Knowledge from Falsehoods Reconsidered

Recent epistemological debates have increasingly focused on the contentious counter-closure principle, which holds that, necessarily, if an agent S believes q solely on the basis of a competent inference from p, and S knows q, then S also knows p. This principle has drawn attention due to various challenges, particularly the issue of inferential knowledge derived from false premises. In this article, we pursue two objectives. First, we argue that the counter-closure principle is untenable but for reasons that depart from traditional critiques. Specifically, we will present a novel argument against the internalist approach that supports the cases of knowledge from falsehoods. Second, we show that the counter-closure principle’s failure can be better addressed within an externalist framework by exploring novel theories of defeaters and the relationship between doxastic and propositional warrant.