Abstract
In this paper, I propose that one can have reason to choose a few tickets in a very large lottery and arbitrarily believe of them that they will lose. Such a view fits nicely within portions of Lehrer’s theory of rational acceptance. Nonetheless, the reasonability of believing a lottery ticket will lose should not be taken to constitute the kind of justification required in an analysis of knowledge. Moreover, one should not accept what one takes to have a low chance of being true. Accordingly, one should take care not to believe of too many tickets that they are to lose. Finally, while arbitrariness is no absolute barrier to epistemic reasonability, one may not be able to believe that one’s lottery ticket will lose if one cannot regard oneself as knowing it will lose.
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Notes
Interestingly, Lehrer (1983) considers the possibility of reasonable arbitrariness in a novel interpretation of Wilfrid Sellars’s empirical acceptance rules. While not endorsing a rejection of a symmetry principle, Lehrer finds that such a position is “justified by systematic epistemic objectives and is in no way ad hoc (…)” (Lehrer 1983, p. 469).
In (Ross 2003), I responded to Lehrer’s earlier argument (of the first edition of Theory of knowledge), framed in the language of beating a competing claim proposed by a skeptic. Essentially the same argument is reformulated in (2000), and thus I update the argument to use his later theory here.
Hawthorne and Lasonen-Arnio (2009) have to complicate Low Chance considerably in order to accommodate the possibility of knowing contingent a priori truths having a low objective chance of being true. These details need not concern us here.
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Ross, G. Reconsidering the lessons of the lottery for knowledge and belief. Philos Stud 161, 37–46 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9939-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9939-y