Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically structured.  There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods. This foundationalist picture of knowledge imposes two requirements on knowledge: (1) There must be cognitive states that are basic in the sense that they possess some positive epistemic status independently of their epistemic relations to any other cognitive states.  I call this the Epistemic Independence Requirement [EIR].  Positive epistemic statuses include being knowledge, being justified, or just having some presumption in its favor.  (It was popular to claim that basic cognitions must possess an unassailable epistemic warrant — certainty, incorrigibility, or even infallibility — but this is not as common today.)  Epistemic relations include deductive and inductive implication.  (2) Every nonbasic cognitive state can possess positive epistemic status only because of the epistemic relations it bears, directly or indirectly, to basic cognitive states.  Thus the basic states must provide the ultimate support for the rest of our knowledge, which I call the Epistemic Efficacy Requirement [EER]. Such basic, independent and efficacious, cognitive states would be the given.  Many philosophers have believed that there has to be such a given, if there is to be any knowledge at all.  