How Data Helps
Suppose someone enters a raffle and wins an encyclopedia, then reads various of its entries, correcting a lot of their earlier misapprehensions. But except we're to capitulate to radical skepticism, plainly this type of luck, too, ought to be considered suitable with data. A third method to modal circumstances on knowledge worthy of mention is the requirement that for a topic to know that p, she must rule out all “relevant alternatives” to p. Significant early proponents of this view embody Stine 1976, Goldman 1976, and Dretske 1981. The thought behind this method to knowledge is that for a topic to know that p, she must have the power to “rule out” competing hypotheses to p—but that only some subset of all not-p possibilities are “relevant” for knowledge attributions. If so, may that belief really be unjustified, irrespective of that the group’s members take it to be justified? This would be so, if justification is a type of actual reliability (section 5.a) in being appropriate