prerequisite value of understanding

In epistemology there has been a recent upsurge of interest in the so-called 'value problem'.1 The genesis of this refreshing new body of work is the apparent intuition that knowledge is valuable, indeed something especially valuable. Attention to the value of knowledge raises a two-fold problem for contemporary epistemology. First, the original Meno problem itself (in the form of a prima facie puzzle about the relative values of knowledge and true belief) remains very much alive, and second, many contemporary analyses of knowledge, driven largely by increasingly specific and detailed responses and counter-responses to the Gettier problem, can seem baroque and complex, and to fail to capture the importance of knowledge for our lives. For these reasons, the issue of the value of knowledge looms particularly large today. Regarding the first point (that the problem is alive), it certainly seems true on the face of it that knowledge is more valuable than simply having the right belief about something (say, by accident). However, accidentally true beliefs seem to do a fine job getting us what we want in many situations. While epistemologists are still for the most part convinced that lucky guesses are not knowledge, lucky guesses seem to get us all the practical benefits of knowledge. Say that I find myself in a forest and I need to eat some mushrooms to survive. In this particular forest, there are only a few mushrooms that are edible; the rest are lethally poisonous. I can have the true belief "these mushrooms are edible" in a couple of ways: as a 'merely' true belief, or as an item of knowledge. If I randomly look at the edible group of mushrooms and form the belief, then I have a merely true belief by means of a lucky guess. If I have put in the time to research the edibility of various forest mushrooms, and use this preparation to identify the edible mushrooms, then I have knowledge that these are the edible mushrooms