The Knowledge Norm for Justified Belief and Its Normative Implications: Explanatory Advantage, Epistemic Excuse, and the Dialectic of the Debate

One recent strand of post-Gettier approaches to the relationship between knowledge and justification consists of putting knowledge ‘first’ in the sense of having it be the unanalysable epistemic variable that explains justification. This is in direct opposition to more traditional pre-Gettier analyses of knowledge that explain knowledge in terms of justification being one of its necessary conditions. My thesis leverages the knowledge-first work of Clayton Littlejohn and Timothy Williamson to evaluate several arguments for and against one way of reading knowledge’s explanatory role, that of knowledge being the norm of justified belief (KNJ). According to prominent KNJ deniers, knowledge being the norm of justified belief makes our understanding of justification and knowledge problematic by undermining their theoretical motivations and/or explanatory roles. In clarifying what this problematisation amounts to, I identify four broad issues that KNJ faces. First, KNJ defenders cannot accommodate important normative differences between cases of knowledge and cases of non-knowledge yet positively epistemically evaluable beliefs. Second, KNJ defenders face the dilemma of either adopting a highly foreign notion of rationality or admitting that in some cases one ought to adopt an irrational doxastic state of belief suspension. Third, given a reasonable account of different functions of justification within commonplace epistemic and legal contexts, knowledge is not needed to explain the features of beliefs that matter to their justifiability. Lastly, fourth, KNJ defenders’ attempts to appropriate the normative category of excuse to explain away intuitions about justifiable non-knowledge beliefs fail because they are either ad hoc, normatively indiscriminating, or otherwise incapable of accurately accounting for the extent of excusable beliefs. I respond to the first three issues by leveraging Littlejohn’s identification of the hypological and deontic senses of justification. In doing so I highlight how this identification, which I call DHJ-i, not only grants knowledge an explanatory advantage over other epistemic variables in accommodating this identification but that it does so in a manner that affords the KNJ defender three distinct further advantages over the KNJ denier. First, DHJ-i gives knowledge conceptual work to do that throws into question the method, often reserved for KNJ deniers, of solely relying on intuitions about how to assess the justifiability of belief in a case-by-case basis (case-based intuitions about justified belief). Second, DHJ-i helps clarify for defenders a viable defence of the use of a more (KNJ)-friendly notion of rationality as the standard of norm-following doxastic behaviour, either as belief or belief suspension. Third, defenders can employ DHJ-i to reasonably argue that some (KNJ)-antagonistic positions, such as taking justification to have either a non-factive norm or no one individual norm at all, attain problematic normative ramifications even within some commonplace epistemic and legal contexts. I respond to the fourth issue by motivating (KNJ)-friendly modifications to Williamson’s derivative norms framework (DNF). These modifications accomplish two things. First, they differentiate between the normative categories of excuse and exemption without sneaking in unwanted internalist assumptions about this difference. Second, they locate an agent’s following of the appropriate knowledge-derived norms within cases that the KNJ defender would also want to find excusable beliefs in. Moreover, in relation to this issue and for a broader purpose, I address an intriguing tension in the overall dialectic of the debate between KNJ defenders and deniers concerning excuse and justification. Basically, when making precise the dialectic between, on one hand, models of conditions for justification and excuse, and on the other, their counterexamples,