Anti-Luck Epistemology

Abstract

In the last chapter we encountered the Gettier problem that is posed by the Gettier-style cases. This is the problem of how to formulate a theory of knowledge which is ‘Gettier-proof’. We noted that Gettier-style cases essentially trade on the anti-luck intuition that if one has knowledge then one has a true belief that could not have easily been wrong. In light of this fact, one natural thought to have is that rather than fixating on avoiding Gettier-style cases we should instead try to formulate that epistemic condition (or conditions) which appropriately accommodates the anti-luck intuition — i.e., we should try to formulate the anti-luck epistemic condition. After all, if we were able to formulate such a condition, then that would deal with the Gettier problem by default, plus any other cases that trade on the anti-luck intuition. We will call any theory of knowledge that explicitly has as a central component an anti-luck epistemic condition an anti-luck epistemology. That the condition has to be explicitly thought of in this way is important since all theories of knowledge aim to exclude knowledge-undermining epistemic luck, and so all such theories can be thought of as implicitly incorporating an anti-luck epistemic condition. Nevertheless, only some theories explicitly incorporate such a condition, as we will see.