Logos & Episteme

Volume 2, Issue 4, 2011

Defending Interest-Relative Invariantism

I defend interest-relative invariantism from a number of recent attacks. One common thread to my response is that interest-relative invariantism is a much weaker thesis than is often acknowledged, and a number of the attacks only challenge very specific, and I think implausible, versions of it. Another is that a number of the attacks fail to acknowledge how many things we have independent reason to believe knowledge is sensitive to. Whether there is a defeater for someone's knowledge can be sensitive to all manner of features of their environment, as the host of examples from the post-Gettier literature shows. Adding in interest-sensitive defeaters is a much less radical move than most critics claim it is.