Does Epistemology Rest on a Mistake? Rochester Internalism and the Normative Question

Christine Korsgaard and others have asked “the normative question”: in virtue of what do normative claims have authority over us? Many have also claimed that non-reductive realism does not have a good answer to the normative question, and some have argued that expressivism does better in this respect. The debate has been carried out mainly in the realm of moral theory, but it has an obvious application to epistemology. There too we must face the normative question. There too there are non-reductive realists, most notably Rochester internalists. In this chapter, I evaluate how the arguments developed in the realm of morality translate to the case of epistemology. I suggest that epistemic expressivism is a non-starter as an answer to the epistemic normative question, and that the reasons for this should make us re-evaluate whether they do provide a satisfactory answer in the moral case after all.