The shortages of special education personnel are nowhere more severe than in low incidence disabilities in rural schools. This article presents the results of a national study that identified shortage estimates, state certification patterns, personnel preparation programs, and distance delivery mechanisms and examined relationships among these data to assess the state of shortages of special educators in the areas of vision impairments, hearing impairments, severe disabilities, and early intervention. The authors outline current issues and future trends in preparing personnel in low incidence disabilities for rural areas.

In this paper, we present an account of in virtue of what thinkers are justified in employing certain basic belief‐forming methods. The guiding idea is inspired by Reichenbach’s work on induction. There are certain projects in which thinkers are rationally required to engage. Thinkers are epistemically justified in employing a belief‐forming method that is indispensable for successfully engaging in such a project. We present a detailed account based on this intuitive thought, and address objections to it. We conclude by commenting on the implications that our account may have for other important epistemological debates.

Closure for justification is the claim that thinkers are justified in believing the logical consequences of their justified beliefs, at least when those consequences are competently deduced. Many have found this principle to be very plausible. Even more attractive is the special case of Closure known as Single-Premise Closure. In this paper, I present a challenge to Single-Premise Closure. The challenge is based on the phenomenon of rational self-doubtit can be rational to be less than fully confident in one's beliefs and patterns of reasoning. In rough outline, the argument is as follows: Consider a thinker who deduces a conclusion from a justified initial premise via an incredibly long sequence of simple competent deductions. Surely, such a thinker should suspect that he has made a mistake somewhere. And surely, given this, he should not believe the conclusion of the deduction even though he has a justified belief in the initial premise.

Suppose that that T is one of ten million tickets that have been sold in a fair lottery. Clearly the probability that T will lose is extremely high. Suppose that I know these facts. Suppose, too, that T will in fact lose. Given these assumptions, it is tempting to conclude that I can know P, the proposition that T will lose. Certainly the present authors are tempted to conclude this. In his brilliant book Knowledge and Lotteries, however, John Hawthorne makes a strong case for the opposing view. He urges that in everyday contexts speakers are reluctant, or even outright unwilling, to claim that agents know propositions like P. And he buttresses this appeal to conversational data with several powerful theoretical arguments.Hawthorne uses the expression "lottery proposition" to stand for propositions that satisfy two conditions: first, they have a very high degree of probability; and second, there is an intuitive reluctance to say that they are known to be true. He maintains that many propositions concerning lotteries meet these two conditions, and that a variety of other propositions meet them as well, including the proposition that Hawthorne's car has not been stolen since he parked it in a certain lot this morning, and the proposition that Hawthorne will not have a major heart attack in the near future. It is clear that these propositions are highly probable. But also, according to Hawthorne, there is considerable intuitive reluctance to claim that they are within our ken. Moreover, Hawthorne maintains that this intuitive reluctance is well-founded. In most cases, he says, it is wrong to claim that an agent knows a lottery proposition.We feel that Hawthorne's work on lottery propositions is of the first importance. He makes a case for his views about lottery propositions that is prima facie quite persuasive. Moreover, his views have important consequences. For example, as he shows, doubts concerning the knowability of