Abstract

The consensus is that a normal person, regarding a normal fair lottery, under ordinary, realistic conditions, can’t know ahead of time that a given ticket is a loser. I disagree, sort of. Suppose you learn that a lottery involves extreme probabilities. You also hear, perhaps via the lottery’s website, that someone who bought just one ticket got the winning number. In response to the acquisition of those two pieces of knowledge, you come to think that either the announcement is false (no one who bought a single ticket won), or it's true but either something superhuman was going on or the lottery was fixed. I say: if your belief is true, then it amounts to knowledge. That is, you can know that the lottery’s outcome won’t be an ordinary case of someone with one ticket winning a fair lottery, with no superhuman assistance.