The Normativity of Knowledge and the Scope and Sources of Defeat

In this paper I will be appealing to a prior grasp of the normativity of knowledge itself—its role in entitling a subject to confidence and in authorizing others to believe on the strength of one’s epistemic standing—to shed light on the nature and scope of defeat. The strategy will be to focus on cases in which an otherwise epistemically well-positioned subject fails to enjoy these normative standings, and to argue that the best explanation is the presence of defeaters. In ordinary cases, this strategy yields results that are not particularly interesting: in such cases the allegation of relevant defeaters will be greeted with a yawn. The interest of the present paper lies in its use of this strategy to motivate the allegation of a type of defeat that is decidedly more controversial: so-called normative defeat (a term I borrow from Lackey (1999)). Highlighting this type of defeat underscores a social dimension to knowledge that the literature typically overlooks or ignores.