Reasonable Acceptance and the Lottery Paradox: The Case for a More Credulous Consistency

Abstract

In his formulation of coherentist theories of knowledge and epistemic justification, Keith Lehrer has often returned to the lottery paradox to draw important lessons. Some of these lessons are about knowledge. Lehrer has maintained that if a lottery has lots of tickets, only one of which will win, one cannot know, simply on probabilistic grounds, that any particular ticket will not win. Lehrer also defends a less obvious lesson: that it is not even reasonable to accept that one’s ticket will not win. It is not clear, however, that Lehrer’s theory of personal justification has this consequence. It is even less clear that it should.