Kieran Britt

The idea that knowledge and justification can be defeated is a staple of contemporary epistemology. Recently, however, several prominent knowledge-firsters have rejected this idea. According to them, agents retain knowledge and justification in the face of (putatively) defeating evidence, at least in paradigm cases of (putative) defeat. But it isn’t plausible that the agents’ beliefs remain rational in such cases. To accommodate this, these knowledge-firsters posit unreasonable knowledge: cases where knowledge and rationality come apart. In this paper, I argue that the accounts of rationality endorsed by prominent knowledge-firsters – when coupled with indefeasibilism about knowledge – fail to accommodate clear intuitions about rationality in certain novel defeat cases. Thus, knowledge-first indefeasibilists lack a satisfactory account of rationality. This, I suggest, provides us with reason to accept what seemed intuitive all along: that in putative cases of defeat, justification and knowledge really are defeated. This in turn undercuts much of the motivation for positing unreasonable knowledge.