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INTRODUCTION
Our ordinary epistemic assessments of action seem to suggest that knowledge sets the epistemic standard for appropriate practical reasoning. If I know that my car is parked in the yard, it seems that I am entitled to use that my car is parked in the yard as a premise in my practical reasoning. Conversely, if I fail to know that my car is parked in the yard, it seems that I am not entitled to the premise that my car is parked in the yard and hence would be vulnerable to blame if I used that premise in my reasoning. Such considerations motivate the following claim often referred as the knowledge norm of practical reasoning:
KNP. One knows a proposition iff that proposition is an appropriate premise in practical reasoning.1
Despite its popularity, KNP leads to an immediate objection to what is considered an orthodoxy in epistemology, moderate invariantism. Moderate invariantism can be characterised, roughly, as the view that epistemic terms such as ‘know’ invariably refers to an epistemic standard that (i) exclusively depends on truth-relevant factors and (ii) can be met quite easily. Following DeRose, the phrase ‘truth-relevant’ roughly denotes factors that “affect how likely it is that the belief is true, either from the point of view of the subject or from a more objective vantage point” (DeRose 2009: 24). Examples of truth-relevant factors are a belief's safety and the reliability of its forming processes. By sticking to certain intuitive judgments, we can quickly derive a rejection of moderate invariantism. Suppose that for a low-stakes subject S it is not very important to be right about whether some proposition p is true, but for a high-stakes subject S* it is very important to be right about whether p is true. Also suppose that S and S* believe p on the same, good but not very robust, epistemic grounds (e.g., a memory about what happened two weeks ago).2,3 Intuitively, S can readily rely on p in practical reasoning, but S* can appropriately rely on p only after taking some extra-precaution. Thus we have:
1. p is an appropriate premise for S’s practical reasoning
1*. p is not an appropriate premise for S*’s practical reasoning