Knowledge-first theories of justification are theories of justification that give knowledge priority when it comes to explaining when and why someone has justification for an attitude or an action. The emphasis of this article is on knowledge-first theories of justification for belief. As it turns out, there are a number of ways of giving knowledge priority when theorizing about justification, and what follows is a survey of more than a dozen existing options that have emerged since the publication in 2000 of Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits.

The present article first traces several of the general theoretical motivations that have been offered for putting knowledge first in the theory of justification. It then provides an examination of existing knowledge-first theories of justification and their objections. There are doubtless more ways to give knowledge priority in the theory of justified belief than are covered here, but the survey is instructive because it highlights potential shortcomings that would-be knowledge-first theorists may wish to avoid.

The history of the Gettier problem in epistemology is a long history of failed attempts to give a reductive account of knowledge in terms of justification and other conditions. In light of this, many have since judged the project of providing a reductive analysis of knowledge to be a degenerating research program. In putting knowledge first in the theory of justification, epistemologists are exploring whether we can more successfully reverse the order of explanation in epistemology by giving an account of justified belief in terms of knowledge. This article concludes with a reflection about the extent to which the short history of the many controversial attempts to secure an unproblematic knowledge-first account of justified belief has begun to resemble the older Gettier dialectic.

Table of Contents

1. Motivating Knowledge-First Approaches
2. The Token-Identity Theory
3. Modal Theories
4. Reasons-First, Knowledge-First Theories
5. Perspectival Theories
6. Infallibilist Knowledge-First Virtue Epistemology
7. Proficiency-Theoretic Knowledge-First Virtue Epistemology
8. Functionalist & Ability-Theoretic Knowledge-First Virtue Epistemology
9. Know-How Theories and the No-Defeat Condition
10. Excused Belief vs. Justified Belief
11. A Methodological Reflection on Gettier
12. References and Further Reading