AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Impurists about knowledge believe practical factors and considerations about what might be rational for an agent to choose might impose constraints on the scope of what she might know. I shall argue that the most familiar and influential impurist views are mistaken. These impurist views must be mistaken because they are incompatible with something I've dubbed "epistemic encroachment". Epistemic encroachment occurs when considerations about what we know impose constraints on what might rationally be chosen. Epistemic encroachment makes sense of some seemingly robust but puzzling intuitions about choice that, I shall argue, our impurists about knowledge cannot make sense of given their distinctive views about the relationships between belief, credence, and choice.