Principle of Luck: If a person is right as a matter of luck, he lacks knowledge.
Does the Principle of Luck enable us to explain why the Gettier examples are not instances of knowledge or does it lead to paradox?
To see how the Principle of Luck may be applied, recall Gettier's Case 1: ...Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith's evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:
(e)
The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true) Proposition (d) turned out to be false and the Gettier problem resulted. In discussing Case 1, it was observed that Smith was right about (e) for the wrong reasons: it was an accident or a matter of luck. 2 By the Principle of Luck, we must deny Smith 'entitlement for knowledge'.
Suppose that (d) turned out to be true -would Smith then have knowledge or would the Principle of Luck overrule Smith's knowledge claim? To illustrate this difficulty, compare Case I with a parallel situation, Case I*: ...Smith* has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
Jones* is the man who will get the job, and Jones* has ten coins in his pocket. Smith*'s evidence for (d*) might be that the president of the company