Hawthorne’s Lottery Puzzle and the Nature of Belief

Suppose that that T is one of ten million tickets that have been sold in a fair lottery. Clearly the probability that T will lose is extremely high. Suppose that I know these facts. Suppose, too, that T will in fact lose. Given these assumptions, it is tempting to conclude that I can know P, the proposition that T will lose. Certainly the present authors are tempted to conclude this. In his brilliant book Knowledge and Lotteries, however, John Hawthorne makes a strong case for the opposing view. He urges that in everyday contexts speakers are reluctant, or even outright unwilling, to claim that agents know propositions like P. And he buttresses this appeal to conversational data with several powerful theoretical arguments. Hawthorne uses the expression " lottery proposition " to stand for propositions that satisfy two conditions: first, they have a very high degree of probability; and second, there is an intuitive reluctance to say that they are known to be true. He maintains that many propositions concerning lotteries meet these two conditions, and that a variety of other propositions meet them as well, including the proposition that Hawthorne's car has not been stolen since he parked it in a certain lot this morning, and the proposition that Hawthorne will not have a major heart attack in the near future. 1 It is clear that these propositions are highly probable. But also, according to Hawthorne, there is considerable intuitive reluctance to claim that they are within our ken. Moreover, Hawthorne maintains * This is a slightly expanded version of a paper forthcoming in Philosophical Issues. 1 The term " lottery proposition " and the claim that lottery propositions are widespread are due to Vogel (1990).