When we speak of ordinary unqualified knowledge, my thought is that we are implicitly relativizing to the standards imposed by our evolution-derived humanity. These are standards that determine when we consider it appropriate to store beliefs just as a human being, rather than in one's capacity as an expert of one or another sort. Such stored beliefs are to be available for later use in one's own thought or in testimony to others.

Suppose we wonder whether we should trust the deliverances of our basic epistemic competences. If those are indeed our basic competences, then in order properly to satisfy our curiosity we will inevitably rely on one or more of them. So, either we squelch our curiosity or we will have to fall into the circularity or regress to which the skeptic objects.

If we have a better understanding of knowledge than we do of such justification or competence, then we can explain the latter through the former.

Lowered reliability obviously yields a lesser competence. But lowered breadth does so as well.

If the agent aims to make the attempt if and only if it would be apt, then a distinctive element of risk assessment becomes relevant: How probably would the agent succeed in attempting that fuller end?

When you dream, your perceptual (and other) competence is affected. You are then unable to get it right competently with the beliefs in your dream.

A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.