Perspectivalism About Knowledge and Error

Abstract

Knowledge and error have a quantitative dimension – we can know more and less, and we can be wrong to a greater or lesser extent. This fact underpins prominent approaches to epistemic normativity, which we can loosely call truth-consequentialist. These approaches face a significant challenge, however, stemming from the observation that some truths seem more epistemically valuable than others. In this paper I trace out this perspectivalist challenge, showing that although it arises from a mistaken picture of the quantitative dimension of knowledge and error, when we reconceive how that quantitative dimension should be understood we find the perspectivalist challenge has survived unscathed.