Hawthorne’s Lottery Puzzle and the Nature of Belief

Abstract

John Hawthorne has maintained that we cannot be said to be epistemically justified in believing propositions simply on the basis of their having a very high degree of probability. He urges that this view has strong intuitive support, and he buttresses that support with considerations having to do with the cognitive, conversational, and practical roles of the concept of knowledge. This chapter is critical of Hawthorne’s claim, its alleged intuitive support, and the buttressing argumentation. It also makes positive suggestions about the conversational constraints that determine whether a proposition is assertible, the Gricean constraints on assertion, the nature of epistemic possibility, the role of knowledge in practical reasoning, and the ways in which degrees of belief interact with deductive inference.

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