Abstract

One of the most widely recognised intuitions about knowledge is that knowing precludes believing truly as a matter of luck. On Pritchard’s highly influential modal account of epistemic luck, luckily true beliefs are, roughly, those for which there are many close possible worlds in which the same belief formed in the same way is false. My aim is to introduce a new challenge to this account. Starting from the observation—as documented by a number of recent EEG studies—that our capacity to detect visual stimuli fluctuates with the phase of our neural oscillations, I argue that there can be very close possible worlds in which an actual-world detectable stimulus is undetectable. However, this doesn’t diminish our willingness to attribute knowledge in the case that the stimulus is detectable, even when undetectability would result in the same belief formed in the same way being false. As I will argue at length, the modal account appears unable to accommodate this result.

Highlights

  • The purpose of this paper is to introduce a specific class of counterexample to the modal account of epistemic luck

  • I argued that the fluctuation of visual detection threshold with neural phase poses a serious challenge to the modal account of epistemic luck

  • I described a new problem for the modal account of epistemic luck, which emerged from recent empirical findings from cognitive neuroscience

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Summary

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a specific class of counterexample to the modal account of epistemic luck. The intensity required for certain visual stimuli to be detectable is not fixed, even probabilistically, but rather is constantly fluctuating Using this observation as a starting point, I argue that this allows us to describe cases in which S’s visual detection threshold, while low enough to facilitate conscious perception of a given stimulus in the actual world, is insufficiently low for conscious perception. The point here isn’t that there is no species of epistemic luck incompatible with knowledge, but rather that the modal account sometimes struggles to distinguish between knowledge-compatible and knowledge-incompatible varieties of epistemic luck In arguing along these lines, this paper is ordered in the following way: First, I provide a brief introduction to epistemic luck generally and the modal account I offer something of a diagnosis of where the modal account goes astray (Sect. 5) and discuss a few potential objections (Sect. 6)

The modal account of epistemic luck
The challenge from neural phase
A closer look at knowing and initial conditions
Diagnosing the problem
Conclusion

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