This paper evaluates whether and to what extent modal constraints on knowledge or the semantics of ‘knows’, which make essential reference to what goes on in other possible worlds, can be considered non-epistemic factors with epistemic significance. This is best understood as the question whether modal factors are non-truth-relevant factors that make the difference between true belief and knowledge, or to whether a true belief falls under the extension of ‘knowledge’ in a context, where a factor is truth-relevant with respect (...) to S’s belief that P iff it bears on the probability that P is true. To the extent that these factors are non-epistemic, epistemologies that endorse them—modal epistemologies—stand in conflict with intellectualism. I focus on three modal epistemologies: safety, sensitivity, and David Lewis’s epistemic contextualism. I argue that prima facie, safety and sensitivity allow that non-epistemic changes in a context can shift the closeness ordering on worlds, and in so doing make a difference to whether S knows P, while Lewis’s contextualism allows that non-epistemic changes in a context can shift the relevant domain of not-P possibilities that must be eliminated for ‘S knows P’ to be true in that context. Then to make her theory compatible with intellectualism, the modal epistemologist must say much more about the notion of probability at play in the definition of ‘truth-relevant’. I suggest that either accepting or rejecting that modal epistemologies are intellectualist has significance consequences for debates between pragmatists and purists, which radiate into wider contemporary epistemology. (shrink)

A recent flurry of philosophical research on microaggression suggests that there are various practical and moral reasons why microaggression may be objectionable, including that it can be offensive, cause epistemic harms, express demeaning messages about certain members of our society, and help to reproduce an oppressive social order. Yet little attention has been given to the question of whether microaggression is also epistemically objectionable. This paper aims to further our understanding of microaggression by appealing to recent work on moral encroachment—the (...) idea that knowledge is sensitive to the moral stakes of believing—to argue that microaggression can be irrational in a distinctively epistemic sense, as it can involve relying on an epistemically unwarranted belief. This view suggests that the notion of epistemic justification may come apart from the notion of epistemic blame. (shrink)