Abstract It's standard in epistemology to approach questions about knowledge and rational belief using idealized, simplified models. But while the practice of constructing idealized models in epistemology is old, metaepistemological reflection on that practice is not. In this book I argue that the fact that epistemologists build idealized models isn't merely a metaepistemological observation that can leave first-order epistemological debates untouched. Rather, once we view epistemology through the lens of idealization and model-building, the landscape looks quite different. I defend a package of epistemological views that might otherwise have looked indefensibly dismissive of our cognitive limitations—a package according to which we know a wide variety of facts with certainty, including what our evidence is, what we know and don't know, and what follows from our knowledge. This package turns out to be much more plausible once viewed through the lens of idealization.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.