Supporting the Supportive Reasons Norm

Abstract

My case for the Supportive Reasons Norm is almost complete. As I’ve presented it, the case for the Knowledge Norm is roughly a four-legged stool composed of two different kinds of arguments. The first is an inference to the best explanation, and the second is a theoretical argument about the nature of norms. The first three legs comprising the inference to the best explanation are the lottery paradox, Moore’s paradox, and challenges such as “How do you know?”; the fourth leg is the theoretical considerations of the connection between norms and goals. My aim in Chapters 5 through 8 was to take on each of these legs of the KN argument, one by one, knocking them out. Although one of my purposes was to argue how each of these lines of argument doesn’t uniquely support KN, another was to show how many of these lines of argument actually better support a reasons-based norm such as SRN.