Saving safety from counterexamples
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Saving safety from counterexamples Thomas Grundmann1
Received: 13 April 2017 / Accepted: 3 January 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract In this paper I will offer a comprehensive defense of the safety account of knowledge against counterexamples that have been recently put forward. In Sect. 2, I will discuss different versions of safety, arguing that a specific variant of methodrelativized safety is the most plausible. I will then use this specific version of safety to respond to counterexamples in the recent literature. In Sect. 3, I will address alleged examples of safe beliefs that still constitute Gettier cases. In Sect. 4, I will discuss alleged examples of unsafe (and in this sense lucky) knowledge. In Sect. 5, I will address alleged cases of safe belief that do not constitute knowledge for non-Gettier reasons. My overall goal is to show that there are no successful counterexamples to robust anti-luck epistemology and to highlight some major presuppositions of my reply. Keywords Knowledge · Gettier cases · Safety · Anti-luck epistemology
1 Introduction When, at the end of the last millennium, Ernest Sosa came up with the intriguing idea of defining knowledge as safe belief, i.e. true belief that could not easily have been false,1 a real breakthrough in the theory of knowledge was imminent. The safety account turned out to be superior to many competing accounts of knowledge. In contrast to 1 See Sosa (1999) for the introduction of the term. The idea is already present in Sosa (1996) and
Sainsbury (1997). Williamson (2000) is another early proponent of the safety account, although he does not believe that one can give a non-circular definition of knowledge as safe belief.
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Thomas Grundmann [email protected] University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
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Synthese
the traditional JTB account, it licenses the correct verdicts about standard Gettier cases. For example, when one luckily deduces a true conclusion from a false premise, as in the original Gettier cases, this could easily have resulted in a false belief, so that one therefore lacks safe belief. In contrast to knowledge understood as certain belief, the safety account avoids massive skeptical consequences.2 This is because our methods need not rule out deception in very distant demon-worlds in order to guarantee truth in nearby worlds, as is required by safety. The safety account also seems to fare better than the main alternative modal account of knowledge, which understands knowledge as sensitive belief, i.e. true belief that would not have been believed if what is actually believed were false. Whereas safe belief is closed under competent deduction, sensitive belief seems to violate reasonable versions of the epistemic closure principle.3 Safety also wins the day when it comes to Gettier-like cases in which, as in the barn-façade case, the true belief depends on being lucky within an epistemically unfavorable environment. Consider Henry’s true belief that over there is a barn when he
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