Safety, Skepticism, and Lotteries

Abstract

Several philosophers have claimed that S knows p only if S' s belief is safe, where S's belief is safe iff (roughly) in nearby possible worlds in which S believes p, p is true. One widely held intuition many people have is that one cannot know that one's lottery ticket will lose a fair lottery prior to an announcement of the winner, regardless of how probable it is that it will lose. Duncan Pritchard has claimed that a chief advantage of safety theory is that it can explain the lottery intuition without succumbing to skepticism. I argue that Pritchard is wrong. If a version of safety theory can explain the lottery intuition, it will also lead to skepticism.

A sensitive virtue epistemology

“…23 Comesaña (2005), Baumann (2008), Kelp (2009), Bogardus (2014) and Bogardus and Marxen (2013) all claim that there are instances where knowledge isn't safe; Sosa (1999) and Vogel (2007), on the other hand, claim that there can be insensitive knowledge (though see Becker (2012) for a response to Sosa and Cross (2007) for a response to Vogel). McEvoy (2009) and Dodd (2012) have also argued that safety cannot handle lottery cases.…”

How to Play the Lottery Safely?

“… 3 See, e.g. Lewis (1996), Cohen (1998), Hawthorne (2004), McEvoy (2009), Dodd (2012), Mills (2012), Baumann (2016: ch. 4), for relevant discussions.…”

Counterfactuals and Chance: Reply to Williams

“…In (Dodd ), I argue that the problem threatens to undermine our ability to know much of anything about the external world, if we assume that knowledge has a safety condition (Pritchard ). See also Hawthorne and Lasonen‐Aarnio ().…”