¹ Kern, Andrea, Sources of Knowledge: On the Concept of a Rational Capacity for Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

² Taylor, Charles, ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, in his Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1–19Google Scholar.

³ See, e.g., McDowell's dismissive discussion of what he calls ‘traditional epistemology’, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 (2nd edition, 1996)), 112–113Google Scholar.

⁴ Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982), xxvGoogle Scholar.  The famous phrase quoted here features in an exposition of William James's view, but Rorty adds approvingly on the next page: ‘the pragmatist does not think that, whatever else philosophy of language may do, it is going to come up with a definition of “true” which gets beyond James’ (Ibid., xxvi).

⁵ Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, revised Nidditch, P. H., edited Selby-Bigge, L.A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), I. iv. 2Google Scholar.

⁶ Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 183.

⁷ Ibid., 151.

⁸ See Siegel, Harvey, ‘Cultivating Reason’, in Curren, Randall (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 308Google Scholar.

⁹ See Michael Hannon, describing ‘standard formulations of fallibilism’ in his ‘A Solution to Knowledge's Threshold Problem’, Philosophical Studies, 174, 607n1, where he cites, respectively, BonJour, Laurence, ‘The Myth of Knowledge’, Philosophical Perspectives 24 (2010), 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reed, Baron, ‘How to Think about Fallibilism’, Philosophical Studies 107 (2002), 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brown, Jessica, ‘Impurism, Practical Reasoning, and the Threshold Problem’, Nous 48 (2014), 179CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ McDowell, Mind and World, 143.

¹¹ Ibid., 113; see also McDowell, ‘Knowledge and the Internal’, in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 395–413Google Scholar, and the discussion in Pritchard, Duncan, Epistemological Disjunctivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 136–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 104.

¹³ Both McDowell and Pritchard represent the disjunctive account as in harmony with common sense. See McDowell, , ‘Knowledge and the Internal Revisited’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002), 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Pritchard, Epistemological Disjunctivism, 17–18.

¹⁴ Rödl, Sebastian, Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2007), 158Google Scholar; McDowell, John, Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge. The 2011 Aquinas Lecture (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2011), 42–44Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See the discussion in McDowell, John, ‘The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument’, in Haddock, Adrian and Macpherson, Fiona (eds), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 376–389CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ See Davidson, Donald, ‘The Method of Truth in Metaphysics’, in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 199–214Google Scholar, and ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in LePore, E. (ed.) Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 307–319Google Scholar.

¹⁷ McDowell, Mind and World, 113.

¹⁸ Ibid., 16–17.

¹⁹ Ibid., 11.

²⁰ Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 269; Williams, Michael, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

²¹ Ibid., 197.

²² Kern might respond that, in speaking of a ‘perfect’ exercise of the rational capacity for knowledge, she is simply marking the fact that, when all goes well, the exercise of the capacity is sufficient for knowledge. In such a case, we can explain a person's coming to know simply by citing the exercise of the capacity. It's not that exercising the capacity takes one part of the way, with further conditions needing to be met in order for one to actually attain knowledge. This is critical to Kern's conception of capacities, and essential to her refutation of scepticism. But marking this by invoking the notion of perfection strikes me as potentially misleading.  If we are to recognise that actions issuing from a rational capacity range ‘from perfect actualizations, on one end of the spectrum, to the most varied forms of failed actualizations, on the other’ (161), we have to countenance successful but less than perfect actualisations, and then it's not true that someone knows just in case her belief is ‘a perfect exercise of a particular rational capacity for knowledge’ (185).

Kern sometimes speaks of ‘paradigmatic’, rather than ‘perfect’, exercises of the rational capacity for knowledge, but ‘adequate’ might be a better option.

²³ Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 263 n38; Bakhurst, David, The Formation of Reason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 267.

²⁵ See Bakhurst, Formation of Reason, 155–157.

²⁶ For further discussion on and around these issues, see Rödl, Sebastian, ‘Autonomy and Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 50 (2016), 84–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Bakhurst, David, ‘Training, Transformation and Education’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76 (2015), 301–327CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Reply to Rödl, Standish and Derry’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 50 (2016), 123–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Kern sometimes writes that a small child cannot exercise the rational capacity for knowledge perfectly, sometimes that she ‘is not yet in perfect possession’ of the capacity (Sources of Knowledge, 272). One might quibble, but perhaps in the case of the child this comes to the same thing.

Whether we should be thinking in terms of perfection is one issue; how, if we do, we are to understand the lack of perfection in question is another. Kern ties deficiency to the fact that the small child lacks concepts. She explains that, lacking the concept ‘badger’, the child cannot employ such forms of explanation as ‘I know there's a badger over there because I see one’.  Presumably everything here depends on the child's lack of facility with the form of explanation, and not simply on the fact that she happens to be short of concepts, since an adult's lacking the concepts necessary to discern certain objects would not necessarily render imperfect her possession of the capacity for knowledge.

²⁸ Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 278.

²⁹ See Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press)Google Scholar; Diamond, Cora, ‘The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy’, in Cavell, Stanley, Diamond, Cora, McDowell, John, Hacking, Ian and Wolfe, Cary, Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

³⁰ A version of this paper was presented at a conference on Kern's Sources of Knowledge at the University of Chicago in February 2018. I am grateful to the participants at that event for comments, criticisms and helpful discussion. I also thank the Spencer Foundation for funding my research on the epistemology of education (Grant 201400185).