth is the sole fundamental source of epistemic value — makes the best sense of this pattern.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 40 seconds of active reading over 1 session. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — t=40s; the thesis is clear from the abstract and the blog version, and the full text was unreachable.
What a deeper reading should check:
- The companion blog post gives the likely shape of the argument: a true belief that falls short of knowledge because it rests on false premises is worse, but one that falls short through environmental luck or an unreliable non-inferential process need not be; and Plato’s resilience argument (echoed by Williamson) fails, because a merely true belief can survive misleading evidence that would defeat knowledge. A deeper read should check that the paper keeps this structure and how it uses the care-based attitudes.
- The blog also argues that veritism recovers Plato’s own claim if knowledge means understanding-why; check whether the paper keeps that part.
- Tagging gap: this is core epistemology, and the vocabulary has no epistemology topic; ethics fits only through value theory. This is a finding about the axis.
Access when seeded: philpapers.org and philarchive.org (record and PDF) return Cloudflare 403 here, and there is no Wayback snapshot. The author’s homepage (richardpettigrew.com) lists the paper under “In Preparation” with the abstract, linking only to the PhilArchive PDF. I also read in full the author’s Substack post “Is knowledge more valuable than mere true belief?” (2024-07-19), which argues the same thesis but is a separate, earlier text, not the paper. No date of first appearance for the PhilArchive version was reachable, so year and published are unverified; the blog post suggests 2024 or later. published: is the date the papers-feed tracker captured the PhilPapers record (2025-10-29): an upper bound, not the date of first appearance, which could not be reached.