Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T15:21:36.424Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Probabilistic Approach to Epistemic Safety from the Perspective of Ascribers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2020

Yingjin Xu Open the ORCID record for Yingjin Xu [Opens in a new window]
Yingjin Xu*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Fudan University, 220 Handan Road, Shanghai, China, 200433
*
Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

“Epistemic safety” refers to an epistemic status in which the subject acquires true beliefs without involving epistemic luck. There is a tradition of cashing out safety-defining modality in terms of possible world semantics (as put forward by Duncan Pritchard), and even Julian Dutant's and Martin Smith's normalcy-based notions of safety also take this semantics as a significant component of them. However, such an approach has to largely depend on epistemologists’ ad hoc intuitions on how to individuate possible worlds and how to pick out “close” worlds. In contrast, I propose a probabilistic approach to safety to maximally preclude the preceding type of ad hoc-ness. The main idea is as follows: Each epistemic vignette wherein a subject S holds a true belief p has to be evaluated by a safety-ascriber, hence, S holds a true belief p safely iff according to the safety-ascriber's evaluation (which is based on her background knowledge), the probability of the occurrence of the truth-maker of p is above a pre-fixed “safety threshold”. My theory will be applied to Lottery Cases, Gettierized Cases and Skeptical Cases to test the scope of its applicability.

Keywords

safetyascriberprobabilitybackground knowledgetruth-maker
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 31 - 46
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Dretske, F. (1970). ‘Epistemic Operators.’ Journal of Philosophy 67, 1007–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dutant, J. (2010). ‘Two Notions of Safety.’ Swiss Philosophical Preprints 87, 1–19.Google Scholar
Gettier, E. (1963). ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ Analysis 23, 121–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A.I. (1976). ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge.’ Journal of Philosophy 73, 771–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman, A.I. (1988–1989). ‘Psychology and Philosophical Analysis.’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 89, 195–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greco, J. (2007). ‘Worries About Pritchard's Safety.’ Synthese 158, 299–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritchard, D. (2007). ‘Anti-luck Epistemology.’ Synthese 158, 277–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritchard, D. (2008). ‘Knowledge, Luck, and Lotteries.’ In Hendricks, V. and Pritchard, D. (eds), New Waves in Epistemology, pp. 28–51. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Pritchard, D. (2009 a). Knowledge. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Pritchard, D. (2009 b). ‘Safety-based Epistemology: Whither Now?’ Journal of Philosophical Research 34, 33–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, M. (2016). Between Probability and Certainty: What Justifies Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1973). ‘Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability.’ Cognitive Psychology 5, 207–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar