How to combine evidentialism with knowledge-first epistemology

The main aim of this paper is to develop a view that I call “Evidential Knowledge First”. To do so, first, I consider a traditional way of developing evidentialism, which I call Traditional Evidentialism, and argue that, while it vindicates the roles we expect evidence to play, it struggles accounting for cases of non-inferential justification and non-inferential knowledge (§2-3). I then consider a view we might call “Technically Evidentialism”, which we get when we jointly take two core claims of knowledge-first epistemology, e.g., E=K and J=K. These claims jointly entail the evidentialist idea that justification supervenes on evidence, while avoiding the problem faced by Traditional Evidentialism. However, and contra Traditional Evidentialism, the resulting view doesn’t account for the roles evidence plays in justifying our beliefs (§4). This brings us to Evidential Knowledge-First, which develops traditional evidentialism against the background of knowledge-first epistemology in a way that retains the best features of both views (§5). Evidential Knowledge-First provides us with a novel two-tiered account of knowledge. As we will see, a core feature of my view is that it entails that cases of non-inferential knowledge are cases of knowledge without justification. I argue that this is a benefit of the view (§6).