Lotteries and justification

Christoph Kelp

pp. 1233-1244

in: Sune Holm, John Basl (eds), Teleological organisation, Synthese 194 (4), 2017.

Abstract

The lottery paradox shows that the following three individually highly plausible theses are jointly incompatible: (i) highly probable propositions are justifiably believable, (ii) justified believability is closed under conjunction introduction, (iii) known contradictions are not justifiably believable. This paper argues that a satisfactory solution to the lottery paradox must reject (i) as versions of the paradox can be generated without appeal to either (ii) or (iii) and proposes a new solution to the paradox in terms of a novel account of justified believability.