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Epistemic Luck and Epistemic Risk

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Abstract

We are witnessing a certain tendency in epistemology to account for the anti-luck intuition in terms of risk. I.e., instead of the traditional anti-luck diagnosis of Gettier cases and fake barn cases, a new anti-risk diagnosis seems to be preferable by many. My goal in this paper is twofold: first, I contribute to motivate that drift; and second, I defend that we ought to partially resist it. An anti-risk diagnosis is valid and preferable for fake barn cases, but we still need an anti-luck diagnosis for classic Gettier cases. The paper thus defends the Solomon-like result that we need both concepts—epistemic luck and epistemic risk—to deal with all the cases where knowledge is undermined.

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Notes

  1. Engel Jr. (1992). There are other varieties of epistemically benign luck, but they are not essential for my argument (see Pritchard, 2005, p. 5.2).

  2. A regular appearance of collective volumes—Hazlett (2015), Borges et al. (2017) or Hetherington (2018)—shows that the literature on Gettier-like cases keeps its vigour. There is some dispute however about how universal those intuitions are, particularly the one related to BARN (see Turri, 2018).

  3. Cognitive performances are perceptual in these scenarios, and mostly subpersonal, which makes things easier. But I believe that the conclusions that will be reached are of application for reflective and deliberate cognitive performances.

  4. Curiously enough, Gettier did not use the term “luck” at all, and the closest he got to it was “sheerest coincidence” (Gettier, 1963, p. 123). In the first papers that discuss those cases, luck was also rather absent, and “accidents” was more frequent—see for instance Unger (1968)—, a tendency that may still be found—as in Setiya (2012, Ch. 3). There are important differences between those concepts though. Winning a fair lottery, for instance, is a matter of luck, but not an accident, and hardly a coincidence. See Pritchard (2015, p. 126) and Broncano-Berrocal (2016).

  5. According to modal accounts of luck, the problem with Gettier-like cases is that the cognitive success is modally insecure (i.e. could easily not have occurred). Both Susie and Henry got it right, but there are relevant possible worlds where they don’t. Such modal insecurity may be precluded by postulating different conditions on knowledge, such as sensitivity—Nozick (1981) and Dretske (1971)—, safety—Pritchard (2012)—or normalcy—Smith (2016), Ebert et al. (2019). For a general categorization of luck theories, see Broncano-Berrocal (2016).

  6. Lack-of-control accounts are common among virtue epistemologists, with Ernest Sosa’s agent reliabilism as its most influential version. In Sosa’s view, both Susie and Henry fall short in their quest for knowledge because they both fail to manifest their cognitive faculties and virtues in some respect: either at some basic level or at the meta-level. Failure at the basic level explains why Susie does not earn knowledge in any sense (her success is apt), whereas Henry acquires at least “animal knowledge” (apt belief), even if he fails to obtain “reflective knowledge” (as meta-apt belief). See Sosa (2007, p. 22, 2011, p. 94, 2015, pp. 79–80). So-called “robust” versions of virtue epistemologies, of which Sosa’s is just one example, are attempts to fully explain Gettier-like cases with a lack-of-control account of luck. See Greco (2010, 2012), Navarro (2015) and Broncano-Berrocal (2017). Elaborate—although not always pure—lack-of-control accounts of luck may be found in Riggs (2009), Levy (2009, 2011) and Broncano-Berrocal (2015).

  7. See Baumann (2014) or Konek (2016). Probabilistic accounts of these cases are scarce though, because they tend to formulate cognitive attitudes in terms of degrees of credence, which does not fit well with the categorical state of knowledge, that requires ‘settled’ or ‘full’ belief. Moss (2013, 2018) has defended the compatibility between traditional epistemological tenets and the credence framework.

  8. Arguably, the modal accounts is the most extended one among epistemologists, lack of control accounts among moral theorists, and probabilistic accounts in decision theory.

  9. See Lackey (2008), Hetherington (2013), Ballantyne (2013), Coffman (2015), Hales (2016) or Turri (2015).

  10. As, for instance, “epistemic” in “epistemic injustice” it is not meant to label an account of injustice that is dependent on an epistemic perspective, but a sense in which knowledge is affected by injustices.

  11. I find it misleading because “epistemic risk” would be a variety of outcome risk, namely, the risk that the cognitive process yields an undesired outcome—lack of knowledge. In the epistemic domain, knowledge is the outcome at risk.

  12. On the face of it, one may think that Pritchard’s ALVE was a mixed, half based on modality (safety) and half based on lack of control (ability). But that would be misleading. In Pritchard’s model, the ability condition is not meant to solve the problem of epistemic luck at all. It is only the safety condition, a modal feature of the scene, what allegedly allows him to account for both situations of veritic epistemic luck. This is so because, according to Pritchard, agents may manifest their abilities, but still succeed by sheer luck, since he postulates a very weak ability condition that merely requires the belief to be produced by such capacities with the right direction of fit (see Pritchard, 2012, pp. 249, 260, 273).

  13. The concept of luck has progressively left the scene of Pritchard’s epistemology: aiming first at a purely anti-luck epistemology (2005), the importance of luck was soon diminished by the introduction of an ability condition (2012), and it is finally substituted by the concept of risk in the ARVE (2015). Luck would have finally lost all explanatory weight, becoming idle in the epistemic arena, which is what I intend to avoid in the next sections.

  14. To be fair, an overstatement of the importance of risk in epistemology has also been put forward. According to Martin Smith, for instance, the traditional space of epistemology has been dominated by what he calls “the risk-minimization conception of justification”, according to which a belief is justified when it is held in a way that is not epistemically risky (2016, Ch. 2). Smith criticizes this conception and proposes a different variety of anti-luck epistemology, half modal half probabilistic, based on the idea of normalcy.

  15. A probability theorist would claim that, in contrast to luck, the notion of risk emphasizes the objective chances of things going wrong in some respect, expressing our fear of the probable occurrence of some misfortune from a forwards-looking perspective. And the same would go mutatis mutandi for lack-of-control theorists: what we fear is prospective lack of control and its potentially pernicious implications.

  16. A convincing way to make this point is by drawing upon William James’ famous idea that we have two distinctive and not perfectly fitted epistemic goals: attaining true beliefs and not forming false beliefs (1956). Our intuition in epistemic luck scenarios seems to be motivated by the latter goal, since the former one is actually attained.

  17. See Broncano-Berrocal (2015: 12) for the opposite view. It is far from clear how may Pritchard motivate Negativity if he drops the significance condition from his account of luck, as he has recently proposed (2014), but I will not make a meal out of this tension here.

  18. I follow the idea that situations constitute temporal perspectives (see Vázquez Campos and Liz Gutiérrez eds. 2015). The notion of situation is central in some accounts of semantics and pragmatics, such as Barwise and Perry (1983) or Recanati (2007).

  19. The idea that luck attributions are structured by temporal perspectives has been defended by Hales (2015), who distinguishes between synchronic and diachronic points of view. Besides, Coffman (2006, p. 390) and Levy (2009, p. 491) have elaborated the significance condition of luck in temporal terms. Both hold that the initial conditions of the event must be immediately prior. I would rather say that the relevant time-scale is totally context-dependent. Thanks to Kramer Thompson for valuable discussion.

  20. My point may be considered as akin to Coffman’s claim that “being a stroke of luck” is a more primitive notion than “being lucky for” (2014, p. 487), but “strokes of luck” are a particular class of events, whereas situations are a different metaphysical beast. Similarly, Hales’ (2015, p. 258) distinction between synchronic and diachronic luck is also related to events (either instantaneous events, such as a batter’s hitting a ball, or temporally extended ones, such as the batter’s success during a season or along his career).

  21. See Pacuit and Roy (2017). The distinction is present in epistemology since Goldman (1979, pp. 21–22), but in such a way that the two perspectives tend to collapse into each other, as finally happens in that same paper (see also Neta, 2017).

  22. The notion of perspective also allows for subjective reading, which I am not making (“epistemic”, in the sense I discarded in Sect. 2, as relative to the epistemic position of someone). According to such reading, a perspective is a set of someone’s beliefs, or available evidence, and we may call a situation “lucky” or “risky” in so far as the assessor, or the agent, is uncertain about the facts from her perspective.

  23. A referee for Erkenntnis has pointed out that my position is in contradiction with Steven Hales’ claim that there are lucky necessities (2016). If Hales were correct, some situations would be lucky even if they could not potentially have been otherwise (i.e. there was no risk). A possible reply is to deny that Hales’ intuition is about luck. It may be more related to what Pritchard calls “fortune”: not an issue of the fragility or contingency of events, but of significant and stable features, either of the world or of an agent’s character, that are valuable for her, but she does not particularly merit.

  24. I take the notion of perspective from Vázquez Campos and Liz Gutiérrez (2015, p. 54). My proposal may depend on the resolution of some controversies about the nature of time. For instance, if some form of determinism were correct, perhaps there would be no such thing as real objective risk, not just subjective perception thereof.

  25. At this point, the distinction between decisions made “under risk”, where the chances are known ex ante, and those made “under uncertainty”, where they are not, is crucial for probabilistic accounts. The idea is canonical since Knight (1965, p. 19) and it is still in force (see Hansson, 2009). I have tried not to rely on it though, since I intend to remain neutral regarding the validity of the probabilistic account.

  26. See Baron and Hershey (1988).

  27. That is the reason why believing a truth, or even a necessary truth may be risky: not because such proposition could not be true, but because one could believe otherwise.

  28. On this difference, see my (2019: 67).

  29. I thank John Greco for stressing this particular point to me.

  30. See Reed (2012) about the untimeliness of fallibilism in epistemology. In particular, in relation to Gettier cases, see Zagzebski (1994) and Anderson (2018).

  31. Pritchard seems to assume that far-away possibilities may not actually occur: they must be close enough to the actual world to do so. I do not agree on this: I would say that, in so far as they are real possibilities, they may actually occur. It might not be pointless to quote an authority to support a truism when it is put into question: “it is obvious that one may be shot even if one’s risk of being shot is small” (Williamson, 2009, p. 12). That is why, as Carter and Peterson (2017) have claimed, even possibilities in far-away worlds may also be essential for epistemic evaluations.

  32. I am deeply indebted to John Greco, Niall Paterson, Duncan Pritchard, and Ernest Sosa for very helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper, and to J. Adam Carter, Jane Friedman, Miranda Fricker, Dani Pino, Kramer Thompson, and David Velleman for valuable discussion. This paper also benefited greatly from comments and suggestions made by audiences at the universities of Copenhaguen, Edinburgh, Madrid, Oviedo, Saint Louis, and Seville. I wrote a good part of it while I was academic visitor at the Philosophy Department of New York University in 2019, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (“Estancias de Movilidad” Program). Finally, I would like to express my gratitude for finantial support by the “New Perspectives on Epistemic Risk” (E-RISK) research project (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, PGC2018-098805-B-I00).

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    Jesús Navarro

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Navarro, J. Epistemic Luck and Epistemic Risk. Erkenn 88, 929–950 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00387-9

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