Abstract

This chapter lays out a case that with the proper perspective on the place of epistemology within normative inquiry more generally, it is possible to appreciate what was on the right track about some of the early approaches to the analysis of knowledge, and to improve on the obvious failures which led them to be rejected. Drawing on more general principles about reasons, their weight, and their relationship to justification, it offers answers to problems about defeat and the conditional fallacy that plagued early defeasibility analyses of knowledge and offers a sketch of a contemporary alternative that is motivated by the idea that knowledge requires the right kind of “match” between objective and subjective factors.