Abstract
An epistemically lucky agent manages to derive a true conclusion from an incomplete, or faulty, set of premises. The concept of epistemic luck is interesting because it appears that an agent acquires knowledge in these situations, when in fact, Western epistemologists tend to resist attributing knowledge to the agent. The Nyāya, on the other hand, would attribute a type of knowledge to the agent while denying that the agent has acquired a more robust type of knowledge. The Nyāya attribute knowledge to an agent despite the possibility of epistemic luck because they distinguish between two types of knowledge: knowledge simpliciter and a more robust sense of knowledge, which I call reflective knowledge, following Pritchard (2005).
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Notes
- 1.
Bhattacharya’s suggestion was given in private correspondence with Matilal.
References
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Professor J.L. Shaw, who has spent a considerable amount of time and energy explaining the Nyāya theory of knowledge and translating numerous works into English so that the content of these works may be discussed and examined by modern philosophers. His contributions to the field of philosophy have made Indian philosophy, and particularly the Nyāya School, more accessible to everyone. He has been kind enough to allow me access to a draft of his paper, Knowledge, Belief and Doubt: Some Contemporary Problems and their Solutions from the Nyāya Perspective (2004) so that I could use it as a basis for this paper.
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Doctor, P. (2016). Nyāya, J.L. Shaw and Epistemic Luck. In: Bilimoria, P., Hemmingsen, M. (eds) Comparative Philosophy and J.L. Shaw. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17873-8_8
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