Externalism, skepticism and epistemic luck

This paper deals with the concept of epistemic luck and its place within wider philosophical debates on knowledge and skepticism. Philosophers involved in these debates share an intuition that knowledge excludes luck. Starting from Prichard?s modal definition of luck and his distinction between two varieties of epistemic luck, namely veridic and reflective, the paper explores the internalist and externalist prospects for avoiding epistemic luck and skepticism. Externalism seems to be capable of both coping with the Gettier-type cases and eliminating at least veridic epistemic luck by introducing the so-called safety condition for knowledge. As such, it also responds to some versions of skepticism as the safety condition explains how it is possible to acquire knowledge without proving that the well known skeptical alternatives are false. Thus, even though it does not eliminate the reflective epistemic luck or meta-epistemological skeptical challenge, the externalist approach to knowledge looks more plausible than the internalist, especially because it may allow an internalist justification to play its due role in acquiring knowledge. Clanak se bavi pojmom epistemicke srece i njegovim znacajem za dva vazna epistemoloska problema, analizu znanja i problem skepticizma. Okosnicu rasprava cini poznata sokratovska intuicija, oko koje se filozofi gotovo bezrezervno slazu, da je znanje nespojivo sa prekomernim udelom srecnog sticaja okolnosti u otkricu istine. U svetlu Pricardovog modalnog tumacenja pojma epistemicke srece i razlikovanje veridicke i refleksivne epistemicke srece, razmatraju se prednosti i mane dve osnovne suprotstavljene koncepcije znanja, internalizma i eksternalizma. Pokazuje se da je eksternalizam u prednosti nad internalizmom jer izlaze uslove za znanje cijim zadovoljenjem biva otklonjena bar veridicka epistemicka sreca. Eksternalizam je u prednosti i kada je rec o problemu skepticizma, jer uspeva da objasni kako je moguce imati znanje uprkos tome sto nemamo internalisticko opravdanje za iskljucenje poznatih skeptickih alternativa. Iako ne otklanja refleksivnu epistemicku srecu i ne resava problem skepticizma formulisan na meta-nivou, eksternalizam ukupno uzev predstavlja prihvatljiviju koncepciju ljudskog znanja pogotovu zato sto moze da prihvati cinjenicu da internalisticko opravdanje igra znacajnu ulogu u nasem saznanju.