Abstract
Kelly Becker has argued that in an externalist anti-luck epistemology, we must hold that knowledge requires the satisfaction of both a modalized tracking condition and a process reliability condition. We raise various problems for the examples that are supposed to establish this claim.
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Notes
See Philosophical Studies (2008) 139: 353–66, The quote is from p. 365. All quotations in the text are from Becker’s article.
See her Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 285.
By contrast, see Duncan Pritchard’s Epistemic Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) for an anti-luck epistemology that tries to make do with just a modalized tracking condition to rule out epistemic luck.
See his “Nozick on Knowledge: Finding the Right Connections”, in The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and his Critics, ed. S. Luper-Foy (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield: 1987), 182–96, p. 184).
Even though this article is co-authored, for convenience we will talk about the Haveit case in the first person.
See Goldman’s Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Becker might insist that we have gone too narrow and that the relevant process is deductive inference from Haveit-induced beliefs about car ownership. However, what if, in the actual world, I only deduce the existential generalization that someone in the office owns a Ford from my various Haveit-induced false office-car-ownership beliefs? We once again have an actual world truth-ratio that is unimpeachable. As for going counterfactual, imagine that I’ve just been introduced to existential generalization in logic class and have become obsessed with making such inferences. In all the nearby possible worlds, I will only make correct deductive (i.e. EG) inferences to luckily true office-car-ownership beliefs, with a resulting high truth-ratio for the wider process-type now under consideration.
An anonymous referee pointed out that Becker elsewhere (see his Epistemology Modalized (New York: Routledge, 2007), fn. 35, p. 159) has suggested that similar cases may in fact involve beliefs that do amount to knowledge. The fact that Haveit intends that true existential-generalization-based beliefs are formed may also provide some support for the claim that the existential belief in question qualifies as knowledge, especially if the case is amplified to include the feature that Haveit somehow knows that I will make the true existential beliefs. However, these features concerning the intentions and possible knowledge of Haveit concerning my existential generalizing habits are not an integral component of the counterexample just given. To see this, suppose that instead of aiming to induce true existential beliefs concerning car ownership, Haveit merely wants me to form false beliefs about who in particular in the office owns a Ford, and has no knowledge of my current obsession with existential generalization. Let us also keep the stipulation that if Haveit had not owned a Ford, he would not have hypnotized me. My belief that someone owns a Ford in this scenario is (i) formed via a narrow content-neutral reliable process (ii) safe (iii) sensitive and, most importantly, (iv) lucky.
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Brueckner, A., Buford, C.T. Becker on epistemic luck. Philos Stud 163, 171–175 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9805-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9805-3