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Reassessing Lucky Understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2022

Miloud Belkoniene Open the ORCID record for Miloud Belkoniene [Opens in a new window]
Miloud Belkoniene*
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
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Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Knowledge is widely regarded as being incompatible with epistemic luck, but according to several philosophers, the same does not hold for understanding. This paper examines to what extent understanding is vulnerable to epistemic luck. After discussing the weaknesses of some of the cases that have been offered to support the conclusion that understanding tolerates environmental epistemic luck, I turn to a more recent one offered in favour of the opposite conclusion. I argue that this case does not manage to establish that understanding is vulnerable to environmental luck; this even if the fact that understanding comes in degrees is taken into account. Finally, I examine the vulnerability of understanding to intervening luck – the type of luck present in classical Gettier cases – and conclude that when such luck is present, one's understanding is necessarily sub-optimal; a conclusion that does not hold, according to what I argue, when it comes to environmental luck.

Keywords

Understandingknowledgeepistemic luckgraspingjustification
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 513 - 527
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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