It has been argued that an advantage of the safety account over the sensitivity account is that the safety account preserves epistemic closure, while the sensitivity account implies epistemic closure failure. However, the argument fails to take the method-relativity of the modal conditions on knowledge, viz., sensitivity and safety, into account. In this paper, I argue that the sensitivity account and the safety account are on a par with respect to epistemic closure once the method-relativity of the modal conditions is (...) taken into account. Therefore, epistemic closure is no longer an arbiter in the debate. (shrink)

Both sensitivity and safety theorists concur that their accounts should be relativized to the same method that one employs in the actual world. However, properly individuating methods has proven to be a tricky matter. In this regard, Nozick (Philosophical Explanations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981) proposes a Same-Experience-Same-Method Principle: if the experiences associated with two method tokens are the same, they are of the same type of method. This principle, however, has been widely rejected by recent safety and sensitivity theorists. (...) In this paper, I raise an argument in favor of Nozick: not endorsing the principle leads to some rather implausible consequences when certain skeptical scenarios are considered—i.e., scenarios in which skeptical possibilities are ‘close’. Additionally, this argument reveals some important lessons about skepticism in general and the place of modal accounts of knowledge in the internalism/externalism debate. (shrink)

According to the sensitivity account of knowledge, if one knows that p, then (roughly) were p false, one would not believe that p. One important issue regarding sensitivity is whether or not it preserves inductive knowledge. Critics including Jonathan Vogel, Ernest Sosa, and Duncan Pritchard argue that it does not. Proponents including Kevin Wallbridge insist that it does. In this paper, I first draw attention to an often-neglected distinction between two different versions of sensitivity—a distinction that has important implications for (...) the debate regarding inductive knowledge. In particular, I distinguish between the sensitivity principle originally defended by Robert Nozick and another version that has been the focus of many recent discussions. With the distinction in place, it is shown that a sensitivity theorist cannot preserve inductive knowledge while being unscathed. For neither account can simultaneously preserve inductive knowledge while properly handling the Gettier problem. Overall, sensitivity theorists are in trouble. (shrink)

According to the safety principle, if one knows that p, then one’s belief in p could not easily have been false. In this paper, I pose a dilemma for safety theorists by asking the following question: In evaluating whether or not a belief is safe, must we only examine the error-possibilities of the same belief as formed in the actual world? If ‘yes’, safety meets a familiar objection regarding necessary truths and the objection also extends to contingent propositions. If ‘no’, (...) however, there is no necessity of safety for knowledge. It is argued that this dilemma poses a threat for a number of safety principles from the recent literature. In the end, I draw implications of my arguments for the debate between robust and anti-luck virtue epistemologies. The result is that anti-luck virtue epistemology suffers from the difficulty with the safety principle whereas the robust variant remains intact. (shrink)

The lottery problem is the problem of explaining why mere reflection on the long odds that one will lose the lottery does not yield knowledge that one will lose. More generally, it is the problem of explaining why true beliefs merely formed on the basis of statistical evidence do not amount to knowledge. Some have thought that the lottery problem can be solved by appeal to a violation of the safety principle for knowledge, i.e., the principle that if S knows (...) that p, not easily would S have believed that p without p being the case. Against the standard safety‐based solution, I argue that understanding safe belief as belief that directly covaries with the truth of what is believed in a suitably defined set of possible worlds forces safety theorists to make a series of theoretical choices that ultimately prevent a satisfactory solution to the problem. In this way, I analyze several safety principles that result from such choices—the paper thus gives valuable insights into the nature of safety—and explain why none solves the lottery problem, including their inability to explain away Gettierized lottery cases. On a more positive note, I show that there is a viable solution in terms of safety if we get rid of the unquestioned assumption that safe beliefs directly track the truth. The alternative is a conception of safe belief according to which what safe beliefs directly track is the appropriateness of the circumstances and, indirectly, the truth. The resulting safety principle, I argue, explains why mere statistical evidence is not a safe source of knowledge. (shrink)

The distinction between true belief and knowledge is one of the most fundamental in philosophy, and a remarkable effort has been dedicated to formulating the conditions on which true belief constitutes knowledge. For decades, much of this epistemological undertaking has been dominated by a single strategy, referred to here as the modal approach. Shared by many of the most widely influential constraints on knowledge, including the sensitivity, safety, and anti-luck/risk conditions, this approach rests on a key underlying assumption — the (...) modal profiles available to known and unknown beliefs are in some way asymmetrical. The first aim of this paper is to deconstruct this assumption, identifying its plausibility with the way in which epistemologists frequently conceptualize human perceptual systems as excluding certain varieties of close error under conditions conducive to knowledge acquisition. The second aim of this paper is to then argue that a neural phase phenomenon indicates that this conceptualization is quite likely mistaken. This argument builds on the previous introduction of this neural phase to the context of epistemology, expanding the use of neural phase cases beyond relatively narrow questions about epistemic luck to a much more expansive critique of the modal approach as a whole. (shrink)