Abstract

According to a widely discussed view, knowledge plays a significant normative role in action: It is epistemically rational to treat p as your reason for action if and only if you know that p. As many philosophers have observed, however, this view clashes with the claim that knowledge is moderate and stable. For, granting that claim, there will be high stakes cases in which knowledge seems insufficient. To deal with such cases, some philosophers embracing the knowledge norm combine three independently plausible claims. First, they say that no non-trivial condition is luminous; second, they say that doing something while not being in a position to know that that is appropriate is bad (in high stakes cases); third, they say that in the high stakes cases in question, the subject knows but fails to be in a position to know that she knows (Williamson Philos Q 55:213–235, 2005). This paper argues that this account can overcome the main objections already raised in the literature, but that it still faces the apparently insurmountable challenge of providing a natural and helpful way of substantiating the second claim.