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In The End of Epistemology As We Know It Brian Talbot explores
various ways in which epistemic norms could matter, and
shows how epistemic norms as standardly understood fall
short on each. He argues that we can and should replace
existing norms with norms that matter more. These
replacement norms will be quite different from the norms
standardly accepted by philosophers.
In whichever way we try to explain the importance of the
epistemic, it does not matter at all what we believe about most
topics or why we believe it. When what we believe does
matter, it is often not particularly important that our beliefs
are true, but rather just that they are good enough for our
purposes. When the truth is not what really matters, then no
truth-connected epistemic notions, such as reliability,
evidence, coherence, accuracy, or knowledge, are really
normatively significant. Even when truth is genuinely
important, Talbot argues, the standard epistemic norms do not
properly aim at truth, because they do not allow us to sacrifice
one true belief for the sake of others. In light of all of this,
epistemic norms as standardly conceived are not really
concerned with what matters.
Talbot explains how epistemic norms that genuinely matter
should replace truth-based epistemic notions with conceptions
of success, reasons, and justification aimed at the "good
enough." These new norms will require us to form some
seemingly bad beliefs — beliefs that violate all standard
norms by going against our evidence, being incoherent, or
even being clearly false — in order to improve other beliefs.
In fact, they will sometimes allow our beliefs to be bad for no
reason whatsoever.
These arguments open the door for new projects in
epistemology. They reveal the need for new accounts of
epistemic goodness and rationality, and illuminate how to
rigorously pursue these in ways that are genuinely attuned to
what is worthwhile.
The End of Epistemology
As We Know It
The End
of Epistemology
As We Know It
B R IA N TA L B O T
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Brian Talbot 2024
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Talbot, Brian, author.
Title: The end of epistemology as we know it / Brian Talbot.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2024] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Contents: The importance of epistemic norms demands
an explanation—Consequentialist vindication—Responding
to some fundamental objections—Respect-based
vindication—Epistemic norms and action—Social vindication—Tying up
loose ends—Speculation about replacement epistemic norms.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023033740 | ISBN 9780197743638 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780197743645 (epub) | ISBN 9780197743652
Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of.
Classification: LCC BD 161 . A 48 2024 | DDC 121—dc 23/eng/20231031
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033740
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197743638.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contents
Preface ix
1. The importance of epistemic norms demands an

explanation 1
1.1. Introduction 1
1.2. The epistemic norms should matter or be replaced 3
1.3. Does anything really matter? 8
1.4. Calls for vindications of epistemic norms 11
1.4.1. Pointless beliefs 14
1.4.2. Mundane beliefs 18
1.4.3. Do mundane beliefs really raise questions? 21
1.4.4. Interesting beliefs 25
1.4.5. Conflicts and trade-offs 27
1.5. Wrap-up 31
1.5.1. Roadmap and how to read the rest of the book 33
1.6. A taste of what is to come 35
2. Consequentialist vindication 39
2.1. Introduction 39
2.1.1. Clarifying consequentialism 41
2.2. Trade-offs 46
2.3. Against maximization 50
2.3.1. Satisficing 52
2.3.1.1. Implications of satisficing consequentialism
for epistemology 57
2.3.1.2. Arguments against satisficing 62
2.3.2. Scalar consequentialism 66
2.4. Summary thus far 70
2.5. Indirect vindications 71
2.6. No full vindication of standard norms 75
2.7. Partial vindication? 77
2.8. Conclusion 81
Appendix 82
vi Contents
3. Responding to some fundamental objections 85

3.2. This is not really epistemology, version 1 86
3.3. This is not really epistemology, version 2 89
3.4. Our abilities, or lack thereof 97
3.4.1. Doxastic involuntarism 97
3.4.2. The inability to make trade-offs 99
3.4.3. Guidance and norms 105
3.5. Metaphysics 106
3.6. Conclusion 110
4. Respect-based vindication 112
4.2. What is the deontological vindication of norms? 114
4.3. Respecting mundane beliefs 120
4.3.1. Can’t we find some other account of respect? 124
4.4. Trade-offs 127
4.4.1. First argument for trade-offs: Differential
importance of beliefs 128
4.4.2. Second argument for trade-offs: Beliefs of equal
importance 129
4.4.3. Third argument for trade-offs: Aggregation 132
4.4.4. Objection 135
4.5. Conclusion 139
5. Epistemic norms and action 141
5.1.1. Examples and specifications of Status
and Tendency 143
5.2. Trade-offs 146
5.3. Irrelevance to action and Tendency 155
5.4. Status 158
5.5. Emotion and belief 168
5.6. Suboptimal action and suboptimal belief 171
5.7. Conclusion 178
6. Social vindication 179
6.2. Social vindication unpacked 180
6.3. Social vindication and nonstandard norms 184
6.3.1. Trade-offs 185
6.3.2. Laxer epistemic norms 189
Contents vii
6.4. Interpersonal disagreement and the possibility of error 191

6.5. Social vindication and deviation 193
6.5.1. The Razian account 198
6.5.2. Consent and fairness 200
6.5.2.1. Consent 200
6.5.2.2. Fairness 203
6.5.2.3. Summary 206
6.6. Conclusion 208
7. Tying up loose ends 209
7.2. The master challenge 210
7.2.1. Virtue epistemology and nonstandard norms 210
7.3. Constitutive norms of belief 216
7.3.1. The problem with constitutivism 218
7.4. Brute importance 223
8. Speculation about replacement epistemic norms 228
8.2. How to vindicate epistemic norms 228
8.3. Epistemic norms on mundane beliefs 231
8.4. The epistemic good 234
8.5. Interesting beliefs 237
8.6. Replacing knowledge 239
8.7. Pointless beliefs 241
8.8. Disagreements with other norms 241
8.9. Conclusion 244
References 247
Index 257
Preface
Over a decade ago I taught a seminar on epistemic value and norma-

tivity. From that seminar came a paper on one of the ideas that ended
up in this book. Things would probably have ended there if Clayton
Littlejohn hadn’t written a response to my paper. In thinking about
his response, I started seeing that there were deeper and more gen-
eral things to say. So I wrote another paper. That got rejected by every
top-10 journal that would consider long submissions (some of them
rejected it twice). But the referee comments were generally encour-
aging and helpful. With each rejection, my ideas got bigger and the
arguments better, but it also got harder and harder to squeeze things
into a reasonable length paper. Julia Staffel told me to write a book in-
stead, and if you know her you know that her advice is always good.
I applied for grants to fund writing the book and Richard Pettigrew
generously agreed to write letters of support. I didn’t get any of those
grants, and I was still (to be honest) iffy about the project, but Richard
and Julia’s encouragement made me think that I should do it. Without
Clayton, Julia, and Richard, the book would not exist in any form.
I owe massive thanks to those who read drafts of this for my
book workshop: Clayton Littlejohn, Errol Lord, Jack Woods, Sinan
Dogramaci, Alastair Norcross, Bob Pasnau, Chris Heathwood,
Matthias Steup, and Mike Huemer. I got terrific advice, feedback, and
encouragement from them. Thank you also to the members of writing
groups I’ve belonged to: Heather Demarest, Caleb Perl, Rob Rupert,
Raul Saucedo, and Julia Staffel. I’ve talked about this stuff to probably
every philosopher I’ve known for the last decade, and I can’t remember
most of who else I should thank, but some that come to mind that
I haven’t already mentioned are Eric Wiland, Daniel Taub, Kathryn
Lindeman, Joe Salerno, Ben Levinstein, Dmitri Gallow, Ted Shear,
Jennifer Carr, Jason Raibley, and Colin Elliot. Thank you to audiences
at the University of Victoria, University of Colorado Boulder, the APA,
x Preface
the Formal Epistemology Workshop, the Orange Beach Epistemology

Workshop, and the St. Louis University Epistemology Workshop. I owe
a massive thanks to the University of Colorado Boulder philosophy de-
partment in general for their belief in me as a researcher. Thank you to
Peter Ohlin at Oxford University Press; his interest in the book helped
keep me going. Thank you to my mom, Ada, Ivan, and Tony Barbata
for nonphilosophy help along the way.
I could not have written this book without Julia Staffel. She has al-
ways been a thoughtful, generous, supportive, reasonable, and under-
standing partner. I’ve benefited greatly from her example of how to be
a good philosopher. And she patiently and helpfully talked with me
about almost every single thing in here and lots of stuff that I cut.
Thanks also to myself. At no point has any of this been easy, and I’m
proud of what I’ve accomplished. I believe everything I assert in this
book and I believe the conjunction of all of it, too.
1
The importance of epistemic norms
demands an explanation
1.1. Introduction
The epistemic norms should matter. The ones philosophers typically

focus on do not matter enough. So we should replace them. While the
replacement norms will agree to some significant extent with more
standard epistemic norms, they will vary quite significantly as well.
They will permit us to form some seemingly bad beliefs—beliefs that
violate all standard norms by going against our evidence, being inco-
herent, or even being clearly false—in order to improve other beliefs.
In fact, they will sometimes allow our beliefs to be bad for no reason
whatsoever.
That paragraph summarizes the project of this book. What does
it mean?
First, what are epistemic norms? Answering this is complicated by
the fact that there is no uncontroversial characterization of the epi-
stemic and by my goal to engage with a wide variety of views. For that
reason, I’ll sketch the extension of what I am talking about rather than
try to give a definition that all epistemic norms fit. This is only a sketch;
anything that looks enough like the examples I’m giving here is prob-
ably an epistemic norm as well. Perhaps the most traditional character-
ization of epistemology is as the study of knowledge. I don’t think that’s
how we should think about it, as you’ll eventually see, but it’s a good
place to start. Knowledge is one possible epistemic norm—we might
think that our beliefs should be knowledge, or that knowledge is that
standard against which we should measure our beliefs. Knowing that p
traditionally requires that one’s belief that p be justified. The standards
for justification are also epistemic norms. Sometimes philosophers
talk about beliefs being warranted rather than justified, or about beliefs
The End of Epistemology As We Know It. Brian Talbot, Oxford University Press. © Brian Talbot 2024.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197743638.003.0001
2 The End of Epistemology As We Know It
being rational, or theoretically rational (to differentiate these norms

from those of practical rationality). These are also epistemic norms.
Epistemic norms may have to do with the pursuit of truth, or accu-
racy, or knowledge, or wisdom, or understanding. Epistemic norms
may say that our beliefs should fit the evidence, be coherent with one
another, or be reliably formed. The epistemic norms can be norms on
full, all-or-nothing belief, but they can also be norms on degrees of
belief or credences: the norms discussed in the literature on Bayesian
rationality— norms of probabilism and conditionalization, for
example—are epistemic norms.
My goal is to argue that epistemic norms as they are standardly un-
derstood by philosophers in the analytic tradition should be jettisoned
and replaced with different norms. I’ll call the norms I’m arguing
against standard epistemic norms. The standard epistemic norms are
not universally endorsed by analytic epistemologists, of course. This
book, and my path to this book, was influenced by Michael Bishop
and J. D. Trout (2004), Sally Haslanger (1999), Stephen Stich (1990),
Jonathan Weinberg (2006), and others who have criticized or rejected
standard epistemic norms. But there is a pervasive mainstream set of
views in traditional and formal epistemology that I am arguing with.
It will be clearer what these are by the end of this chapter, and I’ll also
say more about this in later chapters as well. But, briefly, the standard
epistemic norms include the intuitive ones; norms centered on truth,
accuracy, or knowledge; and norms requiring that our beliefs fit our
evidence, are coherent, or are reliably formed. I focus on norms as
discussed by analytic philosophers because I was trained in analytic
philosophy, and it was hard enough to write a book arguing against
the majority of analytic epistemologists. But there are good reasons to
think that my arguments have wider scope than that. There’s evidence
that the concept of knowledge is more or less culturally universal and
that this almost universal concept looks a lot like the concept discussed
by analytic epistemologists (for some overviews, see Boyd & Nagel
2014, Machery 2017). I may very well be arguing against an almost
universal concept, then.
What do I mean when I say that epistemic norms should matter and
that norms that do not matter enough should be replaced? I’ll discuss
this in the next two sections of this chapter.
The importance of epistemic norms 3
1.2. The epistemic norms should matter or

be replaced
I’ll be talking about mattering a lot, and so I need some synonyms

or this book will be tedious to read. I’ll interchangeably talk about
mattering and importance, about what matters and what is important,
and about how much things matter and how important they are. When
I talk about what matters, or what is important, I am using these terms
stipulatively to refer to something familiar to all of us, that we think
about very often in our ordinary lives, and that is discussed in a va-
riety of ways throughout philosophy. Let’s start with some illustrative
examples that don’t involve epistemic norms.
Every game has rules, and these rules are norms. Let’s think about a
bad game—Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders to those outside
the United States. If you aren’t familiar with this game, in it there are no
choices for any player to make or any way for a player to influence the out-
come of the game. Typically, nothing turns on the outcome at all. There
are plenty of other examples of games like this, such as War or Candyland;
you can pick the one you like the least. People can sometimes have good
reasons to play such games, typically to amuse young children. But people
can also play games like this for no good reason. Let’s imagine that that’s
what Abi and Bela are doing. Further, they recognize this and have no
interest in the game or its outcome (this is like something out of an ab-
surdist play, but it’s not hard to imagine). It’s Abi’s turn, and she rolls a 6,
meaning that, according to the rules of game, she must move six spaces.
An alien comes up to Abi and says, “I will murder a random innocent
human being unless you move five spaces instead of six.”
What should Abi do? Morally, she should move five spaces.
According to the rules of the game, however, she should move six
spaces. If Abi asked us for advice, we could point out both of these
facts. Once she knows what morality and the rules of the game both
say, though, she can still ask us, “Yes, but what should I do?” At this
point she’d be asking, “Which of these norms should I conform to?”
We can give a trivial sort of answer to her question: morally she should
do what the moral norms say and, according to the rules of Chutes and
Ladders, she should do what the game’s rules say. I call these answers
“trivial” because it’s trivial that, according to norms of type x, you ought
to do what norms of type x say. Making these trivial points wouldn’t be

really answering Abi’s question. It’s meant to be a substantive question,
although in this case it is not a hard one to answer: there’s a nontrivial
sense in which she should move five spaces. (This may raise red flags
for some philosophers, and I’ll address those concerns in section 1.3;
for now, those philosophers should at least be able to recognize that
I haven’t said anything surprising, and that this is a very ordinary no-
tion that I’m employing.)
In my terminology, the requirements of morality in this case matter
more than the rules of this game. (I say “in this case,” but I suspect that’s
universally so.)
The example need not involve morality. The alien might have said,
“Move five spaces or I’ll punch you really hard.” If that were the case,
the norms of prudence would be in conflict with the norms of the
game. Again, Abi should move five spaces rather than six, because pru-
dence matters more than the norms of this game (in this case). Nor
must the example involve rules of games. We can find conflicts be-
tween all sorts of norms—law, prudence, morality, etiquette, religious
norms, linguistic rules, and aesthetic norms can each potentially dis-
agree with the other. When they do, we may know what each type of
norm says to do but still quite sensibly wonder, “What should I do?” To
answer this question substantively, we must determine which partic-
ular norm in the particular situation matters more.
The Chutes and Ladders example is an extreme case because the
norms of this game in this case don’t matter at all. To see what I mean,
imagine that Abi rolls six, and then moves five spaces knowingly but
for no reason whatsoever. Bela notices and says, “You broke the rules.”
Abi says, “So what?” And Bela replies, “You’re right, who cares!” If Abi
and Bela are truly playing this bad game for no good reason and have
no interest in the outcome, their reactions to the rule violations are
completely appropriate. That’s because these rules in this case don’t
matter at all. We can imagine cases in which these rules do matter: if
one were playing with a child and were trying to model how to follow
rules in general, or the child really cared about the game, then rule fol-
lowing might matter; or if one placed a bet on the outcome, the rules
might also matter. But in this case they do not matter at all.
Whether or not we agree about Chutes and Ladders, we can recog-
nize that some norms don’t matter at all, that the appropriate response
to some norm violations is to shrug and say, “So what?” Once we see
that, we can distinguish questions about importance or mattering from
other questions that may sound similar. For one: we might wonder
what makes x better or worse according to some type of norms. We
see this in some discussions about the value of knowledge—some of
these focus on why knowledge is epistemically more valuable than
true belief that falls short of knowledge. These discussions focus on
a type of value that is within the epistemic norms. Discussions of
within-norms value are not the same as discussions of what matters,
since if the relevant norms don’t matter, then showing that something
is better or worse within those norms does not show that that thing
matters more or less. We must also distinguish investigation of what
matters from investigations of what norms govern which activities.
To illustrate: my beliefs can be epistemically justified or unjustified,
but my hopes cannot be. One might wonder why that is, why epi-
stemic norms govern or apply to beliefs but not hopes. There’s also
discussion in epistemology about whether practical norms apply to or
govern beliefs (e.g., Rinard 2019), or about whether epistemic norms
only apply to beliefs, or also to actions (e.g., Friedman 2020 discusses
whether norms of inquiry are epistemic norms). Relatedly, there are
debates about whether or why epistemic norms are categorical—why
they apply (if they do) to our beliefs regardless of our goals or interests
(e.g., Kelley 2003). These are questions about when, whether, and why
norms govern some things and not others. The question about what
epistemic norms do and do not govern is an important one if the epi-
stemic norms are important. But showing that some norms do govern
some activity is not the same as showing that these norms matter.
That’s because, as the Chutes and Ladders example illustrates, it can
be unambiguous that norms do apply to a person at a time but this
needn’t mean that conforming to or violating those norms matters
at all.
The Chutes and Ladders examples illustrate two aspects of impor-
tance. These are central to everything I’m going to say for the rest of
the book.
• When a particular norm that matters more conflicts with a norm

that matters less, there is a nontrivial sense in which one ought to
comply with the one that matters more.
• When one gratuitously violates a norm— violates it for no

reason—the seriousness of the violation, how truly wrong it
is, is proportionate to how much the norm matters. The less a
norm matters, the more appropriate it is to shrug off gratuitous
violations of that norm.
To clarify what I mean by “truly wrong,” compare a woman going out-

side without a corset with lying to one’s spouse. The former might
be (let’s imagine) the worst thing one can do from the perspective of
Victorian etiquette, and the latter is not the worst thing one can do
from the perspective of morality. But the latter still matters more than
the former, because it is more truly wrong to violate it.
Another crucial point: importance is really a property of specific
instances of norms. To illustrate, it is plausible that linguistic norms
matter to some extent. We need widespread conformity with these
norms in order to keep communication efficient and even possible.
The extent to which these norms matters plausibly varies from situa-
tion to situation. It is, perhaps, relatively significant that an elemen-
tary school teacher speaks properly when in front of their students. But
I constantly break linguistic rules when talking in private to my cats;
this doesn’t matter at all.
I take it that I’ve identified something we are all familiar with, al-
though something that there is not a fully conventional vocabulary
for talking about. That lack of vocabulary is why I’m stipulating that
I will use “matters” or “important” to refer to this phenomenon. We
see discussion of what matters throughout ordinary life. It is not
uncommon for people to agree about what is or is not polite, but to
disagree about whether they should be polite in a given situation.
Similarly, we regularly see disagreements about the importance of
grammar or other linguistic rules—not only about what these rules
require (or whether the rules have changed), but also about the sig-
nificance of violations of grammatical norms. For example, when
I was younger, there was a lot of social discussion about what was at
the time called “Ebonics” or “African American Vernacular English.”
Often all parties to these discussions agreed that a particular Ebonics
speaker had violated the linguistic norms of so-called standard
American English, and were arguing about what the import of that
was, or if it had any at all. More recently, there’s been significant so-
cial discussion about the importance of specific laws such as mask
mandates during the COVID epidemic. Often, those opposed to
mask mandates agree that the rules do require them, but are debating
the relative importance of those rules.
Now we can see why I say that epistemic norms should matter.
If epistemic norms don’t matter at all, then the right reaction to
violations of epistemic norms is always, “So what?” Epistemologists,
and real people too, spend a lot of time and effort thinking about
whether beliefs do or do not conform to epistemic norms. That
doesn’t make sense if they don’t take those norms to matter at least
somewhat. Even if the epistemic norms we standardly employ do
matter somewhat, if there are competing norms that systematically
matter more, then we should systematically violate the standard
epistemic norms. That follows from what it means for one norm to
matter more than another. If this were systematic enough, then in
effect we should entirely ignore standard epistemic norms and just
follow these competing norms. That’s how I’m going to argue that
the epistemic norms should be replaced—I’m going to show that
there are competing norms that systematically matter more. These
new, better norms won’t disagree with more standard epistemic
norms about every case. Sometimes it does matter that we are cor-
rect, coherent, reliable, and so forth. But (as it turns out) quite often it
matters more that we are not.
To argue that standard epistemic norms systematically don’t matter
as much as some competing norms, I am going to consider a series
of explanations for why epistemic norms matter (in chapters 2, 4, 5,
and 6). For each, I’ll argue that that explanation actually tells us to re-
place the standard norms with some nonstandard ones. This approach
makes sense if we think that the importance of epistemic norms
demands an explanation. I’ll spend most of the rest of this chapter
arguing that it does. But first I need to discuss a question/concern that
will be pressing for some of my readers: does anything really matter? It
may seem that everything I say turns on that question, so I had better
address that before I talk about anything else.
1.3. Does anything really matter?
Some think that nothing really matters. Those who think this can agree
that some acts are morally right or wrong, legally right or wrong, pru-
dentially right or wrong, etc. But they think that, when these different
norms conflict, there’s nothing substantive to say about what we should
do. We can give trivial answers: morally, we should do the moral thing;
legally, we should do the legal thing; prudentially, we should do the
prudent thing; but there’s nothing else to be said beyond these. On this
view, if the rules of Chutes and Ladders conflict with our moral duties,
then morality says we should break those rules and the rules say we
should violate our moral duties, and there’s nothing more to be said.
To illustrate the view I have in mind, consider this quote from
Richard Feldman:
I take it that when people say things such as “Moral oughts trump ep-
istemic oughts” they are not saying that the moral weight of epistemic
oughts is less than the moral weight of other moral considerations.
I believe that what they are saying is that there is some sort of generic
ought that somehow encompasses moral considerations, epistemic
considerations, and perhaps others, and then weighs them against
one another to come up with an overall assessment. This is not any
particular kind of ought. It is just plain ought. . . . It’s this [the just
plain ought] that I just don’t understand. Of course, by this I mean
to suggest that no one else understands it either. It makes no sense.
(Feldman 2000, 692)
Feldman’s “just plain ought” is the sort of thing I’m getting at when
I talk about what matters. David Copp expresses a similar view in dif-
ferent words:
I will be defending the position that neither morality nor self-interest

[nor any other type of norm] overrides the other, that there are
simply verdicts and reasons of these different kinds, and that there is
never an overall verdict as to which action is required simpliciter. . . .
[I]‌n cases of conflicts between kinds of reasons, there is no fact as to
what a person ought simpliciter to do. (Copp 1997, 86–87)
Again, the ought simpliciter is the sort of thing I am talking about when
I say that, in a nontrivial sense, we should break the rules of Chutes and
Ladders and instead do our moral duty.
If you think that some norms really do matter more than others, you
can read this book as I’ve written it. If, on the other hand, you agree
with these authors that nothing really matters, you can read the book
almost as I’ve written it but just with some minor changes. Because of
this, I don’t need to argue against those who think that nothing really
matters. Even if nothing really matters, things matter to us (or to you,
to me, to my neighbor, etc.). And that’s all this book needs. Let me ex-
plain what I’m talking about and why that’s enough for my purposes.
You may have children. If you don’t, you may have met someone
with children; put yourself in their shoes. You love your children. But
you also know other children, and you recognize that, if those other
children had been your children, in most cases you would have loved
them just as much as you love your actual children. And they would
deserve that love from you just as much as your actual children do.
In fact, there’s nothing overall objectively better or more lovable about
your children than at least some other children. But you still love your
children and not those other children. And that love is a vital and cen-
tral component of your life. Crucially, your love for your children can
survive your recognition of everything I say in this paragraph and con-
tinue to be just as vital and central a component of your life.
This is much like how importance works if nothing really matters.
What do I mean? Assume nothing really matters. For each of us, there
are still things that matter to us. These play a crucial and central part
in our lives—in how we think about the world, in how we feel, and in
how we choose to plan and act. There may be reasons why these things
matter to us in the causal sense of “reasons.” But for some fundamental
set of things that matter to us, there’s no reason for them to matter in
any nontrivial normative sense: there’s nothing nontrivial to be said in
favor of these things, rather than some other things, mattering to us.
(Focus on the things that fundamentally matter, because some things
matter derivatively—they matter because of their connection to some-
thing else that matters) We can be perfectly aware of that, as I take
Feldman and Copp to be, and still these things can continue to matter
to us and shape our lives and concerns.
What exactly is involved in something mattering to us? I don’t

have a view on this. It may have to do with the connection between
what matters to us and our motivations (Street 2017). This is remi-
niscent of work on reasons internalism, the idea that for something
to be a normative reason for A, that thing must be suitably connected
to what motivates A. But one can think that mattering has to do with
motivation without thinking that reasons have to do with motivation.
One can think, for example, that agents can have reasons that don’t
motivate them, but these reasons wouldn’t matter to those agents.
Mattering may be connected instead to our desires, or perhaps to our
commitments or projects (e.g., Woods 2018, Maguire & Woods 2020).
I’m not going to take a stand on this. It’s enough to say that, if nothing
really matters, and if a norm violation doesn’t matter at all to person A
(even derivatively), then the appropriate reaction on A’s part to that
violation is to shrug and say, “So what?” That doesn’t mean that others
should shrug off A’s violation—sometimes norms that govern A’s be-
havior will matter to B but not A. If two norms conflict, then A should,
in some appropriately subjective/personalized sense of “should,” con-
form to the norm that matters more to A. Again, this doesn’t require
that others approve of this or advise A to do so, as it may matter more
to them that A conform to the other norm.
This subjective reading of “matters” should immediately raise
concerns. Who cares about this subjective notion? I suspect that, if this
is genuinely your concern, then you really think some things do really
matter. That’s fine by me—all of the core arguments in the book work
on either the objective or subjective reading of “matters.” But if you
genuinely do think nothing really matters and are still asking, “Who
cares?” about the subjective notion of importance, my answer is, “You
care.” I am going to try to convince you in this book that the standard
epistemic norms don’t matter to you, and that they can be replaced
with norms that do matter to you, and that you think they should be so
replaced (in the suitably subjective/personal version of “should”). And,
since I’m talking about what matters to you, this is going to be tied into
what you care about, are motived by, desire, are committed to, etc. That
is, my arguments are going to be tied into what is central and crucial
to shaping your life in a way you identify with. If there is nothing that
really matters in the objective sense, what more could you want out of
an argument about norms? But I do have more to offer. Because I will

show that, quite generally, the epistemic norms don’t matter to us as
a group, or to (for the most part) each of us individually. And so this
book is not just an idiosyncratic project about my personal interests
or your personal interests, but reflects something more general and
shared about what matters to most of us.
Another concern about the subjective notion of importance is that
we can’t engage in rational debates about it. If the standard epistemic
norms do matter to you, how can I change your mind? We don’t really
need to worry about this, however. It’s a familiar cliché about romantic
relationships that a person will sometimes think they love so and so,
but in actuality they love their idea of so and so, and not so and so
themselves. Or sometimes A has genuine feelings for B, but B doesn’t
merit those feelings by A’s own lights; A is overlooking things that
A themselves considers dealbreakers. When we argue with someone
about their romantic feelings, we try to show that they don’t have the
feelings they think they have, or that those feelings are misplaced by
their own lights. We can do just the same thing with regard to subjec-
tive importance. In that vein, this book can be read as arguing: “Here
are a bunch of reasons why you thought standard epistemic norms
mattered to you. But standard epistemic norms don’t have the features
that make them matter in this way. Once you see the standard epi-
stemic norms as they truly are, you’ll see either that they never actually
mattered to you, or by your own lights they shouldn’t have.”
For the rest of this book, when I talk about what matters or what
is important, you can read this either objectively or subjectively. This
won’t make any difference to the arguments I’m making, and I will
largely not differentiate between these two readings.
1.4. Calls for vindications of epistemic norms
I am going to argue for the replacement of standard epistemic norms

by nonstandard ones. To argue for this, I am going to consider a series
of different explanations for why the epistemic norms matter, and for
each I’ll show that some nonstandard norms matter more according to
it. I will sometimes call these vindications of epistemic norms, and the
norms that end up mattering (most) according to these explanations

will be vindicated by them. This approach requires us to think that the
importance of epistemic norms needs an explanation. Why should we
think that? Arguing for that is the task of the rest of this chapter. Along
the way, I’ll cover concepts that will play crucial roles throughout
the book.
The call for an explanation of the importance of epistemic norms
has a long history. We see it, for example, in Plato’s Meno:1
Socrates. If a man knew the way to Larisa, or anywhere else, and went
to the place and led others thither, would he not be a right and
good guide?
Meno. Certainly.
Soc. And a person who had a right opinion about the way, but had never
been and did not know, might be a good guide also, might he not?
Men. Certainly.
...
Soc. Then right opinion is not a whit inferior to knowledge, or less
useful in action; nor is the man who has right opinion inferior to
him who has knowledge?
Here, Socrates raises a puzzle that he then tries to solve: how is that
knowledge is better than mere true belief, when both (at first glance)
seem to be equally good guides to action? This is really a question about
the importance of knowledge, both as a guide to action and as relevant
to virtue. Variants of this puzzle have received a great deal of attention
in contemporary philosophy, with a number of philosophers trying to
explain why knowledge matters more than doxastic states falling short
of knowledge (e.g., Zagzebski 2003, Kvanvig 2003). Importantly, these
philosophers start with the thought that knowledge does matter more;
for many, this is a puzzle, and worthy of writing on, because it’s hard to
explain why. If the importance of epistemic norms did not demand an
explanation, we could simply just say that knowledge is more impor-
tant and call it a day.2 Going beyond the Meno problem, a great many
1 Text from http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html, translation by Benjamin Jowett.
2 What I say in this text does not apply to all discussions of the so-called Meno
problem. Some think that it’s a problem just for certain views of the nature of knowledge,
epistemologists have taken on the task of vindicating epistemic norms,

or have taken some particular vindication as the foundation of their
account of what the epistemic norms are. We’ll see this throughout the
rest of the book—when I talk about different explanations for why the
norms matter, I’ll give examples of philosophers who have endorsed
those explanations. This again suggests that epistemic norms need
vindication.
My own thinking about the importance of the epistemic norms
started from thinking about and teaching the Meno problem. And, as
we’ll see, I have some concerns that resemble Socrates’ concerns in the
Meno—that it is hard to explain why knowledge, or any other standard
epistemic good, matters since we don’t seem to really need it for prac-
tical purposes. But the Meno worries don’t capture other crucial ways
in which the importance of standard epistemic norms demands expla-
nation. To point to where we are going to go in what follows, I’ll use a
different bit of dialog, which are a sort of parable about the standard
epistemic norms:3
A: I love books!
B: Really, what’s your favorite?
A: Oh, I don’t have a favorite. I love Windows 95 for Dummies just as
much as The Brothers Karamazov.
Upon hearing this response, B should wonder if A really loves books.

And, if A does, is this really the right way to love books—is this the
sort of love for books that really matters? Even when A loves the right
books, such as The Brothers Karamazov, B should wonder if A really
loves them in the right way.
As we will see, the standard epistemic norms are a lot like A in this
parable. Inasmuch as the truth or other epistemic goods do seem
to matter sometimes, the standard epistemic norms have a bizarre
and so they need not think that the importance of knowledge generally needs an ex-
planation. Others think it is just a problem about why knowledge is more epistemically
valuable than mere true belief and that it need not be about importance (Sosa 2007,
Pritchard 2011).
3 My thanks to Daniel Taub for this parable.

relationship to them. The epistemic norms don’t seem to care about

what is really important about belief, just as A doesn’t seem to re-
ally care about what matters about books. In light of this, we should
wonder: why do these norms matter? Even when the standard norms
do look good in particular cases, their worrisome features should
make us wonder: are they really good norms, or do they just happen
to overlap with the norms that truly matter? Nothing I am about to
say in the rest of this chapter definitively shows that the standard epi-
stemic norms don’t matter. But, in light of what I am about to discuss,
if one were to claim that they did matter, this claim would demand an
explanation.
The discussion to follow is supposed to raise questions about the
importance of all standard epistemic norms. As noted above, that’s
supposed to cover a large range of theories, and it would be tedious
to discuss each specifically. But one feature that all standard epistemic
norms have in common is that they forbid believing things that are
obviously false. We can spell this out in a few different ways, but the
rough idea is that if there is clear evidence that p is false starting A right
in the face, all standard theories forbid believing p. That’s in the na-
ture of evidentialist sort of theories, but we see this in nonevidentialist
theories as well. For example, reliabilists would say that the evidence
that p is false defeats whatever justification A’s belief that p would have
even if it is formed by an otherwise reliable process. This thought that
standard epistemic norms forbid believing obvious falsehoods gives us
a simple, central idea that we can use to call the importance of these
norms into question.
1.4.1. Pointless beliefs
Some beliefs are pointless (I’ll be using this word throughout the book
to refer to this phenomenon). This is a widely discussed phenomenon,
although under a few different names. Here are some examples of al-
legedly pointless beliefs:
• Beliefs about the number of grains in a random handful of sand

(Sosa 2003).
• Beliefs about how many motes of dust are on my desk

(Grimm 2009).
• Beliefs about whether an arbitrary space-time location has a par-
ticle in it or not (Talbot 2019).
• Beliefs about the full name of Domenico Scarlatti’s maternal
grandmother (Goldman 1999).
• Beliefs about whether Bertrand Russell was right-or left-handed
(Kelly 2003).
• Beliefs about the number of times “the” is used in a McDonald’s
commercial (Zagzebski 2003).
• Beliefs about how many people have walked along an arbitrary
city block between 11 am and noon (Kitcher 2002).
• Beliefs about arbitrary disjunctions, such as, “Either Obama
was the 44th president of the U.S. or some goat is named Edna”
(adapted from Harman 1986).
These examples are supposed to be ones in which true beliefs or knowl-

edge looks “fundamentally valueless” (Zagzebski 2003, 21) or “wholly
lacking in value” (Grimm 2009, 248). In my terms, it doesn’t seem to
matter whether pointless beliefs are true or false.
There are arguments that true beliefs on pointless topics have some
importance (e.g., Lynch 2004, Kvanvig 2008). Jon Kvanvig (2008) asks
us to imagine two beings, one omniscient, and one who knows eve-
rything except the pointless truths (Horwitch 2006 briefly makes a
similar argument). Clearly, Kvanvig says, the former is better than the
latter in some sense that matters, and so pointless truths must matter.
I’m not fully convinced by this argument, but to be conservative, I will
assume in the rest of this book that pointless truths matter to some ex-
tent. This is conservative because it only ever makes my conclusions
harder to prove.
If pointless truths do matter, they matter vanishingly little. I’ve
argued in other papers that this is effectively infinitely little; even
if I am wrong about that, though, the total importance of any set of
pointless true beliefs is at most quite small (Talbot 2019, 2021). I will
give a simplified argument for this here, as the precise details won’t
make a significant different to this book. Consider the following
example:
An angel visits you. They hold up a stack of telephone books. These,

the angel says, contain every phone number from 1962 that is no
longer operable. The angel can put knowledge of all of these phone
numbers into your mind. The angel promises you that this knowl-
edge will have no instrumental value or disvalue. The knowledge
won’t negatively affect you in any way (e.g. it won’t make it harder for
you to remember other things). But you won’t be able to put it to use
either—you won’t be able to use it to win bar bets, for example. The
angel also holds up a $5 bill. You can have the phone book knowledge
or the $5, but you can’t have both.
The telephone books contain what I take to be pointless knowledge.

It’s hard to imagine someone who isn’t extremely wealthy (and thus
for whom the $5 has effectively no value) finding this knowledge more
important than the $5, even though the $5 is not terribly important.
We can make the stack of phone books as big as we like, and this isn’t
going to change people’s minds. To bolster this, imagine that the angel
offered someone a choice between the phone book knowledge and
nothing, and they chose nothing. This, perhaps, would be somewhat
irrational, but it’s hard to imagine not shrugging off this rational failure
and saying, “So what?” So, when we are forced to choose between
any amount of pointless knowledge and a minor amount of some
other good that matters, we should choose the other good. And gra-
tuitous losses of any amount of pointless knowledge are appropriately
shrugged off. These show that pointless knowledge, if it matters at all,
matters incredibly little, and that this is so even when we aggregate any
amount of pointless knowledge.
This gives rise to a dilemma. It does not matter, or it matters in-
credibly little, whether or our pointless beliefs are true or not. What
does this mean about the epistemic norms when they govern point-
less beliefs? Either the epistemic norms do matter to some significant
degree when they govern pointless beliefs, or they do not. Let’s say
they do matter to some significant degree. Given how clear it seems
that having true pointless beliefs doesn’t matter to any significant de-
gree, the significant importance of norms governing them seems quite
surprising and demands an explanation. What if we say that the epi-
stemic norms don’t matter to any significant degree when they govern
pointless beliefs? (Plenty of epistemologists have [effectively] said just

that; see Friedman 2017 for an overview and references) This would
mean that we need an explanation for why the epistemic norms matter
when they govern nonpointless beliefs. Why? The overwhelming ma-
jority of things we can possibly believe are pointless.4 In fact, the ma-
jority of things we do believe are pointless; we just can’t help forming
all sorts of beliefs. To demonstrate, take any subject you are interested
in. You think that there are more pointless facts about that subject than
there are nonpointless ones.5 I love my wife, and I find more things
interesting about her than about anyone else, but most facts about
her—the precise number of hairs on her head, the current distance
between her and Cybill Shepherd, the barometric pressure on her 3rd
birthday—don’t interest me in the slightest. If we say that the epistemic
norms don’t matter to any significant extent when they govern point-
less beliefs, then we are saying that the vast, vast majority of things
that epistemic norms apply to don’t matter to any significant extent.
This casts the epistemic norms in a bad light, even when they apply to
nonpointless beliefs. If epistemic norms ever matter significantly, this
demands an explanation. If someone claimed to you: “Such and such
norms do not matter 99.99999999% of the time. But every once in a
while, they really do matter!” you would want an explanation for the
truth of that second claim.
So, the pointlessness of so many beliefs (whether or not we agree
on which particular ones are pointless) raises pressing questions about
when and whether epistemic norms matter significantly and why that
is. In the rest of the book, I won’t take a stand on which particular
beliefs are pointless. Throughout the book, I will use the term “point-
less belief ” stipulatively in the following way:
pointless beliefs (or credences) are those beliefs for which it does not
matter whether they are true or false, or closer or farther from being
true or false; or for which this matters vanishingly little
4 Since there are infinite things we can possibly believe, the term “majority” may be
inappropriate here, but hopefully you get the point.

5 The only exception to this is baseball and baseball lovers, who in my experience
cannot find a bit of baseball trivia uninteresting.

The way I’ve defined this term, not only does the truth of pointless
beliefs not matter, it also doesn’t matter whether these beliefs are closer
or farther from the truth. I’ve put things this way because of ideas I’ll
discuss in the next subsection.
1.4.2. Mundane beliefs
When you were reading my list of pointless beliefs, the following

might have occurred to you: “These won’t look pointless to everyone”
(see e.g., Friedman 2017). Having true beliefs about whether Bertrand
Russell was right-or left-handed mattered to Bertrand Russell’s boxing
coach. A city planner would not find beliefs about how many people
walk down a given block pointless. I agree: beliefs that are pointless to
some will not be pointless at all. At least some beliefs are mundane (this
is also a term I’ll use throughout the book).
Mundane beliefs are beliefs that are not pointless because of their
practical relevance. To get a clearer picture about what I mean, con-
sider the following examples:
• Beliefs about where Brian (that’s me!) left his car keys.
• Beliefs about who sells Brian’s favorite coffee beans.
• Beliefs about which ties Brian has not yet worn this semester.
None of these beliefs are pointless to me. To put things roughly (this
will require some fixing in a moment), it matters to me whether or
not my instances of these beliefs are true or false. And yet to most of
you reading this book, these beliefs are pointless—it doesn’t matter
whether these beliefs are true or false when you have them. Versions
of these beliefs, but about your car keys, your favorite coffee beans, and
what you’ve worn so far this semester, are not pointless to you but are
pointless to me (at least I hope that is largely true; if the only people
who read this book are people whose car keys I care about, that’s a bit
of a disaster). What’s more, if we make my beliefs on these topics no
longer practically relevant to me—if God comes to earth and forbids
me from ever making or drinking coffee and from making coffee
recommendations to anyone—they become pointless to me. For these
examples, what makes the difference between them being pointless or

nonpointless for a person at a time is their practical relevance to that
person at that time. And this is so for a large class of beliefs, all of which
I will stipulatively call mundane beliefs.6
To be clear, not every nonpointless belief need be practically rele-
vant. It may be that some beliefs have significant noninstrumental, or
final, importance. I’ll come back this below. But it should be obvious
that some beliefs are mundane, and that these are likely the beliefs we
spend most of our time, outside of our jobs as philosophers, occu-
pied with.
Mundane beliefs raise questions about the importance of standard
epistemic norms. At first glance, having true mundane beliefs
seems to matter to some significant extent. But that needs qualifi-
cation. Mundane beliefs are only nonpointless—they only matter
significantly—because of their practical relevance. We can often do
perfectly well, practically speaking, with false mundane beliefs, as long
as they are close enough to the truth. Examples of this abound in our
everyday life, but I’ll pick a slightly rarified one for the moment because
it is relatively clear. Imagine that Chris owns a car but is blind, and for
that reason others do all the driving for him. Chris has beliefs about
where his car keys are. These are not pointless to Chris, because they
have some practical relevance to him. Even though he never uses those
keys himself—in fact, he never even touches them—he sometimes has
to tell others where they are. Let’s say there are three hooks next to each
other that the keys can be put on. Chris sincerely believes that the keys
are on hook 2. In fact, they are actually on hook 1, two inches to the left.
Chris’s belief that they are on hook 2 is false, but good enough for all the
practical uses of Chris’s belief. If he tells someone that the keys are on
hook 2, they will find the keys just as well as if he had given their true
6 It may seem like the ideas in this paragraph commit me to the subjective notion
of importance (section 1.3). They do not. To see why, think about well-being. Many
philosophers endorse more or less subjective accounts of well-being, which say that, for
something to be good for A, A must judge that it is valuable. Even if what is conducive
to or constitutive of well-being is subjective in this way, the importance of well-being
can be objective. That is, we can say that it is objectively important that people’s lives
go better or worse, even if what makes them go better or worse is somewhat subjective.
Similarly, we can say that it is objectively important that one has valuable true beliefs,
even if which beliefs are more or less valuable is partly subjective.
location. Grant for the moment that Chris’s key hook beliefs can be
good enough for practical purposes without being true. Now imagine
that Chris’s evidence decisively tells him that the car keys are on hook
1, but he still believes that they are hook 2. Or imagine that Chris has
some belief which logically entails that the keys are on hook 1, but he
still believes that they are on hook 2. Or imagine that Chris forms his
belief about the car keys’ location through a process that almost never
delivers the truth, and so which is not reliable, but does mostly deliver
beliefs that are close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Each
of these means that Chris’s belief is not justified according to standard
epistemic norms. But it could very well be that his belief would be jus-
tified according to some other norm. This alternate norm could still
be sensitive to evidence, coherence, or the suitability of belief forming
process, but only in ways that get us close enough to the truth. For ex-
ample, we could have some norm that says that a belief is justified if it
is formed by a process that typically produces beliefs that are true or
close enough. Does it matter that Chris’s belief violates the standard
epistemic norms if it conforms to these alternative norms, which are
attuned to practical concerns? If it does, does this violation matter any
more than norm violations in pointless beliefs?
Every standard epistemic norm says, one way or another, that one
should not form an obviously false belief. But there are obviously false
beliefs that are just as good as true beliefs for practical purposes. And
there are beliefs that are only nonpointless because of their practical
significance. And so we have to ask: why would it matter to any signif-
icant extent whether or not these beliefs conform to or violate these
fairly strict epistemic norms, as long as these beliefs are good enough?
This is another way in which the importance of standard epistemic
norms demands an explanation.
For the rest of this book, I’ll use the term “mundane belief ” as
follows:
mundane beliefs are beliefs whose truth, or distance from the truth,
only matters significantly because of practical relevance
This discussion of mundane beliefs explains why I defined “point-

less belief ” as I did. It doesn’t matter that our pointless beliefs are true
or even that they are close to the truth. The truth of mundane beliefs
might not (always) matter, but their closeness to the truth does.
1.4.3. Do mundane beliefs really raise questions?
At this stage of the book, I’m arguing that we should want an answer
to the question, “Why do epistemic norms matter?” I’ve argued that
mundane beliefs make that question pressing. If you agree—if you
think that the phenomenon I’ve just pointed to does show that we need
an explanation for why the standard epistemic norms matter, even if
you think you know what that explanation is, then you can skip this
subsection. This subsection is for those who worry that there is really
nothing that needs explaining here.
The first way to argue that mundane beliefs don’t raise questions
about the importance of standard epistemic norms is to say that I’ve
mischaracterized what is going on in the Chris example. I claimed that
Chris’s belief that the keys are on hook 2 is not a pointless belief. But,
you might respond, it is pointless. You might argue thusly: not only
does the truth of the belief have no practical significance, but it also
doesn’t really matter if the belief is closer or farther away from the
truth. The actual relevant nonpointless belief, you might say, is his be-
lief that the key is on one the hooks. That belief matters, you might
think, but not his belief about which hook it is on. More generally, one
might say that whenever a false belief can be good enough for practical
purposes, that belief is really pointless and doesn’t matter, but there
will always be some related belief that that does matter and that needs
to be true for practical purposes.
This is a fairly radical claim. If there are many beliefs like this—that
can be good enough for practical purposes even if they are false—then
this “defense” of standard epistemic norms relegates to pointlessness a
whole bunch of beliefs that seemed to matter. What’s more, this claim
doesn’t really solve the problem. It just passes the buck. Effectively, we
would be saying that, when it does not matter that a belief is true or
false, nothing about that belief really matters. Why would this be? We
certainly seem to use these sorts of beliefs in our theoretical and prac-
tical reasoning. If the only beliefs that matter are those whose truth
matters, then we no longer have to explain why the epistemic norms

are as strict as they are, but now we must demand an explanation for
why the only beliefs that matter are those whose truth matters, and
how this grounds the importance of epistemic norms.
The second way of trying to get rid of the problem posed by mun-
dane beliefs is to say that, intuitively, it just matters that mundane beliefs
are true. If that’s right, then we don’t have to explain why standard ep-
istemic norms are strict as they are with regard to these beliefs. In re-
sponse, I am going to argue that intuitions don’t favor this response. To
be clear, I am not yet trying to prove to you that the standard epistemic
norms are mistaken. Rather, what I’m trying to show is that it is not
so obvious that it matters that certain mundane beliefs are true (when
they are close enough to the truth), and this should make us wonder
why norms as demanding as the standard epistemic norms (which tell
us to never believe anything obviously false) matter.
I’ll start with a personal example. I do need to find my car keys for
myself sometimes, but even so, if I believed that my car keys were on
hook 2 when in fact they were on hook 1, and I learned that I was mis-
taken, I would shrug and say, “So what?” (assuming that this didn’t
demonstrate some cognitive issue, such as oncoming dementia, that
was going to cause other problems). Casual polling of my colleagues
supports this.7
This is a pervasive phenomenon. That phenomenon is why we
have the idiomatic expression “Same difference” in English (I’m told
that the German equivalent is “Gehopst wie gesprungen,” or roughly
“Hopped just as jumped”). We typically use this expression when we
are talking about something worth talking about—so, something that
is not pointless—but where being fully accurate seems insignificant.
Importantly, this expression gets deployed when we are corrected,
so when the variation between our claim and the truth is noticeable.
When we are corrected and say, “Same difference,” we are not saying,
7 You may wonder: what if I were looking at the key hooks with goal of grabbing them
and I continued to believe that they were on hook 1? Then I would not shrug off my mis-
take. But that fits what I’ve been saying: the false belief would then no longer be good
enough for practical purposes, because it would not help me move my hand to the right
location.
“That’s exactly what I said.” We aren’t disputing that we were mistaken.

We are disputing that the mistake really matters.
Interestingly, a recent study found that participants were willing
to ascribe knowledge to people who have false beliefs, as long as
those beliefs were close enough to the truth for practical purposes
(Buckwalter & Turri 2020). This is further support for my claims.
These were mundane beliefs, and participants either judged that the
agents knew because they were close enough to knowing—suggesting
that standards of knowledge worth employing should ignore the
falsehood—or judged that the person did not know but did not want
to criticize the agent’s doxastic state for insignificant reasons and so
answered as if the agent knew.
The idea that a certain degree of falsehood about mundane topics
doesn’t matter also explains a common challenge we encounter
when teaching philosophy. To illustrate, consider something that can
occur when we teach metaphysics at the introductory level. Some
philosophers deny that “ordinary” objects exist—they deny that there
are tables, chairs, etc. Getting students excited about this issue should
be easy. But it is not always so. A standard way to deny that tables exist
is to say instead that there are just collections of atoms arranged table-
wise. It can be hard to motivate students to want to think about this
view. We could chalk this up to students being lazy, but I don’t think
that’s an adequate explanation. Often, these same students can be
motivated to engage with other questions or views. We have a better
explanation. The question “Is there a chair in front of me?” looks mun-
dane, and the difference between “Yes,” and “No, there is just a collec-
tion of atoms arranged chair-wise,” is not a difference that matters for
practical purposes. And, if that’s so, even if a student could improve
their beliefs on this topic, so what? Why should they, for any sense of
“should” that matters?
Every philosophy teacher has faced some form of this challenge, no
matter what we teach. It is often marked by students asking about the
debate or question we are teaching: “What difference does this make?”
I see this often when I teach competing theories in ethics or legal phi-
losophy that have very similar extensions (that mostly overlap in what
they say is wrong or permissible), and differ only in rare or esoteric
cases. These theories look mundane, because they are claims about
what to do. For practical purposes, the difference in their extension

can largely be ignored. If these topics really are mundane, and practi-
cally irrelevant differences in mundane beliefs are normatively insig-
nificant, it makes sense to not worry about which theory is true: the
students would be under no important obligation to improve their
beliefs.
When we face this challenge, we might get students to engage by
showing how the difference between the competing views is practically
important. That this can work (and that we expect it to work) reinforces
the thought that practically irrelevant differences in the truth of mun-
dane beliefs don’t matter: by showing that there is something prac-
tically relevant at stake, we show that students should try to believe
the truth, for a sense of “should” that really matters. But we often
cannot find practical implications to motivate student engagement.
That doesn’t make teaching impossible. Instead, a successful teacher
will make the topic look interesting, a term I’ll say more about in the
section. They will make it look like the truth matters independently
of its practical significance. When we can get students to think that
good beliefs about a topic have final importance, then we can motivate
students to think that they should improve their beliefs, and this in
turn generates greater engagement (albeit not universal engagement—
that’s asking too much). The challenges of teaching philosophy, and the
successful responses to those challenges, are exactly what we should
expect if the differences between mundane truth and some falsehoods
seem not to matter.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the topics we cover are mundane.
We should be unsurprised if students are sometimes mistaken about
what matters, or even about what matters to them. But the idea that
noticeable divergences from mundane truths don’t matter significantly
gives us a much more charitable interpretation of student disengage-
ment with philosophy. I’m attributing a very understandable mistake
to students, since the topics I’m discussing really do look mundane at
first glance. Alternatively, we could say that students do see the dif-
ference between true and false views on these topics as mattering, but
just don’t care. Attributing this sort of akrasia to students (who, admit-
tedly, are sometimes akratic) is less charitable than my attribution of
the more subtle mistake.
So, if we take what nonepistemologists say seriously, it does seem

often to not matter whether mundane beliefs are true or not, as long
as they are close enough to the truth for practical purposes. If mun-
dane beliefs are only important for their practical significance, why
should norms governing them forbid forming obviously false, but
good enough, mundane beliefs? But that’s just what the standard epi-
stemic norms do forbid. And so we must wonder: why do the standard
epistemic norms matter, when they don’t seem attuned to what matters
about mundane beliefs?
1.4.4. Interesting beliefs
Mundane beliefs have what we might call “instrumental impor-

tance”—they are important for their usefulness. And that suggests
that there could be beliefs whose truth has final—noninstrumental—
importance. I will call such beliefs, if they exist, interesting beliefs.
I happen to think that there are such beliefs. But the main points of
this book do not rely on you agreeing. It could very well be that the im-
portance of epistemic norms is just derivative from their connection
to practical considerations, as some have suggested. If that’s what you
think, then chapters 5 and 6 will be most relevant to you. But what if
there are beliefs whose truth has final importance? Does that raise ad-
ditional questions about what standard epistemic norms matter?
If there are interesting beliefs, mundane beliefs, and pointless
beliefs, this raises the question: why are the epistemic norms governing
each of these beliefs the same? After all, these are important to different
extents, for different reasons, and in different ways. And yet almost no
standard epistemic norms discriminate between beliefs of these types.8
That’s weird. It should make us wonder: when conformity to standard
norms seems to matter—as, I suspect, it does when we focus on inter-
esting beliefs—does it matter qua conformity with standard norms, or
does it just seem like the standard norms matter because they overlap
8 That’s not entirely true: some versions of epistemic utility theory do treat some
beliefs as more valuable than others, although this turns out to cause a host of problems
for those views (Levinstein 2019, Talbot 2019).
with the norms that really matter? To see what I mean, note that philo-
sophical anarchists think that the law doesn’t really matter. Of course,
some laws prohibit murder, and it does matter that we don’t murder
people. But, the anarchist replies, those laws don’t matter, they just
happen to overlap with a moral norm that matters; there’s nothing
about the fact that murdering violates the law that is important. Part
of the argument for that is that laws can, and often do, give us terrible
advice. Laws don’t, or need not, generally track what really matters.
And so, the anarchist thinks, there’s nothing really important about
violating laws, qua laws. Similarly, the standard epistemic norms so
often seem to track what doesn’t really matter, and this might make us
wonder: when my interesting beliefs violate a standard norm, and this
seems to matter, does the fact that they violated that norm matter or is
what is really important that they also violated some other norm?
In the rest of this book, I’ll use “interesting belief ” as follows:
interesting beliefs are those belief whose truth has significant

noninstrumental importance
It may be that there are beliefs whose truth matters noninstrumentally—

that are interesting, in my technical sense—regardless of anyone’s atti-
tude towards those truths. I suspect that many philosophers think that
this is so, that there are topics that we should be interested in, whether
or not we are (see Roberts & Woods 2007). But it may also be that all
interestingness is interestingness to someone. For example, for many
years I was intensely curious about whether or not Goldbach’s conjec-
ture was true. As far as I can tell, this was not because of any useful-
ness of this knowledge—I would have been perfectly happy to figure
this out even if I could never tell anyone about it (although obviously
I would have preferred to be able to do so). So that seems interesting
in the technical sense—important beyond its practical significance. At
the same time, I don’t believe that everyone else needs to be curious
about Goldbach’s conjecture; when I meet people who aren’t, I don’t
find anything deficient about them. Perhaps a better example are facts
about people you care about. Often we are curious about certain facts
about our friends, even when we think that knowing those facts will
not help us do anything. And yet we are not curious about similar
facts about strangers, nor do we think that strangers should be curious

about our friends in the way we are. To the extent that I talk about in-
teresting beliefs in this book, I will be open both to there being some
objectively interesting beliefs, and also to interestingness being partly
or entirely person relative.
1.4.5. Conflicts and trade-offs
Let’s discuss a final bizarre feature of standard epistemic norms. This is

that standard norms forbid so-called epistemic trade-offs, even though
those seem really great. This will again make us wonder: why do these
norms matter? And this will also introduce a pervasive theme of this
book. In every chapter, we’ll see that, given the explanation for why
epistemic norms are supposed to matter in that chapter, they shouldn’t
actually forbid trade-offs.
What are epistemic trade-offs? Let’s consider examples of a kind of
trade-off case involving what one might call “epistemic bribes” (I’m
borrowing this term from Greaves 2013). Consider an example from
Fumerton (2001). A researcher can only get their research funded if
they sincerely believe in God, despite having insufficient evidence
to support this belief. Assuming the funding allows the researcher
to learn new things that they could not otherwise have learned, the
researcher is faced with a conflict: they can have an evidentially
supported religious belief, or they can have more knowledge about
their area of research, but they can’t have both. We can think of more
realistic examples along these lines. There is evidence to suggest that
researchers who are overconfident about their abilities are more likely
to make discoveries (Li et al. 2011). Let’s assume that that is so. Being
overconfident is taking an epistemic bribe: the overconfidence does
not give the researcher greater ability, so the researcher really must
choose between having accurate, evidentially supported beliefs about
their abilities, or more likely discoveries about their field. In Fumerton’s
case, every account of the standard epistemic norms says that believing
in God is counternormative—forbidden by the norms—no matter how
great the benefits are. The same in the overconfidence case: being more
confident than your evidence warrants is not epistemically justified
no matter the benefits (there is extensive discussion of this issue; see,

e.g., Firth 1981, Foley 1992, David 2001, Fumerton 2001, Jenkins 2007,
Greaves 2013, Berker 2013, Caie 2013, Carr 2017).
But these examples do not pose the issue starkly enough. Let me
teach you a bit of trivia. Oreo and Hydrox cookies are almost indistin-
guishable. Most people think that Hydrox are knock-off Oreos. It turns
out, however, that Hydrox predate Oreos.9 That’s an actual fact. But it’s
a pretty pointless one. Keep that in mind. Imagine that Fumerton’s re-
searcher stands to get a grant from the Oreo company. All that they
ask of her is that she ignore the evidence about the invention dates of
Hydrox and Oreo cookies (this has no connection to her research, by
the way). If she does, she will get a grant that makes her more likely to
learn whatever truly important facts you want to imagine. Even so, any
belief she forms about these pointless cookie facts will be unjustified
according to every standard epistemic theory.
Some of the literature on epistemic trade-offs discusses a different
kind of trade-off, involving self-fulfilling credences (Caie 2013, Carr
2017). For example, imagine that A is sick, but if they are 100% con-
fident that their health will improve, then it will. Some think that self-
fulfilling credences like these create epistemic conflicts and possible
epistemic trade-offs. That’s unclear to me. If a person is more confi-
dent that their health will improve, and this makes it so that it will,
it’s just not obvious to me that they’ve violated any epistemic norm,
or done anything else that would constitute a trade-off (from informal
conversations, I’m not completely alone in this). My arguments in this
book can be applied to self-fulfilling credences, but I will tend to not
talk about them in order to focus on more clearly counterintuitive stuff.
We can now define “epistemic trade-off:”
epistemic trade-off: Forming or maintaining a belief that is epistemi-

cally worse than it could be in order to receive epistemic benefits
We can be flexible in how we interpret “in order to.” An epistemic

trade-off might not be intentional, or explicitly intentional, as the
9 https://w ww.mashed.com/223360/the-strange-history-of-the-oreo-and-hydrox-
cookie-rivalry/
agent may not think about their beliefs in this way, and yet we may still
want to call it a trade-off.
Notice two things. For one, epistemic trade-offs can be terrific to
make. This is not under dispute.10 And yet traded-off beliefs are never
justified according to standard epistemic theories.11 Further, forbid-
ding all epistemic trade-offs seems to treat all beliefs as equally valu-
able. After all, saying that the researcher’s beliefs about Oreos are not
justified by the benefits the researcher stands to receive about actually
interesting things seems to be saying that the cost to the Oreo belief is
as important as all the benefits involving interesting beliefs. On its face,
this makes the epistemic norms look terrible. Imagine that someone
was trying to sell some norms to you—trying to explain why these
norms really matter. And, in the course of explaining the norms, they
mentioned in passing that the norms never ever allowed anyone to sac-
rifice anything of the least (relevant) value, no matter how much they
stood to gain. This would make these norms a tough sell. The seller
would need to provide a very good explanation for why these norms
matter. The same goes for the epistemic norms: given that they do not
allow traded-off beliefs to be justified, no matter what, we need some
explanation for why they matter.
10 That’s not entirely true. Joyce and Weatherson (2019) argue that trade-offs are never
epistemically beneficial. Making these trade-offs creates a huge range of epistemically

bad beliefs as well, and these outweigh the benefits the agent stands to gain. This seems
to ignore the fact that some beliefs are more important than others. We can construct
trade-off cases in which the downsides largely involve pointless beliefs, for example, and
the benefits are all clearly more important.
11 This needs qualification. Standard theories allow something like trade-offs: they
allow us to put our energy into investigating whatever questions we like, so that we might
end up with less evidence about p in order to get more evidence about q. But this doesn’t
affect (according to standard theories) whether one’s beliefs about p can be justified
when they go against one’s evidence in order to benefit q, and that’s the sort of trade-off
I am interested in.
Further, I’m not the first philosopher to say that trade-offs should be permissible in
some cases. Some think that fallible agents can violate, for example, coherence norms
when being coherent is too costly for the agent (Staffel 2019a). So some allow a limited
range of trade-offs. My arguments shows that agents should make trade-offs in a wider
range of cases—not just to deal with their cognitive limitations, but also when these
trade-offs get them more information, for example. This means that even ideal agents
should make trade-offs in some cases. Richard Pettigrew (2018) recently has said that
if trade-offs are a consequence of his views, he’d accept them as well, as have Kristoffer
Ahlstrom-Vij and Jeffry Dunn (2020). But this is certainly not mainstream.
There’s been a great deal written on this topic, and so you may
very well be aware of some attempts to explain why epistemic norms
matter that also explains why traded-off beliefs are not justified. I don’t
think any of these work, and that’s something I’ll spend a lot of time
discussing in the rest of this book. For now, all I want is for you to rec-
ognize this: the fact that standard epistemic norms forbid trade-offs
means that we must give an explanation for why standard epistemic
norms matter.
Potential epistemic trade-offs are pervasive in our cognitive lives.
Trade-offs are possible whenever epistemic goods come into conflict—
whenever we can have good x or good y but not both. Some conflicts
of epistemic goods are due to resource constraints. Beings with lim-
ited time and cognitive resources, such as limited attention or limited
information processing speed, will not be able to attain all of the epi-
stemic goods available to them. In some cases, they will be able to allo-
cate those resources to attain good x or to attain good y, but not both.
Some of this happens over the long run. There are too many interesting
areas of academic inquiry, for example, and no human can pursue all
of them. One can, for example, acquire significant understanding of
epistemology, or of primate biology, but not both. These goods are in
conflict. Resource constraints also create conflicts in the present mo-
ment, not just in the long run. As Jane Friedman (2019) points out, at
every moment you are presented with a great amount of sense data,
any of which you can use to improve your beliefs about your imme-
diate environment. But you can’t use all of it simultaneously. Further,
attending to some of this sense data can take resources away from other
reasoning tasks, such as thinking about some philosophical argument.
Thus, epistemic goods about various features of your environment
are in conflict right now—you can’t have all of these available goods.
These goods are also in conflict with more interesting goods as well—
for example, in the near-term, you can know some detail about what
is right in front of you or you can have a better credence about some
philosophical topic, but not both. Note that these conflicts need not
have anything to do with acquiring new beliefs. We can be presented
simultaneously with information relevant to a range of credences
we currently have, which will correct flaws in those credences; if we
cannot use all of it during some period of time, then the accuracies,
or justification, or fit-to-evidence, of these different credences are in

conflict. Given these conflicts, we can make epistemic trade-offs. We
have all this evidence, and can’t use all of it. If some of our beliefs fail
conform our beliefs to our evidence, then others of our beliefs—now,
or in the future—will be better.
In the rest of this book, I am going to argue that the epistemic norms,
if they matter, really must allow trade-offs. In fact, they have to require
them. What do I mean by that? They not only have to see traded-off
beliefs as conforming to the norms (as justified, for example), they also
have to say that, when we don’t make trade-offs, sometimes this means
that our beliefs are not justified. This is a radical claim.12 Let’s say that
the CEO of Oreo cookies tells our researcher, “Hey, it turns out that
Hydrox cookies really were invented before Oreo cookies. But, if you
believe that, you won’t get this grant.” And let’s say that the researcher
still believes what she’s been told—what her evidence indicates—and
so believes the truth, that Hydrox cookies predate Oreos. In some
cases, I will argue, this belief can’t be justified in the sense that matters.
1.5. Wrap-up
Here are the key takeaways from this chapter that are necessary to
understand the rest of the book, and here is a sketch of where we go
from here.
It can matter to a greater or lesser degree whether or not we conform
to specific norms or normative prescriptions. The less this matters, the
more we can appropriately shrug off gratuitous norm violations. When
two norms conflict in a situation, we should conform to the specific
prescription that matters more in that situation. I will also use the term
importance to talk about what matters and how much it matters. For
those that deny that anything really matters—that anything matters in
an objective, attitude-independent way—everything I say about what
12 A few philosophers beside myself have endorsed a version of this view, saying that
if we give a consequentialist vindication of epistemic norms (chapter 2), the norms have
to allow for trade-offs (Pettigrew 2018, Singer 2018, Driver 2018, Ahlstrom-Vij & Dunn
2020). I go beyond this to show that this holds for any plausible vindication.
matters or about importance can be restated as about what matters or

is important to us, or to you or to me.
Epistemic norms should matter. If they never mattered significantly,
then it would be fine to violate them for no reason. If they systemat-
ically mattered less than competing norms, then we should system-
atically violate the epistemic norms and conform to the competing
ones. Norms that should be treated this way aren’t what those of us
studying normative epistemology are looking for. If standard epistemic
norms— the epistemic norms focused on by mainstream analytic
philosophers—matter less than some competing, nonstandard, epi-
stemic norms, then we should replace the standard epistemic norms
with the nonstandard ones (this claim needs a little refinement, but
that refinement will come throughout the book).
To argue that the standard epistemic norms actually should be
replaced, I will consider a number of different accounts of why the ep-
istemic norms matter, and show that, for each account, standard epi-
stemic norms matter less than competing, nonstandard norms. I will
sometimes use the term vindications to refer to accounts of why epi-
stemic norms matter. My approach is motivated by the thought that
epistemic norms require vindication, that their importance is not
brute or unexplainable.
Why think that standard epistemic norms require vindication? For
one, they treat beliefs on pointless, mundane, and interesting topics
too similarly, subjecting them to the same normative standards, which
(at the very least) forbid believing things that are obviously false. Even
views that allow whether a belief is justified to be stake-or context-
sensitive think that what gives beliefs justification is the same for
beliefs on all topics, although they may allow that how much justifica-
tion a belief requires varies from topic to topic. Further:
• Most topics are pointless. True beliefs, or beliefs close to the truth,
about pointless topics matter either not at all, or vanishingly little;
the sum importance of any set of pointless true beliefs is very low
at best.
• Some topics are mundane. These are nonpointless for a person at
a time because of their practical significance. For many mundane
topics, it seems to not matter much if we have true or false beliefs
on the topic, as long as these beliefs are close enough to the truth
for practical purposes (which does matter).
• Some topics seem interesting. True beliefs on these topics seem to
some significant extent noninstrumentally important.
We should wonder: why hold beliefs on each type of topic to the

same standards, when these beliefs matter for different reasons and
in different ways? Why have norms on pointless beliefs at all, given
that these truths barely matter (at best)? Given that conformity with
most standard epistemic norms seems to matter barely at all (at best),
since most beliefs are pointless, why think that conformity with any
standard epistemic norms matters more than this? To the extent that
this conformity does seem to matter when it comes to mundane and
interesting beliefs, is that an illusion because this conformity mimics
conformity with more important, nonstandard epistemic norms?
Given all of these questions about whether standard epistemic norms
matter, their importance demands an explanation—they need to be
vindicated.
Further, the fact that standard epistemic norms forbid making ep-
istemic trade-offs—they forbid forming one belief poorly in order to
reap further epistemic benefits—should also make us wonder why
standard epistemic norms matter. Why forbid this, when trade-offs
can be extremely beneficial and sometimes extremely low cost (e.g.,
when they involve sacrificing a merely pointless belief)?
1.5.1. Roadmap and how to read the rest of the book
In the next chapter, I am going to discuss one of the most seemingly

widespread, and most discussed, views about the vindication of epi-
stemic norms, which I call “epistemic consequentialism.” I will argue
that this approach to vindication gives us nonstandard epistemic
norms, norms which both require us to make epistemic trade-offs and
are also laxer in many ways than standard epistemic norms (especially
with regard to mundane and pointless beliefs). Chapter 2 will give you
a better sense of my methodology. It will probably also raise a number
of questions about this methodology, although some of you may have
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The End of Epistemology As We Know

1. The importance of epistemic norms demands an

3. Responding to some fundamental objections  85

6.4. Interpersonal disagreement and the possibility of error  191

Over a decade ago I taught a seminar on epistemic value and norma-

the Formal Epistemology Workshop, the Orange Beach Epistemology

The epistemic norms should matter. The ones philosophers typically

being rational, or theoretically rational (to differentiate these norms

1.2. The epistemic norms should matter or

I’ll be talking about mattering a lot, and so I need some synonyms

to do what norms of type x say. Making these trivial points wouldn’t be

• When a particular norm that matters more conflicts with a norm

• When one gratuitously violates a norm—​ violates it for no

To clarify what I mean by “truly wrong,” compare a woman going out-

1.3. Does anything really matter?

I will be defending the position that neither morality nor self-​interest

What exactly is involved in something mattering to us? I don’t

an argument about norms? But I do have more to offer. Because I will

1.4. Calls for vindications of epistemic norms

I am going to argue for the replacement of standard epistemic norms

norms that end up mattering (most) according to these explanations

epistemologists have taken on the task of vindicating epistemic norms,

Upon hearing this response, B should wonder if A really loves books.

3 My thanks to Daniel Taub for this parable.

relationship to them. The epistemic norms don’t seem to care about

1.4.1. Pointless beliefs

• Beliefs about the number of grains in a random handful of sand

• Beliefs about how many motes of dust are on my desk

These examples are supposed to be ones in which true beliefs or knowl-

An angel visits you. They hold up a stack of telephone books. These,

The telephone books contain what I take to be pointless knowledge.

pointless beliefs? (Plenty of epistemologists have [effectively] said just

inappropriate here, but hopefully you get the point.

cannot find a bit of baseball trivia uninteresting.

1.4.2. Mundane beliefs

When you were reading my list of pointless beliefs, the following

examples, what makes the difference between them being pointless or

This discussion of mundane beliefs explains why I defined “point-

1.4.3. Do mundane beliefs really raise questions?

matters, then we no longer have to explain why the epistemic norms

“That’s exactly what I said.” We aren’t disputing that we were mistaken.

what to do. For practical purposes, the difference in their extension

So, if we take what nonepistemologists say seriously, it does seem

1.4.4. Interesting beliefs

Mundane beliefs have what we might call “instrumental impor-

interesting beliefs are those belief whose truth has significant

It may be that there are beliefs whose truth matters noninstrumentally—​

facts about strangers, nor do we think that strangers should be curious

1.4.5. Conflicts and trade-​offs

Let’s discuss a final bizarre feature of standard epistemic norms. This is

no matter the benefits (there is extensive discussion of this issue; see,

epistemic trade-​off: Forming or maintaining a belief that is epistemi-

We can be flexible in how we interpret “in order to.” An epistemic

epistemically beneficial. Making these trade-​offs creates a huge range of epistemically

or justification, or fit-​to-​evidence, of these different credences are in

matters or about importance can be restated as about what matters or

We should wonder: why hold beliefs on each type of topic to the

1.5.1. Roadmap and how to read the rest of the book

In the next chapter, I am going to discuss one of the most seemingly

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted

1. The importance of epistemic norms demands an

3. Responding to some fundamental objections 85

6.4. Interpersonal disagreement and the possibility of error 191

• When one gratuitously violates a norm— violates it for no

I will be defending the position that neither morality nor self-interest

It may be that there are beliefs whose truth matters noninstrumentally—

1.4.5. Conflicts and trade-offs

epistemic trade-off: Forming or maintaining a belief that is epistemi-

epistemically beneficial. Making these trade-offs creates a huge range of epistemically

or justification, or fit-to-evidence, of these different credences are in