How (not) to be a fallibilist: Lottery paradox and two types of epistemic contextualism

Abstract

There is one common thing among lotteries from all over the world: there is small number of winning tickets and considerably bigger number of losing tickets. Therefore, the probability that a ticket wins a lottery is quite low, usually so low that we think that it is almost sure the ticket loses. But, we would never say that we know that a ticket will lose, until we see results of the lottery in, for example, some newspapers. And the probability of newspapers making a mistake does not seem to affect our knowledge claims. But why is that, since newspapers could make a mistake more often than a ticket wins? This question presents trouble for fallibilism, which claim that S could know that p, even when the probability that p is less than 1. Contextualist theories give their typical brand of solution: we have a change of context between the two cases, and in one case standard for knowledge claims are higher than the standard in the other case. Because of that, one can know that S lost the lottery when she reads it in newspapers. In this paper, I will present analysis of the lottery paradox, and two types of epistemic contexutalism: simple conversational contextualism and inferential contextualism. I will also present two of the most popular solution based on simple conversational contextualism, made by Lewis and Cohen. Finally, I will introduce some problems for such solutions, and show that the problems could solved if we apply strategy and explanation of inferential contextualism, type of contextualism proposed by Michael Williams.

Za svaku uspešnu lutriju na svetu važi jedna istina: postoji mnogo gubitnič- kih tiketa, ali jako malo pobedničkih. Verovatnoća da će neki tiket pobediti na lutriji je jako niska, obično toliko da se čini gotovo izvesnim da će izgubiti. I pored toga, nismo skloni da kažemo da znamo da će neki tiket izgubiti, sve dok sutradan ne pogledamo rezultate u novinama. Verovatnoća da novine greše nam, sa druge strane, ne smeta da kažemo da neko zna da je njegov tiket izgubio. Zašto, kada novine mogu grešiti češće nego što neki tiket dobija? Ovakvo pitanje predstavlja problem za sve falibilističke teorije, koje tvrde da možemo znati iskaz p, iako je verovatnoća da je p istinito manja od 1. Većina kontekstua- lista tvrdi da su u pitanju različiti konteksti, pri čemu u jednom primenjujem strožije, a u drugom blaže standarde za pripisivanje znanja; pošto su standardi blaži, u drugom slučaju znamo da je neko izgubio na lutriji. U ovom radu izneću detaljniju analizu problema lutrije i predstaviću dva tipa kontekstualizma, prosti konverzacioni i inferencijalni kontekstu- alizam. Takođe, predstaviću dva popularna rešenja koje su ponudili zastupnici prostog konverzacionog kontekstualizma, Luis i Koen, i ukazati na moguće teškoće sa kojima se takav tip rešenja suočava. Na kraju, pokazaću da se te teškoće mogu otkloniti iznošenjem potpunijeg objašnjenja koje se kreće u okvirima inferencijalnog kontekstualizma, stanovišta koje je izgradio Majkl Vilijams.