Abstract

This paper aims to show that the putatively non-epistemic nature of propositional truth presents an interesting problem for those who reasonably believe that truth is normatively distinct from warrant or evidence and that such truth is an irreducible condition on propositional knowledge. After arguing that McDowell’s direct realist approach is rather inadequate to deal with the issue I am raising here, I introduce the notion of ‘epistemic gradient’ to show that even if one may plausibly maintain that a significant portion of our empirical beliefs are presumably true in the alethic realist sense, there is no unproblematic transition from conceding that point to making the realist truth a panepistemic condition of propositional knowledge