Anti-risk Epistemology

What is knowledge? It seems to be a big question in philosophy for thousands of years,and still be a widely debated issue in contemporary epistemology.According to the tranditional analysis,knowledge is justified true belief,but it is challenged by Edmund Gettier that there seem to be cases of justified true belief that still fall short of knowledge.This challenge is what commonly referred to as the “Gettier problem” and many epistemologists have undertaken to respond it.One lesson illustrated by Gettier problem is that even true beliefs that are justified can nevertheless be epistemically lucky in a way inconsistent with knowledge.Accoding to this diagnosis,the essence of the Gettier problem is the luck problem.An appropriate account of knowledge needs to specify the sense in which knowledge is incompatible with luck and how to be satisfied.This “luck problem” of knowledge is become a popular topic among epistemologists in recent years.While there are some contemporary epistemological approachs—reliabilism,virtue epistemology and anti-luck epistemology—manage to show how knowledge excludes luck,but no one is successfully addressing the luck problem.It is argued that the failure of dealing with the luck problem is largely as a result of the failure to catch an acceptable notion of luck.In this paper,I try to give an account of luck based on the concept of “risk”,and offer an “anti-risk epistemology”—knowledge is true belief held in a low-risk fashion—through the risk account of luck which can cope with the Gettier problem and specify how knowledge is inconsistent with luck.