Ward E. Jones

This chapter begins with an argument to the effect that some doxastic goods are _surreptitious motivators_: in so far as they work to bring about belief, they must do so without the agent herself being aware of their so working. The existence of surreptitious motivators raises two questions. First, ‘Do surreptitious doxastic goods provide us with _reasons_ to believe?’ Recent work in value theory suggests an argument for the following claim: if a good cannot consciously motivate a believer to believe, then that good cannot provide a reason to believe. The second question raised by surreptitious motivators is the following, ‘Is it possible that _important_ values governing our doxastic lives can only motivate surreptitiously?’ Discussion of this second question interrogates the so-called credit account of the value of knowledge, which conceives of the value of knowledge as a surreptitious motivator. The chapter ends with a brief look at an alternative approach towards conceiving of the value of knowledge.