Anti-luck Approaches And Safety Of Knowledge

Contemporary some important debates in epistemology starts from Gettier problems. In Gettier cases, the agent acquired knowledge in a certain lucky way and the belief is justified and true. However we do not think that the agent acquire the knowledge. Philosophers generally tend to admit that put the epistemic luck exclude the knowledge to guarantee safety belief, getting the cognitive success.The purpose of this paper is to illustrate three access of safety knowledge on the basis of understanding luck and epistemic luck, which three is anti-luck epistemology, virtue epistemology and the theory of modal knowledge safety.Firstly, after make sense of epistemic luck, the anti-luck epistemology adds an anti-luck condition for knowledge that includes two theories:safety theory and sensitivity theory. The formal is developed on the later. Sensitivity theory adds a sensitivity condition, that is S must track the truth of p. This condition can solve some Gettier problems, but pay a heavy price. Safety theory put forward a safety condition to exclude cognitive luck. Which is only when the belief of p is true, S will believe that p. The safety theory can solve some Gettier problems. However, the epistemologists tend to think that this condition cannot exclude all epistemic luck, just because of agent’s ability work abnormally.Second is virtue epistemology as the access to excluding epistemic luck. It works from the agent’s cognitive ability. This paper analyzes strong virtue and weak virtue in virtue epistemology. After that, it is that this two could exclude part of epistemic luck but not all singly. A new solution is combine the safety condition with the ability condition which is from virtue epistemology to form a new approach, anti-luck virtue epistemology, hoping to solve the problem which cannot be solved individually. Unfortunately, this conjunction is useless.Thirdly, a way to make sense of luck is modal account. Through investigate the connection of belief and fact in possible worlds to judge whether the belief is safety or not.However, there are some cases where agent’s cognitive ability works normally and the belief satisfies safety condition, agent get no knowledge. This is because cognitive modal theory suffers from the environmental epistemic luck when justified knowledge safety. From the author, the modal account for luck is incomplete, to say the least, it cannot solve the problem arising from environmental epistemic luck.