Higher-order defeat, epistemic luck, and knowledge norm of belief

This thesis aims to explain why one would be wrong to stick to his belief upon learning that he has been cognitively unreliable during the reasoning whereby he formed the belief. I show that taking truth as a norm or a goal, which sets the standards of justification for belief, is untenable. For instance, on the one hand, those who take truth as the norm cannot give an explanation because they constrain epistemic reasons to evidential considerations. On the other hand, those who take truth as the goal are susceptible to trade-off objections against consequentialist and instrumentalist views in epistemology. However, I argue that a better explanation, which resides in theories that explain justification in terms of knowledge, does not face such problems. A wide range of accounts in these theories has it that epistemic justification requires being in a position to know the target proposition. By endorsing this requirement, I argue that learning about one's cognitive unreliability constitutes evidence that one is not in a position to know the target proposition because this evidence indicates that, under these conditions, one has no possible way to hold a non-accidental belief that would qualify as knowledge.