No Luck With Knowledge? On A Dogma Of Epistemology

Current epistemological orthodoxy has it that knowledge is incompatible with luck. More precisely: Knowledge is incompatible with epistemic luck (of a certain, interesting kind). This is often treated as a truism which is not even in need of argumentative support. In this paper, I argue that there is lucky knowledge. In the first part, I use an intuitive and not very developed notion of luck to show that there are cases of knowledge which are “lucky” in that sense. In the second part, I look at philosophical conceptions of luck (modal and probabilistic ones) and come to the conclusion that knowledge can be lucky in those senses, too. I also turns out that a probabilistic notion of luck can help us see in what ways a particular piece of knowledge or belief can be lucky or not lucky. The relation between knowledge and mere true belief which does not amount to knowledge has long kept philosophers busy. A number of authors hold that non-accidental true belief is knowledge (cf., e.g., Unger 1970, 114-115). Whatever one might think about that, there is widespread consensus that there cannot be any lucky knowledge. Or: Knowledge is incompatible with luck. More precisely, a belief which is true only by luck cannot