This chapter paves the way for the remaining chapters in Part II, which argue for the “specification thesis”: i.e., that moral virtue is a specification of general cognitive virtue, and general cognitive virtue is nothing other than the notion of healthy understanding discussed in Part I, Chapter 2. The specification thesis presupposes a certain conception of reason: namely, that reason is at bottom a cognitive capacity, albeit one admitting of distinct theoretical and practical employments. But many Kantians think that only the theoretical exercise of reason is genuinely cognitive, and assume that when Kant speaks of “practical cognition”—as he often does—the cognition in question does not share anything basic, qua cognition, with theoretical cognition. This chapter lays out the textual evidence that supports the ascription of the former view to Kant, and confronts competing accounts of Kantian epistemic normativity (O’Neill 1989 and Cohen 2014) that assume only the theoretical employment of reason to be genuinely cognitive. It also explains why the specification thesis does not run afoul of Kant’s claims about the “primacy of practical reason”.