Blogging My Way Through _Epistemic Luck_

Rich Feldman and I (and Jon Matheson and perhaps two other people) are reading through Duncan Pritchard's _Epistemic Luck_ which is chock-a-block full of important questions and provocative and creative answers.

We were discussing a kind of counterexample to the luck analysis of belief (see next post) and I suggested that though we agreed that Pritchard's conception of luck did not do the job, I was still hopeful that a correct analysis of luck might still be able to pull it off. I advocated the Lucky Lemma view of gettierization--that being gettierized was a matter of it being pure luck that one of your lemmas in the inference to the knowledgeless justified true belief was a useful falsehood.

Rich said he didn't see why any further explanation was needed, wasn't it enough that the inference essentially depended on a falsehood. I said I thought that it was much more clear explanatorily if the picture went like this: Knowledge entails credit, credit entails not-luck, so knowledge entails not-luck. This, I suggested, would make it clear why depending on a "lucky lemma" was knowledge-destroying.

He then challenged me to say in just what sense is it lucky that I used a useful falsehood in my inference in the Gettier case. He still thought that it was sufficiently clear that it wasn't knowledge due to essential dependence on a falsehood and that bringing in luck just cluttered the picture. It still seems to me that luck is illuminating here and I, of course, want to know just why essentially depending on a falsehood destroys knowledge, since that's been my response to the Gettier cases from the time I became aware of them and if this luck thing doesn't work out I'll still need an answer to that question.

So there are two questions, either one I'd like an answer to.

Question 1: *Why* does essentially depending on a falsehood destroy knowledge?

Question 2: *How* is using a useful falsehood lucky?

I'll be trying to address the latter question post after next.