Anti-Luck Epistemologies and Necessary Truths

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.

No Luck With Knowledge? On a Dogma of Epistemology

“…However, given our problem with the above kinds of beliefs, it would with this reply become quite unclear what relevance safety can have in the first case when one is dealing with indexical (or demonstrative) beliefs, beliefs which are simply trivially safe (cf. Roland/Cogburn 2011 who briefly apply the safety view to the clock example but do, like many others, neglect the problem here). It does not seem to help to take refuge to belief types rather than belief tokens where the notion of a belief type could be defined, say, in terms of David Kaplan’s (1989) difference between character and content: Speakers who believe what they say when they utter the sentence “It is 12:15 now” share the “character” of their belief even though the contents of their beliefs (and thus their beliefs) vary with circumstances (we can ignore the details of such an account here).…”

Safety and the True–True Problem

“…179-185). 20 We call this the Constancy Principle in Roland and Cogburn, 2011. It raises many issues about the extent to which anti-luck epistemologies such as sensitivity-, safety-, and strength-…”

“…Strangely, Sosa does not discuss the issue in his response to DeRose. In Roland and Cogburn, , we show how Gettier‐type cases arise for necessary truths and tie the problem to broader issues about reliabilism.…”

“…We call this the Constancy Principle in Roland and Cogburn, . It raises many issues about the extent to which anti‐luck epistemologies such as sensitivity‐, safety‐, and strength‐based theories that trade on counterfactuals concerning believed propositions really have any advantage over traditional process reliabilism, which is best represented as stating the relevant counterfactuals explicitly in terms of epistemic processes being the same in different possible situations.…”

Lost at Sea: A New Route to Metaphysical Skepticism

“…(For a classic defense of sensitivity as a necessary condition for knowledge, see Nozick, ; for a classic defense of safety as a necessary condition for knowledge, see Williamson, ; for a classic statement of a preference for safety over sensitivity as a way of cashing out a sort of luck precluded by knowledge, see Pritchard, , §6.7; for a discussion of an alternative, virtue‐theoretic way of cashing out the notion, see Pritchard, , §7.) It is true that cashing it out in either of those modal ways runs into problems with necessary truths, because both sensitivity and safety seem to be trivially satisfied for such truths (Roland & Cogburn, ). And this might prove difficult for a non‐trivial application in our case, because GMTs might be necessary: necessarily true if true and necessarily false if false.…”