Epistemic luck and logical necessities: armchair luck revisited

In Smiljana Gartner Bojan Borstner (ed.), Thought Experiments between Nature and Society. A Festschrift for Nenad Miščević. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 137-150 (2017)
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Abstract

Modal knowledge accounts like sensitivity or safety face a problem when it comes to knowing propositions that are necessarily true because the modal condition is always fulfilled no matter how random the belief forming method is. Pritchard models the anti-luck condition for knowledge in terms of the modal principle safety. Thus, his anti-luck epistemology faces the same problem when it comes to logical necessities. Any belief in a proposition that is necessarily true fulfills the anti-luck condition and, therefore, qualifies as knowledge. Miščević shares Pritchard’s take on epistemic luck and acknowledges the resulting problem. In his intriguing article “Armchair Luck: Apriority, Intellection and Epistemic Luck” Miščević suggests solving the problem by supplementing safety with a virtue theoretic condition-“agent stability”-which he also spells out in modal terms. I will argue that Miščević is on the right track when he suggests adding a virtue-theoretic component to the safety condition. However, it should not be specified modally but rather in terms of performances that manifest competences.

Author's Profile

Guido Melchior
University of Graz

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