According to the Doctrine of Normative Defeat (DND), you may lose justification to believe that p if you fail to possess negatively relevant evidence that you ought to possess. This paper presents an objection to the DND as it's standardly developed: it carries with it an absurd implication regarding how one's knowledge can be restored once one's associated epistemic justification is presumed to be normatively defeated. I defend the force of this objection before closing with a note about what my argument means for the DND's motivation.

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In this paper, I argue that the following claims are jointly inconsistent: (1) that an agent’s justification for belief, if it’s constituted by evidence, depends on the profile of her background beliefs, (2) that whether or not a group believes a proposition is solely dependent on whether the proposition is jointly accepted by its members, and (3) that prototypical group beliefs are justified. I also raise objections to attempts to resolve the tension by retaining (2) and (3). The upshot is a novel objection to the Joint Acceptance Account of group belief since it seems to be accompanied by a kind of skepticism.

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Rational Inconsistency Against Infallibilism

Recent epistemological literature features compelling and novel arguments for thinking that an agent can rationally believe each member of a set of propositions even while knowing that one of the members is false. Perhaps more provocatively, these proponents of “rational inconsistency,” as it were, claim that it’s possible to know each true member of the set while knowing that one of the members is false. In this article, I explain why, if that’s true, then, on pain of an absurd implication regarding the confirmation of a proposition by evidence, proponents of rational inconsistency should reject Infallibilism about knowledge.Recent epistemological literature features compelling and novel arguments for thinking that an agent can rationally believe each member of a set of propositions while knowing that one of the members is false. Perhaps more provocatively, these proponents of ‘Rational Inconsistency,’ as it were, claim that it’s also possible to know each true member of the set while knowing that one of the members is false. Call this ‘Knowledgeable Inconsistency.’ In this article, I explain why, if Knowledgeable Inconsistency is true, then, on pain of an absurd implication about how confirmation works, we should reject non-skeptical Infallibilism about knowledge. For that same reason, the recent proponents of Rational Inconsistency should also reject non-skeptical Infallibilism

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I argue for the possibility of suboptimal knowledge: knowledge that p that’s normatively defective given that you ought to inquire into whether p. I do this by appeal to two claims from the literature on inquiry. There’s the Ignorance Norm (IGN) according to which you ought not: know that p and inquire into whether p. And there’s the claim that, even if you know that p, you may still be obligated to inquire into whether p (Inquiry Beyond Knowledge (IBK)). Since the IGN and IBK are consistent (as I’ll explain), we do well to respect them both on account of their plausibility. Notably, though, they entail the possibility of suboptimal knowledge. The following question then arises: what must zetetic normativity be like if suboptimal knowledge is possible? To answer, I suggest that they have epistemic health as their anchoring value, where this is a measure of how well agents function with respect to a range of epistemic goods. The IGN exists for the sake of epistemic health maintenance (to maintain knowledge); meanwhile, IBK is true because there are reasons to acquire states of epistemic health that are stronger than mere knowledge (like certainty). Suboptimal knowledge is possible because concerns for epistemic health maintenance and acquisition have a complex interaction. Suboptimal knowledge, I submit, is the epistemic face of a phenomenon that we observe in hygienic normativity more generally.

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This paper attempts to reconcile the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) with the Knowledge Norm of Belief (KNB). After laying out three challenges for that pair—challenges related to hedged assertions with ‘I believe,’ the “weakness” of belief, and lottery cases—I defend it by exploiting the fact that the standard formulation of the KNA does not strictly imply that knowledge is sufficient for epistemically permissible assertion and by relying on a particular kind of Fallibilism about knowledge.

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