Volume 75, 2018
Theories of Knowledge and Epistemology
HsinMei Lin
Pages 127-131
Knowledge with Luck
What is the kind of relation between knowledge and luck? In the past decades or so, many philosophers have been discussing the Gettier-style counterexamples in order to search for the nature of knowledge. But, they have always faced the problem of epistemic luck. What do we need to avoid the luck problem? Let knowledge be certainly true. If we do, what is the value of knowledge? In the contrary, if we couldn’t avoid the “lucky truth” in our beliefs or propositions, would we lose knowledge which we thought we possessed? I don’t think so. Because the goal of human knowledge is to make our life be better. Knowledge is a direction. We would not like to lose all of knowledge. However, the luck problem is always there. So, what can we do? Should we keep going and look for the nature of knowledge? Or, maybe we should accept the possibility of some lucky elements in our knowledge, and let justification continue to play certain role which can still make human beliefs highly probable true.