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Varieties of Epistemic Risk

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Abstract

My interest is in how shifting from an anti-luck epistemology to an anti-risk epistemology can enable us to make sense of some important epistemic phenomena. After rehearsing the more general arguments for preferring anti-risk epistemology over its anti-luck cousin, I argue that a further advantage of this transition lies in how it puts us in a better position to understand certain trade-offs with regard to epistemic risk. In particular, there can be ways of forming beliefs that are epistemically low risk along one axis of evaluation while being epistemically high risk along another axis of evaluation. I further show how this idea plays out in terms of collaborative inquiries, where the framework provided by anti-risk epistemology enables us to understand how epistemic risk can be distributed across such a collective enterprise and thereby effectively managed.

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Notes

  1. See, especially, Pritchard (2004, 2005, 2007a, 2012a, 2012b, 2015a).

  2. For more on the modal account of luck, see Pritchard (2005, ch. 6; 2014b, 2019a). See also Pritchard and Smith (2004). For further discussion of the notion of luck, including both defences of other proposals and critiques of the modal account, see Rescher (1990, 1995), Coffman (2007, 2009, 2015), Lackey (2008), Steglich-Peterson (2010), Levy (2011), McKinnon (2014), and Hales (2016). Interestingly, Riggs (2007, 2009) argues that it can be a matter of luck that the sun rose this morning, even though there are no close possible worlds where it fails to rise. See Author (2015, §5) for a critical discussion of Riggs’ proposal in this regard.

  3. See Pritchard (2005, passim) for a full defence of this claim, including the articulation of some varieties of epistemic luck that are compatible with knowledge. I also discuss a kind of epistemic luck—reflective epistemic luck—that I claim has a moot relationship with knowledge.

  4. Inevitably, while there is a broad consensus in this regard, there are also pockets of dissent. See, for example, Hetherington (2013), which is itself a response to Pritchard (2013).

  5. This example is, of course, from Chisholm (1977, 105).

  6. For some key defences of (versions of) the safety condition, see Sainsbury (1997), Sosa (1999), and Williamson (2000). See also Pritchard (2002, 2005, passim).

  7. This is especially relevant with regard to the competing sensitivity condition on knowledge, versions of which have famously been defended by Dretske (1970) and Nozick (1981). For a comparative discussion of safety and sensitivity in the context of anti-luck epistemology, see Pritchard (2008) and Black (2011).

  8. For further discussion of these points, and some of the other advantages of offering a defence of the safety condition in terms of anti-luck epistemology, see Pritchard (2007a, 2012a, 2012b).

  9. For an explanation of why a “pure” (or as I sometimes put it, ‘robust’) anti-luck epistemology that maintains that knowledge is just true belief that satisfies the anti-luck condition is implausible, see Pritchard, Millar, & Haddock (2010, ch. 3) and Pritchard (2012a).

  10. See especially Pritchard, Millar, & Haddock (2010, ch. 3) and Pritchard (2012a, 2017b).

  11. See especially Pritchard (2016b, 2017a, 2020).

  12. For more on the modal account of risk, see Pritchard (2015c). For two distinct treatments of the relationship between luck and risk, see Broncano-Berrocal (2015) and Navarro (2019).

  13. I discuss this lacuna in anti-luck epistemology and how anti-risk epistemology resolves it, in more detail in Pritchard (2016b). See also Pritchard (2020). Note I have also applied the modal account of risk to debates outside of epistemology, such as aesthetics (Pritchard 2018a), and some puzzles in legal theory (Pritchard 2018c; The citation “Co-Author, and Author forthcoming” has been changed to “Helmreich, & Pritchard, 2021” to match the author name/date in the reference list. Please check if the change is fine in this occurrence and modify the subsequent occurrences, if necessary Helmreich, & Pritchard, 2021).

  14. For further discussion of these advantages of anti-risk epistemology over anti-luck epistemology, see Pritchard (2016b, 2017a, 2020).

  15. Where there is a live debate in this regard, it tends to concern whether there are other fundamental epistemic goods that are not reducible to truth or whether our focus should not be on truth itself but rather on a specific epistemic standing, albeit usually one that is understood along at least broadly factive lines, such as knowledge or understanding (although in the latter case the connection to truth can sometimes be quite weak). For some relevant literature in this regard, see Williamson (2000, passim), Millar (2011), Kvanvig (2003, passim; 2013), Kelp (2014), and Elgin (2017, passim). I defend the position that truth is the sole fundamental epistemic good in Pritchard (2014c, 2016a, 2019b), though this strong way of understanding epistemic axiology is not required for our purposes here. For a general survey of work on epistemic value, see Pritchard (2007b) and The citation “Carter, Pritchard, & Turri, (2018)” has been changed to “Helmreich, & Pritchard (2021)” to match the author name/date in the reference list. Please check if the change is fine in this occurrence and modify the subsequent occurrences, if necessary. Helmreich, & Pritchard (2021).

  16. Note that it might matter in this regard whether one is using the notion of belief in a broad everyday sense or in a more specific fashion that is of particular relevance to epistemology. Very roughly, according to the latter usage belief is that propositional attitude that is a constituent part of propositional knowledge (especially rationally grounded propositional knowledge). The idea that beliefs are in some sense aimed at the truth looks far more plausible on the narrower conception of belief than when cast in terms of the everyday notion of belief (which might have no such implication). In any case, it is obviously the latter notion that is salient to our current concerns, and so we will take this as given in what follows. For further discussion of this narrower notion of belief, and some of its epistemological ramifications, see Pritchard (2015b, part two; 2018b). For more general discussion of some of the different notions of belief in play in the philosophical literature, see Stevenson (2002).

  17. Note that in putting the matter in this way I am not presupposing that understanding is in general a kind of knowledge, but only that there is a species of understanding which a refined form of knowledge. As it happens, I maintain that knowledge and understanding come apart in both directions, and hence that there is a kind of understanding which is not a form of knowledge, though this point doesn’t matter for our current purposes. See Pritchard (2009, 2014a, 2016c) and Pritchard, Millar, & Haddock (2010, ch. 4). For related discussions of knowledge and understanding, see Kvanvig (2003), Grimm (2006, 2014), and Greco (2013). For a conception of understanding that would treat it as distinct from (propositional) knowledge, see Zagzebski (2001). See also Elgin (2017, passim). For a useful survey of recent work on understanding, see Grimm (2010).

  18. One prominent line in contemporary epistemology on this front comes from those epistemologists who regard virtue epistemology as reorienting traditional epistemological concerns, rather than simply offering the resources to resolve them. In particular, a common theme in this regard is that the project of understanding (propositional) knowledge should not occupy center-stage within epistemology. See Code (1987), Kvanvig (1992), Montmarquet (1993), Hookway (2003), and Roberts and Wood (2007).

  19. For further discussion of this claim, see Pritchard (2014c, 2016a, 2019b).

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    Duncan Pritchard

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Pritchard, D. Varieties of Epistemic Risk. Acta Anal 37, 9–23 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-021-00489-7

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