Dretskean Sensitivity Wins the Lottery!

One major strand of post-Gettier epistemology concentrates on shoring up the connection between belief and truth by postulating a condition that includes a modal requirement. This approach abandons the traditional emphasis on reasons. A second major strand maintains the focus on reasons, aiming to distinguish those that are sufficient for knowledge from those that are not. The first strand has generated an endless parade of counterexamples. Some version of the second strand may be true but insufficiently informative. For example, perhaps knowledge really is undefeated justified true belief, but what is a genuine defeater, and what is justification? An early entrant in the post-Gettier competition, Fred Dretske, proposed a modal requirement that ties reasons, not belief, to the truth, thus incorporating key components of both strands. Drawing solely on resources in Dretske’s presentation, I develop his notion of conclusive reasons in an account of knowledge that I call reasons-based Dretskean sensitivity (RDS), which resolves most, if not all, of the major problems afflicting its wayward cousin, Nozickean sensitivity, and indeed many other epistemological difficulties. This paper lays out the RDS resolution of Hawthorne’s lottery puzzle.