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This chapter discusses the viability of knowledge-first epistemology. The chapter has two parts. The first part presents several big-picture objections to knowledge-first epistemology and argues that while these considerations are pressing, they are not conclusive. The second part focuses on a specific thesis endorsed by many knowledge-first epistemologists—the knowledge norm of assertion. The chapter considers a familiar concern with this norm: It can be appropriate for someone who has a justified belief that p, but doesn’t know that p, to assert that p. Proponents of the knowledge norm typically explain away such judgments by claiming that the assertion is improper but the subject has an excuse for making it. The chapter argues against this response. The chapter concludes by briefly considering whether we should replace the knowledge norm with an alternative. It argues that that there is no norm specifically tied to assertion.

This chapter aims to develop a novel virtue epistemological account of knowledge and justified belief, which gives the view a knowledge first spin. It is virtue epistemological in that it offers accounts of knowledge and justified belief in terms of exercises of epistemic abilities. It has a knowledge first twist because, unlike traditional virtue epistemology, it does not unpack the relevant notion of an epistemic ability as an ability to form true beliefs but as an ability to know. In addition, this chapter aims to show that the resulting knowledge first virtue epistemology compares favourably with its traditional cousins as it offers an appealing new solution to the Gettier problem.

This chapter investigates connections between Knowledge-First epistemology and a meta-epistemological thesis defended elsewhere by the authors (and in opposition to robust forms of virtue epistemology) under the description of epistemic anti-individualism. Epistemic anti-individualism is a denial of the epistemic individualist’s claim that warrant—i.e. what converts true belief into knowledge—supervenes on internal physical properties of individuals, perhaps in conjunction with local environmental properties. The chapter has two central aims. First, it argues that ‘epistemic twin earth’ thought experiments which reveal robust virtue epistemology (RVE) are problematically committed to epistemic individualism also show that evidentialist mentalism is likewise committed to individualism. Second, it argues that, even though a knowledge-first approach in epistemology is in principle (unlike RVE and evidentialist mentalism) consistent with epistemic anti-individualism, this approach fails to offer a plausible account of epistemic supervenience. The chapter suggests this point is a reason to pursue epistemic anti-individualism outside the knowledge-first framework.

In modelling epistemic judgements on normative or evaluative judgements within ‘institutions’—such as sports and games, etiquette, fashion, and the law—as has been done in earlier chapters it has been assumed that the final or basic epistemic value is true belief. This chapter considers objections to this from knowledge-first and anti-consequentialist conceptions of epistemic norms. It presents reasons for scepticism about these views and claims that these alternatives are still compatible with the basic view in the book of the contrast between epistemic norms and moral norms and so with its rejection of the parity premise.

This chapter outlines a theory grounded on the so-called attentional constitution principle (ACP). The ACP contends that attention is constitutive of humans’ perceptual knowledge about individuals. It expands research on perception and demonstrative identification, and is grounded in the idea that the epistemology of empirical beliefs should fit together with the psychobiology of attention in order to explain how human agents navigate and analyze their environment. In contrast to the nonbiological epistemology of knowledge or the nonepistemological psychobiology of attention, the ACP holds that the function of human attention is mainly to serve perceptual knowledge through the extraction of causal information. The following sections of the chapter formulate the ACP and introduce a concept of information that is useful and relevant to the theory.

This chapter’s dialectical aim has, as its focus, a sustained defence of the claim that one cannot have a reason in one’s possession unless it is something that one knows. This view is claimed to have advantages over a different way of thinking about epistemic status. On the ‘reasons-first’ approach to epistemic status, reasons and the possession of them are prior to epistemic status. In reversing this picture, the chapter reveals an important sense in which knowledge comes first—namely, in that we first come to have reasons in our possession by coming to know that certain things are true; there is nothing prior to knowledge that puts these reasons in our possession. In the course of advancing this picture, the chapter furthermore offers a defence of Williamson’s identification of evidence and knowledge (E=K).

This chapter introduces and motivates the main thesis of the book. This is a view of rationality called Reasons Responsiveness, which holds that what it is to be rational is to correctly respond to possessed objective normative reasons. In this ‘Introduction: Reasons Responsiveness, the Reasons Program, and Knowledge-First’, the author offers a presentation of the main notions in this analysis, these being: objective normative reasons, possession, and correctly responding. It also ties Reasons Responsiveness to more general issues in metaphysical analysis. Finally, it shows how Reasons Responsiveness fits into two broader projects in normative theory, namely Reasons Fundamentalism and Knowledge-First epistemology.

This chapter uses some resources of the knowledge-first approach in epistemology (KFAE), championed by Timothy Williamson and characterized by the idea that epistemology should be done by beginning with the concept of knowledge rather than by beginning with the idea that justification or good evidence or even belief itself is more basic to the subdiscipline, to advance a novel argument in defense of the Ockhamist solution to the perennial problem of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and creaturely freedom. As an added bonus, it explains how KFAE also provides the Ockhamist with materials to defuse two of John Martin Fischer’s objections against Ockhamism.

This chapter distinguishes between subjective and objective versions of Bayesianism, arguing for the latter variety. The distinction is made in terms of constraints on ur-priors. Lewis’s “Principal Principle” is discussed as one such constraint. The Carnapian program of delineating a unique ur-prior in purely syntactical terms is presented, and rejected for familiar reasons. It is then argued that the failure of the Carnapian program does not entail the failure of Objective Bayesianism more generally. Ur-prior Conditionalization is introduced as a better alternative to Conditionalization. The chapter ends by presenting Factualism, the view that our evidence consists of what we know.

It is argued that there is a wide variety of epistemic norms, distributed along two different spectra. One spectrum runs from the ideal to the practical and concerns the extent to which it is possible to follow the norm given our cognitive and epistemic limitations. The other spectrum runs from thin to thick and concerns the extent to which the norm concerns facts about our beliefs over and above the content of the belief. Many putative epistemic norms, such as truth and various conceptions of justification, can be found at different points on the spectra. There is no single obvious privileged point from which to say any of these norms is more fundamental than the others, though there may be some reason to doubt that some of the norms are intrinsically interesting.

This essay argues that we need to give more thought to sex in Hamlet—to broaden our thinking beyond the critical consensus regarding the protagonist’s “loathing” of sexuality. I suggest that Hamlet’s antisexual disposition is part not only of his investment in a bounded, isolated self, but also of his concomitant bias toward an epistemology that figures knowledge under the sign of possessive dominion. This means that we can apprehend sex philosophically (and philosophy sexually). This essay understands sex, following Jean-Luc Nancy, as an invitation to unknow, to let go of the sovereignty we habitually impose upon things, experiences, bodies. For most of the play, Hamlet turns down that invitation. But sex isn’t purely degraded in the play; Hamlet suggests a different relation to self-sovereignty and bodily closure, one that embraces both the impossibility of sovereign selfhood and, paradoxically, the prospect that one’s very existence is staked upon this impossibility.

Does belief aim at knowledge or merely at the truth? And what does it mean for belief to aim at something? One account of what it is for belief to aim at something is provided. If you believe that p, then you’re committed to p’s being true. This distinguishes belief from other propositional attitudes. If you imagine or hope that p, then you imagine or hope that p is true. But you’re not committed to p’s being true. The relevant notion of commitment is understood along the following lines. If you acquired evidence that your belief wasn’t true, you’d no longer be justified in believing that p. So on this account, it’s fairly obvious that belief aims at the truth. But the question is whether it merely aims at the truth. If you acquired evidence that your belief is not justified, that could defeat the justification for the belief. So belief aims at justification as well. A consideration of the various kinds of thing that can defeat justification suggests that belief aims at knowledge.

Cases of reasonable, mistaken belief figure prominently in discussions of the knowledge norm of assertion and practical reason as putative counterexamples to these norms. These cases are supposed to show that the knowledge norm is too demanding and that some weaker norm (e.g., a justification or reasonable belief norm) ought to be put in its place. These cases don’t show what they’re intended to. When you assert something false or treat some falsehood as if it’s a reason for action, you might deserve an excuse. You often don’t deserve even that.

This chapter centres on the problematic theme of Byron’s relation to the visual arts and Italian art in particular. It offers possible keys for reading Byron’s response to the art of Italy by concentrating not so much on familiar Classical and Renaissance paintings and sculptures, but instead by focusing on the relationship between Byron’s Cain and the church art of Ravenna – its Byzantine mosaics. As there is no evidence that Byron actually saw any of these mosaics, the chapter takes an openly speculative approach to suggest a whole range of ways in which Ravennese visual art might have shaped Cain. In particular, as the chapter intimates, if ‘the form of Cain departs from all Byron’s previously stated aesthetic preferences’, it does not depart ‘from what he could see around him in Ravenna’s religious art’. Thus, the chapter’s speculative method raises some important and fundamental questions about Byron’s possible absorption of all sorts of Italian art works that he never mentions but certainly did see, the creative role of memory in Byron’s poetic responses to the art he encountered in Italy, and the poet’s more general fascination with different ways of seeing and knowing.