Lotteries, knowledge, and inconsistent belief: why you know your ticket will lose

Synthese 198 (8):7891-7921 (2020)
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Abstract

Suppose that I hold a ticket in a fair lottery and that I believe that my ticket will lose [L] on the basis of its extremely high probability of losing. What is the appropriate epistemic appraisal of me and my belief that L? Am I justified in believing that L? Do I know that L? While there is disagreement among epistemologists over whether or not I am justified in believing that L, there is widespread agreement that I do not know that L. I defend the two-pronged view that I am justified in believing that my ticket will lose and that I know that it will lose. Along the way, I discuss four different but related versions of the lottery paradox—The Paradox for Rationality, The Paradox for Knowledge, The Paradox for Fallibilism, and The Paradox for Epistemic Closure—and offer a unified resolution of each of them.

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Mylan Engel Jr
Northern Illinois University

References found in this work

Philosophical explanations.Robert Nozick - 1981 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Epistemic Luck.Duncan Pritchard - 2005 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism.Peter K. Unger - 1975 - Oxford [Eng.]: Oxford University Press.
Solving the skeptical problem.Keith DeRose - 1995 - Philosophical Review 104 (1):1-52.

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