Constitutivism and Capacities

Capacity constitutivism is a recent form of constitutivism that seeks to ground normative facts in our capacities as agents and believers. Its epistemic version holds that epistemic normativity, including epistemic reasons, is grounded in our epistemic capacities. The success of this project depends crucially on how those capacities are understood. This paper clarifies the distinctive nature of epistemic capacities by contrasting them with capacities in sports, arts, and games. I then argue that this distinctiveness helps explain why the well-functioning of epistemic capacities can ground genuine normativity, while the well-functioning of other capacities cannot.