Normality, safety and knowledge

Abstract

Recent epistemology has seen a striking rise in interest in the notion of normality, including in the analysis of justified belief, defeasible reasoning, and knowledge. In the analysis of knowledge in particular, normality has been used to support modal analyses of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safely true belief. In this paper, I sound a note of caution regarding this proposal. As I will argue, the counterexamples that originally seemed to threaten the safety analysis of knowledge in its more traditional formulations have natural counterparts that continue to threaten the newer, normality‐based formulations. Moreover, these reformulated counterexamples seem to exploit structural features of the notion of normality itself, rather than one or another particular conception of normality.