Review of Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Luck

Duncan Pritchard’s Epistemic Luck is a wide-ranging, nicely written, and generally masterful treatment of the concept of epistemic luck and its relevance to contemporary epistemology. Its central focus is what Pritchard calls the “epistemic luck platitude,” which is the claim that knowledge excludes luck. This claim is widely (if largely uncritically) accepted among epistemologists; and yet an unqualified endorsement of it is problematic, for there are many putative instances of knowledge in which an agent’s reaching the truth is in some sense a matter of luck (e.g., the archeologist who “happens” upon an important find or the detective who stumbles across a critical clue). Pritchard’s aim is to clarify the sense in which knowledge excludes luck and to consider the resulting implications for the theory of knowledge.