Children learn and come to know things about the world at a very young age through the testimony of their caregivers. The challenge comes in explaining how children acquire such knowledge. Since children indiscriminately receive testimony, their testimony-based beliefs seem unreliable, and, consequently, should fail to qualify as knowledge. In this paper I discuss some attempted explanations by Sandy Goldberg and John Greco and argue that they fail. I go on to suggest that what generates the problem is a hidden assumption that the standards for testimonial knowledge are invariant between children and cognitively mature adults. I propose that in order to adequately explain how children acquire testimonial knowledge we should reject this hidden assumption. I then argue that understanding knowledge in terms of intellectual skills gives us a plausible framework to do so.

Epistemologists often remark that knowledge precludes luck. A true belief based on a guess or hunch is not knowledge because it seems merely fortuitous, too much of an accident, and, well, lucky that one happened to get things right. Of course, true beliefs based on guesses and hunches are not justified. However, Gettier cases have persuasively shown that even justified true beliefs can admit knowledge-precluding kinds of luck. So in what sense are justified true beliefs that don't amount knowledge lucky or 'true only by chance'? I will address three different approaches to epistemic luck that have received significant attention in the recent literature: reliability approaches to epistemic luck, credit approaches to epistemic luck, and responsibilist or control approaches to epistemic luck. I will then turn my attention to the implications that epistemic luck has for other epistemic states. I will focus particularly on state of understanding and examine whether, and to what extent, understanding is vulnerable to epistemic luck.

is an impressive, important, and wide-ranging book. We find much to admire within its pages. But in the spirit of philosophical interaction, our goal is to foster discussion of issues concerning which we find Zagzebski's treatment less than wholly compelling. We focus on (i) Zagzebski's assessment of the recent disagreement debates; (ii) the role of conscientious self-reflection in her solution to the epistemic problem of disagreement; and (iii) the broader role of conscientious self-reflection in her project. We argue that Zagzebski's notion of conscientious self-reflection is neither necessary nor sufficient for rational belief; nor does it provide the sort of cognitive guidance that is claimed for it. These considerations, we think, call for further clarification regarding the central role that Zagzebski gives to conscientious self-reflection. They thereby leave in doubt her specific solution to the problem of disagreement.

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