I articulate a view according to which an important difference between undermining and overriding defeaters is that the former require the subject to engage in some higher-order epistemic thinking, while the latter don't. With the help of some examples, I argue that underminers push the cognizer to reflect on the way she formed a belief by challenging the epistemic worthiness of either the source of justification or the specific justificatory process. By contrast, overriders needn't pose any such challenge. I also provide some details on how undermining defeat works in different cases. INTRODUCTIONThe notion of undermining (aka undercutting) defeat is acquiring increasing relevance in epistemology in virtue of its connection with many issues, such as the relationship between higherorder evidence and ordinary evidence, the debate on peer disagreement, and the debate between dogmatism and conservatism in the philosophy of perception.1 This paper is concerned with the understanding of the nature of undermining defeat, regardless of its bearing on any other debate.In a recent paper critical of Pollock's account of the way epistemic defeaters work, Scott Sturgeon (2012) argued that while overriders (aka rebutters) generate their distinctive kind of pressure on their own, underminers "generate it only in concert with higher-order commitments about the 1 For two examples of how undermining defeat plays a role in those debates, see Christensen (2010) (1) e = p = d = (2) e = 2 As it will be evident by my constant reference in cases where the belief is based on some evidence, I'm working with a notion of doxastic justification.3 I will appeal to justificational triads e, p, d throughout and, for ease of exposition, I will take e, p and d to be propositions. However, I don't wish to commit myself to the claim that all evidence is propositional, but only to the much weaker claim that for every piece of evidence available to a subject, there is a proposition that can be used to represent it. 4 The parenthetic remark is meant to rule out cases of epistemic overdetermination, where the subject has access to other pieces of information for or against p, besides the mentioned e and p. Let's recall the two remarks that inspire the view I wish to explore. Sturgeon claimed that while overriders generate their distinctive kind of pressure on their own, underminers "generate it only in concert with higher-order commitments about the basing of lower-order belief". If we look at example (1) again, we can see that d appeals to the commitment that the belief that puffins fly was based on Andreas's testimony-in other words: d couldn't do its defeating job, unless that commitment (or some other very similar to it) were in place. No similar commitment is appealed to in example (2): d would have been an equally effective defeater if, say, the ...

One important distinction in the debate over epistemic justification is the one between propositional and doxastic justification. Roughly, while doxastic justification is a property of beliefs, propositional justification is a property of propositions. On a rather common view, which accounts for doxastic justification in terms of propositional justification plus the socalled 'basing relation', propositional justification is seen as the prior notion, and doxastic justification is explained in terms of it. According to the opposing view, the direction of explanation needs to be reversed, and doxastic justification should be seen as primary. I distinguish between two notions of priority, and I argue that they give different verdicts with respect to the issue of which notion of justification comes first. The lesson may be taken to be that propositional and doxastic justification are in a relation of intertwinement.

One emerging issue in contemporary epistemology concerns the relation between animal knowledge, which can be had by agents unable to take a view on the epistemic status of their attitudes, and reflective knowledge, which is only available to agents capable of taking such a view. Philosophers who are open to animal knowledge often presume that while many of the beliefs of human adults are formed unreflectively and thus constitute mere animal knowledge, some of them—those which become subject of explicit scrutiny or are the result of a deliberative effort—may attain the status of reflective knowledge. According to Sanford Goldberg and Jonathan Matheson (2020), however, it is impossible for reflective subjects to have mere animal knowledge. If correct, their view would have a number of repercussions, perhaps most notably the vindication of a dualism about knowledge, which would frustrate attempts to provide a unified account of knowledge-attributions to human adults, very young children, and non-human animals. I discuss Goldberg and Matheson’s proposal, outline some of the ways in which it is insightful, and argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful because it neglects the inherent temporal dimension of knowledge acquisition. While the article is pitched as a reply to Goldberg and Matheson, its primary aim is to highlight significant connections between the debates on the relation between animal and reflective knowledge, propositional and doxastic justification, and the theory of epistemic defeat.

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The main goal of Wedgwood's book 1 , expected to be the first instalment of a trilogy, is to defend the claim that the concept of rationality is normative. Among other things, on Wedgwood's understanding, this is supposed to entail that 'we always ought to be as we are rationally required to be' (33). 2 Since Wedgwood argues that a mentalist variety of internalism is true of rationality, in his picture the demands of rationality may be characterized as the demand that the agent is broadly coherent-that one's way of thinking fit with the mental states and events present in one's mind at the relevant times (4).Yet, internal coherence can't prevent one from being led astray on occasion, as the possibility of acquiring misleading evidence and the predicament of victims of sceptical scenarios illustrate. If so, as Wedgwood acknowledges, 'we may well doubt whether it must always be true that there is something good simply in being coherent' (38, emphasis original). Addressing this concern-that is, explaining what is good about coherence, and why we should always avoid being incoherent-takes up the main part of the book (chapters 4-9).Wedgwood's answer begins with five careful chapters of stage-setting and preliminary considerations. These chapters develop many philosophical insights and arguments that any philosopher would find worth engaging with independently of the goal that they serve in the book, and include the following broad topics. Chapter 4 offers a discussion of why it is a mistake to think that the most fundamental normative notion is that of reasons; chapter 5 discusses the distinction between different senses of 'ought' and isolates the sense that is taken to be linked to rationality; chapter 6 proposes that the most fundamental normative concepts are evaluative ones and that the concept of rationality is one of them; chapter 7 defends mentalist internalism about rationality, and chapter 8 critiques attempts to explain why rationality matters within frameworks that accept Wedgwood's commitments to internalism and decisiveness of the requirements of rationality.The specific answer to the question of why rationality matters --why we should always avoid being incoherent --arrives in chapter 9, and it is rich in technical details. Simplifying, Wedgwood suggests 'that every type of mental state or mental event that can be rational or irrational has an aim, and thinking rationally is a means to achieving that aim' (5). Wedgwood takes the relevant aim to be an external one: to get things right. The aim is external because the norms that regulate it do not evaluate mental states on the basis of what goes on in the thinker's mind, but on the basis of those mental states' relations to the external world (6, 147, passim). In a nutshell, the reason why we should care about the coherence of our mental states is the following:The general connection between rationality and correctness is this: if your way of thinking is irrational, that is bad news (according to what these mental states are 'telling you' about the worl...