Knowledge and Evidence You Should Have Had

Epistemologists focus primarily on cases of knowledge, belief, or credence where the evidence which one possesses, or on which one is relying, plays a fundamental role in the epistemic or normative status of one’s doxastic state. Thus one’s belief might be rational, or justified, or amount to knowledge (if true and other conditions are met); or in a partial belief framework, one’s credence might be rational or optimal given one’s prior probabilities, and it might also be scored as more or less “accurate” given the truth or falsity of the propositions to which one gives credences. Recent work however goes beyond this evidence to consider the relevance for such statuses of evidence which one does not possess, particularly when there is a sense in which one should have had some evidence. My focus here will be Sanford Goldberg’s (forthcominga, forthcomingb) ambitious approach, but the discussion should be of interest to anyone who is partial to what is sometimes called “normative defeat.” Goldberg talks at length of a subject’s belief being “justified.” His interest is in how the evidence one should have had with respect to some proposition p, particularly when one has higher-order evidence to the effect that there is further evidence one should acquire, can affect the epistemic justification one has for one’s belief that p even if one does not ac-