The Normative Role of Knowledge

Such claims promise to cast light on the nature and value of knowledge. If knowledge plays an important normative role, then we can appeal to this fact in explaining why knowledge is worth caring about. It also constrains, theories of the nature of knowledge, since we can ask what knowledge must be like in order to play its normative role. In the recent literature, for instance, claims about the normative role of knowledge have played a major role in debates over contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism and more traditional forms of insensitive invariantism.1 However, this paper has the more limited aim of understanding the normative role of knowledge, while remaining neutral on further questions about its wider implications for these debates.