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The Preservationist and the Defeatist

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  • Miguel Ángel Fernández-Vargas
Miguel Ángel Fernández-Vargas
Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1315

Published 2026-10-21

Keywords

  • Revocación,
  • Escépticos de la revocación,
  • Maria Lasonen-Aarnio,
  • Normatividad
  • Defeat,
  • Defeat skepticism,
  • Maria Lasonen-Aarnio,
  • Normativity

How to Cite

Fernández-Vargas, M. Ángel. (2026). The Preservationist and the Defeatist . Análisis Filosófico. https://doi.org/10.36446/af.e1315
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Defeatists hold that cases in which an agent obtains misleading evidence against their knowledge that p (“D-Cases”) are cases in which the agent loses their knowledge. Preservationists maintain that in such cases, agents preserve their knowledge. In this article, I present a couple of related problems for the preservationism of Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, the preservationist who has contributed the most to developing this position. The first is that theses inherent to her preservationism result in there being no substantial normative differences between her position and that of her defeatist opponent; the second is that this normative parity between her position and her opponent’s causes the preservationist to face difficulties in specifying the principles that govern when it is permissible for an agent to use within their cognitive economy the propositions they know. Section I introduces the issues to be discussed in the remainder of the article. Section II offers a summary of Lasonen-Aarnio’s preservationist position. Section III argues that theses inherent to her preservationism lead to the conclusion that agents in D-cases are not permitted to use p in their cognitive economy, despite the fact that they know that p; therefore, there are no substantial normative differences between her preservationism and defeatism. Section IV discusses a couple of difficulties facing the argument developed in Section III. Section V explores a maneuver the preservationist might develop: attempting to explain the permissibility of using p in the agent’s cognitive economy in terms of epistemic notions distinct from knowledge. It is argued that this strategy does not yield the results the preservationist needs from it. Section VI summarizes the central conclusions of the article.

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