Safety, Skepticism, and Lotteries

Dylan Dodd*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Several philosophers have claimed that S knows p only if S' s belief is safe, where S's belief is safe iff (roughly) in nearby possible worlds in which S believes p, p is true. One widely held intuition many people have is that one cannot know that one's lottery ticket will lose a fair lottery prior to an announcement of the winner, regardless of how probable it is that it will lose. Duncan Pritchard has claimed that a chief advantage of safety theory is that it can explain the lottery intuition without succumbing to skepticism. I argue that Pritchard is wrong. If a version of safety theory can explain the lottery intuition, it will also lead to skepticism.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)95-120
Number of pages26
JournalErkenntnis
Volume77
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2012

Keywords

  • COUNTERFACTUALS
  • KNOWLEDGE
  • CHANCES

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