Achievements, Safety and Environmental Epistemic Luck. (December 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gaultier, Benoit
• Is Part Of: Dialectica. Volume 68:Fascicule 4(2014)
• Page Start: 477
• Page End: 497
• Publication Date: 2014-12
• Subjects: Psychology -- Periodicals; Dialectic -- Periodicals; 105
• DOI: 10.1111/1746-8361.12081
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0012-2017

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="main"> <title>Abstract</title> <p>Theories of knowledge as credit for true belief, or as cognitive achievement, have to face the following objection: in the famous Barn façades case, it seems that the truth of Barney's belief that he is in front of a barn is to be explained by the correct functioning of his cognitive capacities, although we are reluctant to say that he knows he is in front of a barn. Duncan Pritchard concludes from this that a safety clause, irreducible to the conditions a true belief must satisfy in order to be credited to the believer, constitutes a necessary condition of knowledge. Because those who define knowledge as a cognitive achievement have not convincingly answered this objection, I intend, in the first section of this paper, to refute it by showing how practical and doxastic achievements differ. Then I defend the idea that we should also distinguish two kinds of environmental epistemic luck, and, correlatively, two kinds of safety, that are not equally incompatible with knowledge. Finally, I argue that this distinction is inevitably vague and I indicate some consequences of this vagueness for our knowledge‐intuitions.</p> </abstract>