Externalism, skepticism and epistemic luck

Abstract

This paper deals with the concept of epistemic luck and its place within wider philosophical debates on knowledge and skepticism. Philosophers involved in these debates share an intuition that knowledge excludes luck. Starting from Prichard’s modal definition of luck and his distinction between two varieties of epistemic luck, namely veridic and reflective, the paper explores the internalist and externalist prospects for avoiding epistemic luck and skepticism. Externalism seems to be capable of both coping with the Gettier-type cases and eliminating at least veridic epistemic luck by introducing the so-called safety condition for knowledge. As such, it also responds to some versions of skepticism as the safety condition explains how it is possible to acquire knowledge without proving that the well known skeptical alternatives (e.g. a brain-in-a-vat) are false. Thus, even though it does not eliminate the reflective epistemic luck or meta-epistemological skeptical challenge, the externalist approach to knowledge looks more plausible than the internalist, especially because it may allow an internalist justification to play its due role in acquiring knowledge.

Keywords

• knowledge
• skepticism
• veridic epistemic luck
• reflective epistemic luck
• internalism
• externalism