Abstract
That believing truly as a matter of luck does not generally constitute knowing has become epistemic commonplace. Accounts of knowledge incorporating this anti-luck idea frequently rely on one or another of a safety or sensitivity condition. Sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge have a well-known problem with necessary truths, to wit, that any believed necessary truth trivially counts as knowledge on such accounts. In this paper, we argue that safety-based accounts similarly trivialize knowledge of necessary truths and that two ways of responding to this problem for safety, issuing from work by Williamson and Pritchard, are of dubious success.
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Notes
Russell arguably called attention to this issue (1912, Chapter XIII).
Here, ‘p’ is a variable ranging over declarative sentences and ‘\(\langle p\rangle\)’ denotes the proposition expressed by p. The latter can be read ‘that p’.
Our remarks on the need for context relativity, both formulations of the standard semantics for counterfactuals, and the problem of counterpossibles are informed by the presentation in Brogaard and Salerno (forthcoming).
See, e.g., Sosa (1999).
Sosa attributes this move to Nozick in (1999, p. 146).
This rendering, which typically serves as the jumping off point for contemporary discussions, is essentially that found in Sosa (1999). In Section “Problems for Safety”, we consider accounts based on Williamson’s and Pritchard’s formulations of safety.
Here ‘@ Sam ’ denotes Sam’s actual world. In general, ‘@ S ’ denotes an agent S’s actual world.
See DeRose (2004, Section 5).
The example on which Williamson is commenting here isn’t exactly analogous to ours in that, if Sam has no reason to believe his calculator is broken he would intuitively be justified in his belief. In Williamson’s example (a coin tossing case), however, the agent’s belief is intuitively unjustified. We won’t comment on this further, but it is a difference in the cases.
This constitutes an extension of Pritchard’s view since that view only explicitly applies to what he calls fully contingent propositions—propositions that are not necessary in any sense (logically, metaphysically, physically, etc.).
Cf. Greco’s helpful demon counterexample to simple (process) reliabilism in Greco (1999, p. 286).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging us to expand our discussion of Pritchard’s safety condition.
See Pritchard (2009, p. 34).
This example comes from Pritchard (2009, p. 34).
Technically, the four conditions on knowing here given may require minor supplementation—“tweaking”—to get jointly sufficient conditions on knowing. However, Pritchard takes these four conditions to consititute the “core” of what knowing requires. (See Pritchard (2009, pp. 34–35, 41).) As such, we will treat them as jointly sufficient for present purposes.
See pp. 40–41.
It’s not clear to us why Pritchard’s modified account doesn’t collapse into a virtue reliabilist account, essentially Greco’s agent reliabilism. If there is such a collapse, this could be used to argue against mounting a defense of safety-based epistemology in the way Pritchard (2009) does. That said, we won’t worry over this point here.
See, e.g., (Greco 1999, pp. 286–291).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank James Rocha and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2009 meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society. Thanks to the participants of our session there for helpful discussion.
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Roland, J., Cogburn, J. Anti-Luck Epistemologies and Necessary Truths. Philosophia 39, 547–561 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9295-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9295-0