Winners and losers in the folk epistemology of lotteries

Two assumptions anchor most contemporary discussions of knowledge in cases of (large, fair, single-winner) lotteries. First, based on the long odds alone, you don’t know that your ticket lost. Second, based on watching a news report of the winning numbers, you do know that your ticket lost. Moreover, it is often treated as an uncontroversial datum that this is how most people view matters. Explaining why people hold this combination of attitudes is then treated as a criterion for an acceptable theory of knowledge and knowledge attributions. But do people actually hold the views they’re assumed to hold? We did the necessary empirical work to find out. We studied people’s reactions to lottery cases and discovered that they respond as predicted. We report those results here. We also evaluate three previous explanations for why people deny knowledge in lottery cases; none of them seems to work. Finally, we present evidence for a new explanation for why some people deny knowledge in lottery cases. We suggest that they deny knowledge in lottery cases due to formulaic expression. * This is a draft (2013-02-04) of a paper to appear in Advances in Experimental Epistemology, ed. James Beebe (Continuum). Comments welcome. Please don’t cite, quote or refute without permission. Authorship is coequal and listed un-alphabetically.