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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 OpenAlex
Bruno Guindon

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.901
Threshold uncertainty score0.684

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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