Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Knowing you won't win the lottery

The following seems true:

  1. If you don't have enough evidence to know p, and your evidence for q is poorer than your evidence for p, then you don't have enough evidence to know q.
But if a lottery is large enough, then my probabilistic evidence that I won't win can be better than my evidence that I am now typing. I could be mistaken about being awake, after all. But I know I am typing, so I have enough evidence to know that I am typing. Hence, by (1), I would have enough evidence to know that I won't win the lottery. So in lottery cases, for large enough lotteries, on probabilistic grounds alone one has enough evidence to know that one won't win. But when one has enough evidence to know, and everything else goes right, then one knows. It would be very strange if the other things couldn't possibly go right. So one can know that one won't win the lottery, on probabilistic grounds alone.

1 comment:

Jason Thibodeau said...

It seems to me that the fact that I know that I am now typing does not imply that I have enough evidence that I am now typing. If I believe it in a properly basic way, then I don't need evidence in order to know it, do I?