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Record W4406721302 · doi:10.1017/epi.2024.35

Luck and normative achievements: Let not safety be our guide

2025· article· en· W4406721302 on OpenAlexaff
Bruno Guindon

Bibliographic record

VenueEpisteme · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLuckNormativePsychologyPhilosophySociologyEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract It is a well-worn platitude that knowledge excludes luck. According to anti-luck virtue epistemology, making good on the anti-luck platitude requires an explicit anti-luck condition along the lines of safety : S knows that p only if S’s true belief that p could not have easily been mistaken. This paper offers an independent, virtue epistemological argument against the claim that safety is a necessary condition of knowledge, one that adequately captures the anti-luck platitude. The argument proceeds by way of analogy. I focus on two paradigmatic kinds of normative achievements that also exclude luck: (i) – having a doxastically justified belief and (ii) – performing a morally worthy action. I then show that while (i) and (ii) exclude luck, they are nevertheless susceptible to what I call “modal luck.” I then move on to show that knowledge, or at least some instance of knowledge, is a normative achievement, which I claim provides strong reasons to expect that knowledge is also susceptible to modal luck. Since safety entails that knowledge is incompatible with modal luck, the argument provides strong reasons to reject safety as a necessary condition of knowledge.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.008
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.008
Threshold uncertainty score0.044

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0080.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0040.048
Scholarly communication0.0060.009
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0040.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.049
GPT teacher head0.305
Teacher spread0.256 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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