Inductive knowledge and lotteries: Could one explain both ‘safely’?

Ratio 34 (2):118-126 (2021)
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Abstract

Safety accounts of knowledge claim, roughly, that knowledge that p requires that one's belief that p could not have easily been false. Such accounts have been very popular in recent epistemology. However, one serious problem safety accounts have to confront is to explain why certain lottery‐related beliefs are not knowledge, without excluding obvious instances of inductive knowledge. We argue that the significance of this objection has hitherto been underappreciated by proponents of safety. We discuss Duncan Pritchard's recent solution to the problem and argue that it fails. More importantly, the problem reaches deeper and poses a threat to any current safety accounts that require a belief's modal stability in close possibilities (as well as safety accounts that appeal to ‘normality’). We end by arguing that ways out of the problem require substantial reconstruction for a safety‐based account of knowledge.

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Author Profiles

Peter Baumann
Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
Haicheng Zhao
Xiamen University

Citations of this work

Sensitivity, Safety, and Epistemic Closure.Bin Zhao - 2022 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (1):56-71.
How to Play the Lottery Safely?Haicheng Zhao - 2023 - Episteme 20 (1):23-38.
Safety and Unawareness of Error-Possibility.Haicheng Zhao - 2021 - Philosophical Papers 50 (1-2):309-337.
Why better safe than sensitive.Haicheng Zhao - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
Knowledge and Action.John Hawthorne & Jason Stanley - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (10):571-590.
Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology.Duncan Pritchard - 2012 - Journal of Philosophy 109 (3):247-279.
Knowledge and Lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (219):353-356.

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