Generics, Epistemic Luck, and Knowledge

[摘要] Philosophers generally agree that an individual cannot have knowledge that p if her belief that p is only accidentally true.A common way of putting this claim is that knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck.After criticizing modal accounts of epistemic luck, Ioffer a novel account of knowledge precluding epistemic luck. My account appeals to generic facts concerning how human beings arrive at the truth.Given that it is a generic fact that human beings arrive at true beliefs through perception, memory, testimony, and inference (abductive, inductive, and deductive), an individual S’s belief that p is subject to epistemic luck just in case she arrives at a true belief, but fails to exemplify one of these generic facts concerning human beings.Apart from offering an account of epistemic luck that is extensionally adequate and that could be put to use in a reductive account of knowledge, my account of epistemic luck reorients epistemology away from a disembodied Cartesian rationalism towards a moderate naturalism.

[发布机构] the University of Pittsburgh