A defeater of a belief is evidence that this belief is false. Defeaters are of particular interest to epistemology because they affect whether a belief is justified. An important distinction is between undercutting and rebutting defeaters. Undercutting defeaters remove evidential support for a belief while rebutting defeaters provide evidential support for the opposite thesis of the belief. Defeaters play a central role in modern developments of defeasible reasoning.
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Defeater in the context of Propositional knowledge
Declarative knowledge is an awareness of facts that can be expressed using declarative sentences. It is also called theoretical knowledge, descriptive knowledge, propositional knowledge, and knowledge-that. It is not restricted to one specific use or purpose and can be stored in books or on computers.
Epistemology is the main discipline studying declarative knowledge. Among other things, it studies the essential components of declarative knowledge. According to a traditionally influential view, it has three elements: it is a belief that is true and justified. As a belief, it is a subjective commitment to the accuracy of the believed claim while truth is an objective aspect. To be justified, a belief has to be rational by being based on good reasons. This means that mere guesses do not amount to knowledge even if they are true. In contemporary epistemology, additional or alternative components have been suggested. One proposal is that no contradicting evidence is present. Other suggestions are that the belief was caused by a reliable cognitive process and that the belief is infallible.