Pritchard’s Epistemology and Necessary Truths

Erkenntnis 89 (6):2521-2541 (2024)
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Abstract

Duncan Pritchard has argued that his basis-relative anti-luck construal of a safety condition on knowing avoids the problem with necessary truths that safety conditions are often thought to have, viz., that beliefs the contents of which are necessarily true are trivially safe. He has further argued that adding an ability condition to truth, belief, and his anti-luck safety conditions yields an adequate account of knowledge. In this paper, we argue that not only does Pritchard’s anti-luck safety condition have a problem with necessary truths, adding an ability condition is of no help. Indeed, the same sort of case that precipitates Pritchard’s introduction of an ability condition shows the inadequacy of his completed anti-luck account of knowledge. Moreover, reconstruing safety as an anti-risk condition as Pritchard has recently done does not fix the problem we’ve identified. We conclude by entertaining a radical suggestion to the effect that the failures of safety-based accounts of modal knowledge are due to failures of doxastic success rather than failures to satisfy an anti-luck (or anti-risk) condition. Accepting this radical suggestion makes available the view that there is, after all, no special problem between safety and necessary truths.

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Author Profiles

Jeffrey W. Roland
Louisiana State University
Jon Cogburn
Louisiana State University

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References found in this work

Anti-Luck Virtue Epistemology.Duncan Pritchard - 2012 - Journal of Philosophy 109 (3):247-279.
A Virtue Epistemology.Ernest Sosa - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 143 (3):427-440.
Anti-luck epistemology.Duncan Pritchard - 2007 - Synthese 158 (3):277-297.
Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism.Robert Brandom - 2002 - Philosophical Quarterly 52 (206):123-125.

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