pritchards luck

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Critical Notice of PritchardsEpistemic Luck

Jonathan L. Kvanvig

Duncan Pritchards book1 concerns the interplay between two disturbingkinds of epistemic luck, termed reflective and veritic, and two types ofarguments for skepticism, one based on a closure principle for knowledge andthe other on an underdetermination thesis about the quality of our evidencefor the everyday propositions we believe. Pritchard defends the view thata safety-based account of knowledge can answer the closure argument andprovide an account of how veritic epistemic luck is eliminated. He also arguesthat reflective epistemic luck cannot be eliminated, and that even though itis the sort of luck with which the underdetermination argument is concerned,the fact that this type of luck cannot be eliminated doesnt undermine knowl-edge. Instead, it undermines the assertibility of our knowledge, at least inskeptical contexts. So when the skeptic challenges the idea that we know

using the underdetermination principle, we have no legitimate response tooffer, and it is this fundamental fact of epistemic life that Pritchard termsour inevitable epistemic angst.

The book thus logically divides into two parts. The first part deals withthe skeptical closure argument, the concept of veritic epistemic luck, and thesafety response to this closure argument. The second part rehearses the skep-tical argument employing the underdetermination principle, the connectionbetween this argument and the concept of reflective epistemic luck, and theWittgensteinian approach to the problem that yields the conclusion that thefundamental facts of epistemic life leave us subject to unrelenting epistemic

angst.Pritchard begins with the infallibilist argument for skepticism and rejects

it fairly summarily, but points out that the failure of this argument does littleto dispel the power of skepticism. For the skeptic can produce argumentsthat rely on logically weaker claims than the infallibility claim. The firstsuch claim is the closure principle, which is the claim that if you know p andknow that p entails q then you know q. The closure argument relies on thisprinciple in the following way. The skeptic insists that one can only know

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an everyday proposition, such as the claim that Im in my office writing a

critical notice of Pritchards book, if I also know that Im not a brain-in-a-vatbeing deceived into think that this everyday proposition is true when in factit isnt. The skeptic then insists that I cant know the everyday propositionprecisely because I dont know that the skeptical hypothesis is false.

Pritchards response to the skeptical argument relying on this principle isthat our everyday beliefs are known if true when they are safe. The notionof safety here is a modal notion, and Pritchard glosses the notion in terms ofwhat is true in nearly all nearby worlds in which the belief is formed in thesame way as actually formed. For a belief to be safe, the following conditionalmust be true it must be true in nearly all such worlds: the person forms the

belief in the way in question only when it is true.Pritchard contends however that there is a weaker skeptical argument that

can be given as well, and that the safety response is ineffective against it.The weaker argument relies on the underdetermination principle, accordingto which one has good evidence for p only if ones evidence for p is evidencewhich favors p over claims known to be incompatible with p (Pritchard2005, p. 108). Pritchard argues that the underdetermination principle islogically weaker than the closure principle, and thus that a response to theclosure-based skeptical argument will not translate automatically into a re-sponse to the underdetermination-based skeptical argument. Pritchard thus

turns in the second half of the book to the concept of epistemic luck andthe role it plays in formulating arguments for skepticism, identifying two dis-tinct types of worrisome epistemic luck, veritic and reflective. The formerhe glosses as the claim that [i]t is a matter of luck that the agents belief istrue (Pritchard 2005, p. 146), and the latter as the claim that [g]iven onlywhat the agent is able to know by reflection alone, it is a matter of luck thather belief is true (Pritchard 2005, p. 175).

Insofar as the type of epistemic luck is veritic epistemic luck, Pritchardargues that a safety-based account of knowledge is sufficient to eliminate thistype of luck, but that the kind of luck in view when the skeptical positionis developed on the basis of the underdetermination argument is reflectiveepistemic luck. Pritchards response here is that the skeptics challenge is, ina certain way, unanswerable. His view is that we cannot defend our ordinaryviews against such a challenge, even if in fact our views count as knowledgeon the basis of the safety account of it. Because we cannot answer the skeptic,we are forever consigned to the experience of epistemic angst concerning thequestion of what we know and concerning the justification of our ordinarybeliefs about the world.

The book is a first-rate work in contemporary epistemology. It is well-argued and wellacquainted with the relevant literature on the topics it ad-

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dresses. As is usual in philosophy, there are some parts of it that I believe are

not quite as successful as other parts, and in the remainder of this piece I willfocus on those aspects that I found problematic and which are most centralto the thesis of the book. The first set of concerns surround the notion ofsafety itself. First, questions arise because the account of safety adverts toa two-place nearness relation on possible worlds. Second, Pritchard claimsthat safety is able to preserve closure and able to eliminate the kind of luckpresent in Gettier cases, and questions arise concerning both of these claims.

Finally, the approach taken to safety threatens to eliminate one of thecentral virtues of a theory that employs a safety condition, namely the ca-pacity to explain the possibility of inductive and statistical knowledge. The

second major concern involves Pritchards rejection of internalism. I begin,however, with the issues concerning safety.

1 The Two-Place Nearness Relation

Pritchard formulates safety and sensitivity by quantifying over nearby worlds.For sensitivity the claim is that a persons belief is sensitive just in case theperson doesnt believe the claim in nearby worlds where the claim is false(Pritchard 2005, p. 48). For safety, we get the claim that a persons beliefis safe just in case in nearly all nearby worlds, the person only believes the

claim when it is true (Pritchard 2005, p. 71).The usual formulation of these conditions is in terms of counterfactuals,

with sensitivity being the claim that if the proposition in question were falsethe person would not believe it, and safety being the claim that if the personin question held the belief it would be true. A concept of nearness comesinto play, on the usual construal, only because the standard semantics forcounterfactuals is the Lewis/Stalnaker semantics that employs a primitivenearness (or similarity) relation.

One might think Pritchards formulations are simply the result of sub-stituting into ordinary language some of the semantical apparatus provided

by Lewis and Stalnaker, but that is not so. The primitive relation in theLewis/Stalnaker semantics is a 3-place relation, and the relation of nearnessthat Pritchard employs is a 2-place relation. Thus, even if we had a suitableexplication of the 3-place relation needed for the success of the standard se-mantics (where one world is closer to a second world than it is to a thirdworld), wed need something different from Pritchard to interpret his safetyand sensitivity conditions, since knowing which worlds are closer to whichother worlds doesnt tell us which worlds are close to the actual world. In par-ticular, the Lewis/Stalnaker relation merely provides an ordering of worlds

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from near to far, and Pritchards relation requires a cut-off point within this

ordering to separate worlds that count as near worlds from those that dont.Since the issue of what nearness amounts to is not addressed in the book,

we are left a bit too much in the dark about how the central features of thesafety theory are supposed to work. Without an explication of the 2-placenotion of nearness, the reader is left with the suspicion that some just-so nearness story can be concocted to yield any result one desires whenconsidering specific cases.

We may compare this strategy for clarifying safety with that provided bySosa, for example. Sosa uses ordinary subjunctive conditionals to formulatethe safety condition, leaving the question of the proper semantical treatment

in terms of possible worlds up for grabs. The advantage of this approach isthat the theory is free of the metaphysical encumbrance of possible worldsand the ordinary conditionals can be evaluated as ordinary statements ofnatural language.

Once the technical notion of nearness of possible worlds is brought intothe formulation of the safety condition, more metaphysical work is requiredin order to have much confidence concerning the implications of the theoryfor, especially, the examples involved in the Gettier problem.

2 Safety and Closure

In recent years, the idea that safety preserves closure whereas sensitivity doesnot has been defended by Sosa, but attacked by others. Pritchard maintainsthat the safety condition he offers doesnt need to be altered to preserveclosure.

I think the defense of closure isnt successful, and that seeing why showssome of the shortcomings of developing a theory of safety that requires anearness relation on possible worlds. We can begin to appreciate these pointsby considering variations of Ginets fake barn case. In the original case, theWisconsinites pepper the landscape with fake barns, but fail to remove the

one real barn that you look at. You believe that the object in the field is abarn, and you are correct. But you do not know that the object in the fieldis a barn, because you are just lucky to have attended to the one real barnin the area.

Notice how a safety theorist must explain this case. He must hold thatthere are a substantial number of nearby worlds where ones belief is formedin the same way but is false. To secure this result, it is important to keep theintentions and practices of the Wisconsinites fixed when calculating whichworlds are nearby. If we do not, there will be little reason for thinking that

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there are fake barns in any nearby worlds (except of course the actual world),

and thus little reason to think that in a fair number of nearby worlds onesperceptual belief that the object in the field is a barn is false. After all, itis exceedingly unlikely that the Wisconsinites approach to boredom or thedesire to engage in frivolity is directed in precisely this way, and it couldeasily be that none of the other remotely likely combinations of intentionsand practices would have any empirical results involving fake barns. To getthe result that you dont know that the object in question is a barn, on thebasis of what is true of nearby worlds, nearness will have to be calculated ina way that holds fixed, to a significant extent, the intentions and practicesof the Wisconsinites.

Consider, then, a slight variation of this case. In this case, the Wisconsitesfirst go through the territory painting all the barns green, and then comethrough a second time and replace all the barns with red fake barns. Asbefore, they miss one, and it happens to be the one barn you look at whenyou proclaim, Hey, barn in field!

Once again, you lack knowledge. Moreover, youd lack knowledge whetheryour belief was theres a barn in the field or theres a green barn in the field.Adding color to your belief doesnt morph it into knowledge. To securethis result, it is important again to keep the intentions and practices of theWisconsites fixed when calculating nearness. Failure to do so could easily

result in ones belief being true in nearly all nearby worlds. Considered thecolor belief for example. The Wisconsites painted every barn green. On theface of it, that will make green barn worlds nearby, and anything of anothercolor more distant. Then they replace all but one barn with red-coloredfakes. But maybe they decided this on a lark; maybe it was either this prankor putting shaving cream on your apple pie or a million other pranks theymight have done instead. So of all the things they might have done, doingthe red fake prank is only a minute proportion of the total logical space ofwhat they might have done and were considering doing.

In order to get the proper result that you dont know the object in thefield is a green barn, these other options must be ignored and the intentionsand practices of the Wisconsinites held fixed when calculating which worldsare nearby.

We are now in a position to take a look at the variation of the fake barncase that threatens closure for safety, and see what Pritchards response isto it. In this variation, the Wisconsites introduce chance into their practices.At each barn site, they flip a fair coin to decide what to do. If the coin landsheads, they replace the barn with a red fake barn. If the coin lands tails,they paint the barn green and leave it in place. As before, when you believebarn in field you dont know that there is a barn in the field, and when

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you believe green barn in field you dont know that there is a green barn

in the field.But safety conditions appear to yield the wrong results here. They yield

the result that your barn in field belief is not safe because in roughly50% of nearby worlds in which you form this belief perceptually, you aremistaken. But the green barn in field belief is safe because every nearbyworld in which you form this belief, your belief is true. But then closure failsfor safety, since you know that the green barn belief entails the barn belief.Pritchard disagrees. He holds that the green barn belief is not safe:

[I]n an environment where there is barn-deception going on therewill be a wide class of nearby possible worlds where, for example,the agent is looking at a green barn facade and yet is neverthelessforming a belief that she is looking at a green barn (it could be, forinstance, that this is one of the barn facades that the townsfolkhavent got around to painting red yet) (Pritchard 2005, p. 168).

Pritchard says that the green barn belief is not safe, because there are nearbyworlds where the belief is formed perceptually but is false because the Wis-consinites might not have finished their project yet. The important pointto note about this response is that it implies that, when calculating whichworlds count as nearby worlds, the practices of the Wisconsinites are not held

fixed. As noted above, however, the intentions and practices of the Wiscon-sinites have to be held fixed on pain of being unable to provide an explanationof the original fake barn case and the variation of the case that leaves justone green barn in the territory. But if we hold fixed these intentions andpractices, we get failure of closure.

It should be noted, however, that this failure can be remedied by adop-tion of a different closure principle. If the closure principle appealed to thenotion of competent deduction instead of to known entailment, so that know-ing q results from knowing p and competently deducing q from p, then thebarn belief would have to be arrived at by deduction from the green barnbelief. In such a case, only worlds where the belief is arrived at by deduc-tion from the green barn belief would count, and then the counterexampledisappears because beliefs arrived at by the method of competent deductionare paradigmatically safe. So a safety theorist can avoid the counterexampleby adopting a revised closure principle rather than by suggesting that thenearby worlds dont sustain the example.

Even if we adopt a different closure principle, however, the discussionabove shows the limitations of appealing to nearness relations on possibleworlds. In order to get the desired results, nearness relations alone do notappear to be enough. Instead, as noted above, nearness relations have to

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be calculated while holding fixed other factors in order to be able to explain

why knowledge is absent in certain cases. But if this point is correct, thennearness relations alone cant do the work needed.

3 Safety and Gettier

Recall that Pritchards view is that there are two kinds of epistemic luck thatare problematic, veritic and reflective. Pritchard holds that the second typeof luck cannot be eliminated, but that it doesnt need to be eliminated inorder for knowledge to be present. For knowledge, all that needs to be elimi-nated is veritic luck, and Pritchard believes a safety condition on knowledgeis sufficient for eliminating such luck. Pritchard thus endorses the idea thatsafe true belief is immune to Gettier examples. Given what we noted in thelast section, suspicion is already warranted about such a claim because thenotion of nearness doesnt seem sufficient on its own to yield an explanationof the fake barn case, but there are other problems as well.

Besides the problems noted above with the fake barn case, the safetycondition Pritchard uses has a bit of difficulty with Harmans assassinationcase as well (the case in which Jill hears that the President is assassinatedin a media report, but that immediately after this report occurs, the CIAconcocts a story that is contained in all other media outlets that it was an

agent who was killed rather than the President). Pritchard rejects Harmansaccount of the case, claiming that Jill does know that the President wasassassinated. Rather than agreeing with Harman that she doesnt know,Pritchard claims only that her knowledge isnt stable: unstable becausethere are nearby worlds where the belief is not held, but there are no nearbyworlds where the belief is held but it is false (Pritchard 2005, p. 172). Thisexplanation is a little too theory-driven for my taste, and I would have likedto have seen a more theory-neutral explanation first as to why Harmansaccount of the case is mistaken.

Even if we let this issue go, however, the safety condition has little hope

of handling other types of cases, such as Lehrer and Paxsons Tom/Buckcase. In that case, you see Tom take a book from the library and report it tothe police. The police go to Toms house to arrest him, and Toms motherlies to protect him, saying that Tom is in Hawaii and it must have been histwin brother Buck who stole the book. Variations on the case depend on howseriously the police have to take her report. In the easy case, theyve dealtwith her for years, have investigated the story of a twin and know for surethat there is no such twin. Instead, the woman is pathological and known tobe so, in which case, her testimony no more undermines your knowledge of

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who stole the book than would a remark with the same content that occurs

in the local high school play being performed this evening. In the easy cases,any defeater present because of the testimony of the mother is a misleadingdefeater that doesnt undermine knowledge. In the hard cases, however,the police take her report seriously because they have no such independentevidence. She appears normal, sincere, honest, etc., and they have to checkout her story, which may take weeks or months. In such a case, her testimonyundermines the idea that you know who stole the book; the defeater that ispresent is not a misleading one.

It is fairly easy to see that the safety condition above is ill-suited toexplain these cases. In order to be able to explain the variations by appeal

to safety, when the mothers testimony has to be checked out, we would haveto be able to find a substantial number of nearby worlds in which your beliefis arrived at in the same way but is false. And when the mothers testimonydoesnt need to be taken seriously, those worlds would have to turn out tobe worlds that are not nearby. I see no plausibility whatsoever to the ideathat the concept of nearness could have such implications.

So I think optimism about solving the Gettier problem by an appealto safety is not justified. That doesnt show, of course, that there isntan important kind of luck that is eliminated by safety. It only shows thatthe division into veritic and reflective luck doesnt elucidate completely the

different tasks facing a theory of knowledge. Whatever kind of luck safetyeliminates, there is still the kind of luck involved in at least some Gettiercases, as well as reflective epistemic luck.

This same point can be pressed by noting the implications of safety forlottery beliefs. If you buy a ticket and believe, because of the odds, that yourticket will lose, you do not know that your ticket will lose even if your beliefis rational and justified. Pritchards safety condition cannot explain why youdo not know. It counts your belief as safe when in nearly all nearby worlds,your belief formed in this way is true. But that condition is met, it wouldseem, if the lottery is large enough. And if the lottery isnt large enough, allwe need to do is to imagine a larger lottery.

Such examples push Pritchard toward the position that the conditional ifbelieved in the same way then true must be true in all nearby worlds, and notjust in nearly all. Such a requirement is troubling from the other direction,however, for it appears to rule out the possibility of statistical knowledge,knowledge we gain about populations from samples of it, a possibility that isthreatened by Pritchards account in another way as well, which is the topicof the next section.

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4 The Possibility of Inductive and Statistical

Knowledge

Pritchards treatment of the safety condition imperils one of its primaryattractions, which is that it seems capable of accounting for the possibilityof inductive and statistical knowledge. The example that stands out in thisrespect is Sosas garbage chute example. In that example, you place yourgarbage in the chute, believing that it will soon be in the basement. Thebelief is safe, though not sensitive, according to Sosa: if the bag got hungup on the way down, youd still believe the same (hence your belief is notsensitive); but if you were to believe that the garbage will soon be in the

basement, youd be right (hence your belief is safe). Sensitivity conditionson knowledge wreak havoc with the possibility of inductive knowledge of thissort, but safety seems capable of doing much better.

Pritchards response to the case eliminates this feature of the safety view,however. He says that whether one knows in this case depends on what hasto be different about the world in order for the bag to get stuck on the waydown. He says,

For instance, it could be that there is a snag on the chute which,as it happens, has never caught any of the trash bags that havebeen sent down. In such a case, although the snagging of the bag

would be a statistically rare occurrence, it would neverthelessbe an event that obtains in a nearby world. . . [and hence] theagent doesnt know that the trash bag is now in the basement. .. . In contrast, a rare possibility could also be one that is far off. . . because a lot would have to be different for this particularbag to get caught on the way down (for example, there wouldhave to be differences to the shaft, the bag would need to fall ina particular way, and so forth) (Pritchard 2005, p. 165).

Pritchard distinguishes here between mere statistical rarity and what wemight call backtracking rarity, rarity that occurs only because somethingabout the actual history leading up to the presence of the bag in the basementwould have to have been different. It is clear that if this difference signals asafety difference that safety will lose the advantage of being able to explaininductive and statistical knowledge. Only when rarity is backtracking raritycan the belief be safe, and it is clear that backtracking rarity is not likely tooccur unless there are deterministic laws of nature to explain why the pastwould have to have been different for the claim in question to be false.

We can see this point more forcefully by considering possible scenariosinvolving miracles. Suppose someone once turned water into wine: does that

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fact imperil the safety of my belief that my glass of water wont become wine

in the next 5 seconds? I should think not, but there is no backtracking rarityinvolved in the occurrence of the miracle in question. In this regard, I think Ihave much knowledge that is not at all dependent on what kinds of miracleshave or have not occurred. Miracles will always involve non-backtrackingrarity, but we dont want to conclude that, in a world in which a miracleof the relevant sort has occurred, I dont know whether, e.g., I can walk onwater.

5 Veritic Luck and the Argument Against In-

ternalism

Perhaps the central controversial thesis of the entire book is Pritchards insis-tence that internalists have to deny closure in order to avoid skepticism. Theargument goes from a phenomenal indistinguishability claim to the denial ofclosure, and here is Pritchards argument:

Primarily, however, the problem is that it is impossible to beinternalistically justified in believing the denials of sceptical hy-potheses. If there is, ex hypothesi, no phenomenological differ-ence available to the subject which could indicate to her thatshe is not a victim of this scenario, then it follows that there isnot going to be anything reflectively available to the subject thatcould suffice to indicate to her that her belief in this antiscepticalproposition is true. In this sense, then, she cannot be internalis-tically justified in believing this proposition, even if her belief istrue (Pritchard 2005, p. 44).

The idea here is to argue from the phenomenal indistinguishability point tothe conclusion that internalistic justification for an antiskeptical conclusioncannot be found. The important question for the success of the argument

is how to get from the indistinguishability point to the conclusion. Here,Pritchard is committed to claiming that if there is no phenomenological dif-ference then there is nothing available to the subject to indicate whethershe is a in the good case or the bad case.

The notion of indication here is an epistemic one, however, so there shouldbe no problem substituting the notion of justification itself in place of thenotion of indication. So the claim is that if the good case and bad case areindistinguishable, then there is nothing available to the individual in questionto justify believing that she is in the good case rather than the bad case.

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This argument doesnt work, however. Standard internalists claim that

even if the evidence in question doesnt guarantee that one is in the goodcase rather than the bad case, it is nonetheless evidence for the everydaypropositions that entail that one is in the good case rather than the badcase. Whether one is in the good case or the bad case, the phenomenalevidence justifies for one the everyday propositions that entail that one isin the actual world rather than in the skeptical scenario. This point is thestandard lesson that internalists urge on the basis of the New Evil DemonProblem, according to which standard externalist theories of justificationmake the mistake of distinguishing between the justificatory status of us andus-in-a-demon-world.

Since our world is indistinguishable from that world, no theory ought todistinguish between the justificatory status of beliefs in those worlds. Yet, ifour evidence justifies the same everyday propositions whether or not one isin a demon world, then there is a basis on which to distinguish the evidentialstatus of everyday propositions from skeptical incompatibles: the everydaypropositions are justified and the skeptical incompatibles are not.

This point plays out in a related way in considering Pritchards rejectionof a two-stage model for defending closure and responding to skepticismoffered independently by John McDowell and Peter Klein. Both authorsreject the view that one must first know that the skeptical hypothesis is false

before coming to know that some everyday proposition is true.Instead, both authors invert this order, allowing that ones ordinary per-ceptual reasons can give one knowledge of (or justification for) everydaypropositions, followed by a deduction of the falsity of a skeptical hypothesisfrom the additional evidence provided by this everyday proposition. We thusget a two-stage response to skepticism, which also allows a defense of closurefor internalists. Stage one involves the reasons relationship between ordinaryperception and everyday propositions. Stage two involves the deduction ofthe falsity of a skeptical hypothesis from the new body of information whichincludes the everyday proposition learned at stage one.

Pritchards objection to McDowells version of this approach is this:

[I]t seems altogether inappropriate to try to support ones be-liefs about the denials of sceptical hypotheses by citing factivereasons about what, for example one sees in ones environment(Pritchard 2005, (p. 237)

Note however that no such citing needs to occur in the two-stage modelabove. The only way to endorse the conclusion that the perceptual evidenceis evidence against the skeptical hypothesis would be to endorse a too-strongclosure principle about reasons, to wit

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Reasons Closure: If R is a reason for S to believe p, and S knows

that p entails q, then R is a reason for S to believe q.

Some internalists may endorse Reasons Closure, but it is not a very plausibleprinciple. My perceptual experience is evidence that I have hands, but it isnot evidence that I am not being deceived by an evil demon. Not only isReasons Closure too strong, but it is explicitly rejected by Klein, so it wouldbe inappropriate to presuppose it in offering an objection to Kleins twostagemodel for preserving closure. Regarding Kleins defense of closure, Pritchardsays,

[T]here is no plausible sense in which there is a sufficient evi-

dence base which could support an agents belief in the relevantconsequent proposition (the denial of the radical sceptical hy-pothesis), regardless of whether the agent is able to adduce theantecedent proposition as additional evidence in favour of thisbelief (Pritchard 2005, p. 45).

This argument presupposes that the following closure principle is false:

Competent Deduction Closure: If S justifiably believes that p onthe basis of internal evidence for p and competently deduces qfrom p and comes to believe p on the basis of this deduction,

then S justifiably believes that q.

The justification for believing the falsity of the skeptical hypothesis arises,on Kleins view, in a way that satisfies internalist strictures, since deductivereasoning meets any reasonable internalist requirement for justification. It ishard to see why someone would accept Pritchards closure principle (that ifyou know p and know that p entails q, you know q) and reject CompetentDeduction Closure without already having demonstrated that internalistscannot or do not accept closure.

If we look closely at what Pritchard says against Kleins proposal, we candecipher, I think, what the argument is supposed to be. First, it is clearthat Pritchard thinks that the original perceptual evidence for any everydayproposition does not constitute evidence against the skeptical hypothesis.The reason for such a conclusion is presumably the underdetermination prin-ciple, according to which one has good evidence for p only if ones evidencefor p is evidence which favors p over claims known to be incompatible withp.

But the notion of favoring here is ambiguous in a way related to the NewEvil Demon Problem cited earlier. Suppose that R is a reason for believing p,but not a reason concerning q. Then R favors p over q. So if q is a skeptical

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hypothesis known to be incompatible p, and p is an everyday proposition, R

constitutes evidence that favors p over q. It favors p over q because it is areason for believing p, and isnt a reason, one way or the other, about q. Thisis the account of favoring that internalists can employ when defending theclaim that we and our evil demon compatriots are equally justified in whatwe believe (even if we are likely to be correct and they are overwhelminglylikely to be mistaken).

In order to claim that R doesnt favor p over q, Pritchard needs a strongerreading of favoring. In particular, he must hold that R doesnt favor p over qunless R is also a reason against q, i.e., a reason in favor ofq. Such a readingof favoring, however, is precisely that encoded in the too-strong Reasons

Closure principle. Because Reasons Closure is too strong, no internalist needadopt the stronger reading of favoring, and on the weaker reading of favoring,the two-stage model offered by McDowell and Klein remains untouched byPritchards objections.

6 Conclusion

I have focused here on various complaints about the book, but it would bea mistake to conclude from this fact that the book is not a piece of stellarepistemology. It is such a piece, and the stimulation to disagreement that

it provides is part of the reason why it is such a good book. It is requiredreading for anyone working in the theory of knowledge or epistemology morebroadly construed.

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References

Pritchard, D. (2005). Epistemic Luck. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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