Lotteries, Knowledge, and Rational Belief Essays on the Lottery Paradox

We talk and think about our beliefs both in a categorical (yes/no) and in a graded way. How do the two kinds of belief hang together? The most straightforward answer is that we believe something categorically if we believe it to a high enough degree. But this seemingly obvious, near-platitudinous claim is known to give rise to a paradox commonly known as the 'lottery paradox' – at least when it is coupled with some further seeming near-platitudes about belief. How to resolve that paradox has been a matter of intense philosophical debate for over fifty years. This volume offers a collection of newly commissioned essays on the subject, all of which provide compelling reasons for rethinking many of the fundamentals of the debate.

Introduction Igor Douven; 1. Rational belief and statistical evidence: blame, bias, and the law Dana Nelkin; 2. Knowledge attributions and lottery cases: a review and new evidence John Turri; 3. The psychological dimension of the lottery paradox Jennifer Nagel; 4. Three puzzles about lotteries Julia Staffel; 5. Four arguments for denying that lottery beliefs are justified Martin Smith; 6. Rethinking the lottery paradox: a dual processing perspective Igor Douven and Shira Elqayam; 7. Rational belief in lottery- and preface-situations: impossibility results and possible solutions Gerhard Schurz; 8. Stability and the lottery paradox Hannes Leitgeb; 9. The lottery, the preface and epistemic rule consequentialism Christoph Kelp and Francesco Praolini; 10. Beliefs, probabilities, and their coherent correspondence Kevin Kelly and Hanti Lin; 11. The relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs: a general impossibility theorem Franz Dietrich and Christian List; Bibliography; Index.

Igor Douven is a CNRS Research Professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. His essays have appeared in numerous major philosophy and cognitive science journals, and he is the author of The Epistemology of Indicative Conditionals (Cambridge, 2016).