Ancient Philosophy

Volume 42, Issue 1, Spring 2022

Epistemic Luck in Stoicism

The Stoics held that knowledge depends on the special kind of true appearances they called ‘apprehensive.’ Sextus Empiricus reports that they also thought that some true appearances are not apprehensive—and hence unable to lead to knowledge—because they are true merely ‘externally and by chance’, which suggests that the Stoics were aware of the problem of epistemic luck. Unfortunately, Sextus does not tell us what kind of appearances the Stoics thought are true by chance, and why. I argue that the appearances in question here are imaginations, and propose an explanation why the Stoics, who defined chance in terms of hidden causes, would have thought that imaginations can only be true by chance. The explanation stems from their view that the essential characteristic of imagination is that it leaves the actual cause of its representational content hidden from the subject.