The Appearance of Ignorance: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Volume 2 by DeRose Keith

Author:DeRose, Keith [Неизвестный]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-01-11T22:00:00+00:00

5.12. That There is a Chance of Winning is the Whole Point of the Lottery!

Lotteries may be extremely reliable producers of losing tickets, but it’s not as if they aim to produce only losers. It’s important to the whole enterprise that there be the odd winner. That’s a feature; not a bug, as they say. Might that be important to the appearance of ignorance we are trying to diagnose? Here we reach a certain kind of proposed explanation that some readers may have been inclined toward ever since our puzzle was presented in Section 5.1. I won’t spell out this explanation in full; I suspect that it can be completed in various significantly different ways. But the various explanations I have in mind are all based on the observation that, with respect to the belief that one has lost the lottery, the chance that this belief is wrong—i.e., the chance that one is a winner—is intimately connected to the whole point of entering the lottery. By contrast, in the newspaper case, while there is a chance that your belief that the Bulls won is mistaken, this chance is not similarly connected to any of your goals. It’s just an unwelcome and unintended side-effect of or bug in the process by which you come to have your information.

The newspaper lottery in Section 5.7 may have reinforced this suggestion in some readers’ minds. In that new case, though we’ve set up what in many ways is a lottery-like situation, we retain knowledge and assertability. Why? Because, the suggestion under consideration goes, having a “loser” newspaper is not any part of the point of the new procedure. It is still just an undesired side-effect. Knowledge and assertability in this new case match that of the old, regular newspaper case, and diverge from the regular lottery case, because, like the regular newspaper case and unlike the regular lottery case, the chance of your being wrong in our new case is not correctly connected to any relevant goals.

But the reflections of Section 5.8 should show us why such a suggestion cannot provide the explanation we’ve been seeking. It is only when we focus on your belief that the Bulls won that you seem to know and can assert in the newspaper lottery case. But if we instead focus on your belief that you don’t have the “loser” newspaper, you seem to lack knowledge and assertability. Here, the chance that you are wrong (i.e., the chance that your copy is the “loser”) does seem to prevent you from knowing, despite both its minuteness and its buggy lack of a connection with any relevant goals.

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