Causal Tracking Reliabilism and the Lottery Problem

Grazer Philosophische Studien 86 (1):73-92 (2012)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The lottery problem is often regarded as a successful counterexample to reliabilism. The process of forming your true belief that your ticket has lost solely on the basis of considering the odds is, from a purely probabilistic viewpoint, much more reliable than the process of forming a true belief that you have lost by reading the results in a normally reliable newspaper. Reliabilism thus seems forced, counterintuitively, to count the former process as knowledge if it so counts the latter process. I offer a theory of empirical knowledge which, while being recognizably reliabilist, restricts empirical knowledge to cases in which the fact that p and the belief that p are causally connected. I show that this form of reliabilism solves the lottery problem, avoids the problems that beset the causal theory of knowledge, and show how it handles a number of problematic cases in the recent literature.

Other Versions

reprint McEvoy, Mark (2014) "Causal Tracking Reliabilism and the Gettier Problem". Synthese 191(17):4115-4130

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 100,601

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Reliabilism, Lotteries, and Safaris.Mark V. McEvoy - 2018 - Philosophical Forum 49 (3):325-333.
How to Be A Reliabilist.Christoph Kelp - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):346-374.
Reliabilism Defended.Jeffrey Tolly - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (8):619-635.
Can virtue reliabilism explain the value of knowledge?Berit Brogaard - 2006 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (3):335-354.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-07-18

Downloads
86 (#242,616)

6 months
9 (#467,516)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Mark McEvoy
Hofstra University

Citations of this work

Safety and Unawareness of Error-Possibility.Haicheng Zhao - 2021 - Philosophical Papers 50 (1-2):309-337.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (210):105-116.
Discrimination and perceptual knowledge.Alvin I. Goldman - 1976 - Journal of Philosophy 73 (November):771-791.
The inescapability of Gettier problems.Linda Zagzebski - 1994 - Philosophical Quarterly 44 (174):65-73.

View all 25 references / Add more references