According to a version of Infallibilism, if one knows that p, then one’s evidence for p entails p. In her Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown has recently developed two arguments against Infalliblism, which can both be presented in the form of a dilemma. According to the first dilemma, the infallibilist can avoid scepticism only if she endorses the claim that if one knows that p then p is part of one’s evidence for p. But this seems to come at (...) the cost of making infelicitous claims. According to the second dilemma, the infallibilist cannot make sense of the phenomenon of defeat unless she rejects closure. In this paper, we argue that the infallibilist has the conceptual tools to resist both dilemmas. (shrink)

The paper defends the infallibilist account of evidential support in Knowledge and its limits from Jessica Brown’s objections in her book Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge. By the standards of abductive methodology, Brown’s arguments are ineffective because she offers no developed alternative account of evidential support. Most of her objections apply to the standard probabilistic structure of my account; they are not specific to its distinctively knowledge-first features. Brown’s objection from ‘infelicity data’ is analogous to one from such data to standard (...) accounts of deductive validity as truth-preservation. Contrary to Brown’s assumption, my use of excusability in discussion of sceptical scenarios involves no attempt to give it a precise conceptual analysis. (shrink)