Guidance Rather Than Knowledge

Epistemic status: provisional -- maybe the definition of "guidance" could use more detail.

18 May 2021: made minor changes.

It's possible that when we seek to know things, we are missing the point of knowledge unless we go beyond "knowledge is justified true belief" or something like that to "guidance is knowledge that is not misleading in practice".

For instance, if I am a racist, learning the 100% true-in-itself fact of someone's skin color may mislead me, because of other beliefs and values that I have. Guidance requires a right connection to both "is" and "ought". Or I may fill my soul with knowledge to the point of satiation, and from that for some reason (sort of understandable, sort of not) think or trust that I need seek no more truth. So all the truths that I acquired mislead me, if there's something I still need to learn.

Guidance is connected to importance, the importance of a fact, so guidance requires a proper relationship to both "is" and "ought". To have a "justified true judgment-of-right-guidance" requires that we have morality which is real and sufficiently knowable, and that we believe in whatever axiologies other than morality might exist which relate to guidance -- for instance, the values contained in and supporting rationality, (assuming that you can split axiology into parts, given the interrelatedness of values) -- and that we can access knowledge of those axiologies (or the one axiology), and the pragmatics needed to seek them (or it), sufficiently. Thus, there really is such a thing as a place worth being guided to, and it is possible for guidance to take us there if we listen to it.