ABSTRACT
Eva Schmidt advocates for the superiority of a reasons-first epistemology over knowledge-first approaches by comparing how well these views are able to explain (i) the special epistemic significance of conscious perception, for instance as a starting point of our reasoning about the world; and (ii) the ex-ante justification of basic perceptual belief. She argues that the explanatory performance of her reasons-first view is better than that of its competitors in part because it is naturally combined with nonconceptualism. Perceptual experience, unlike belief, does not involve the exercise of conceptual capacities and has nonconceptual content. As she argues, perceiving is therefore not something subjects can do for a reason; nonetheless, it enables them to possess epistemic reasons. Schmidt is thereby able to take a middle ground between a conceptualist knowledge-first view, which implausibly accords perception the exact same epistemic role as any other type of knowledge, and a knowledge-first view that denies that perception has a content in the first place, which cannot account for the special reason-providing role of perception.
