What is knowledge? : Epistemic Luck is NOT knowledge

John and Sandy were carrying bags of salt across a desert. One night John threw a small handful of salt into the campfire; the salt makes a cracking sound. John then said that they should not go tomorrow, because it was going to rain. Sandy did not believe it. Next morning, there was no sign of rain in the sky, so Sandy continued the trip alone. Shortly after Sandy left, a rain began; it washes away all the salt Sandy carried.

At the end of the story--as most stories for child under ten always do-- it tells the reader why the sound of the salt predicts a rain: the high humidity in the air, an indication of the coming rain, makes the salt wet, and the wet salt makes a cracking sound in the fire.

If I were Sandy, I wouldn’t believe John's words either. For me, the sound of the salt in the fire is just like the image on the crystal ball that a wizard sees. I would also deny that Sandy knew the rain, for it seems to me a random luck for John to correctly predict the weather considering that even now weather forecast is often inaccurate.

From an epistemic perspective, philosophers would also deny that John knew the rain. They would claim that at that night John only had the belief that the rain would come, and the rainfall next day turns John's belief to be true. But a belief's turning out to be true can be just due to luck, which epistemologists refer as the epistemic luck. In order for a true belief to amount to knowledge, justification is required. Though it is uncontroversial that an epistemic luck is incompatible with knowledge, there is a huge disagreement over the nature of justification and consequently over the nature of knowledge. Let us simply conclude that without justification, what one can have is only a belief, and an instance of the belief turning to be true is an epistemic luck.

We therefore exclude a considerable amount of information in our head from the range of what we know. Religious beliefs are not knowledge. Most daily predictions, most sayings about human nature, and understanding of abstract concepts that has no exact definitions, such as love, life, and success, are better to be classified as beliefs.

The fact that one mistakes belief for knowledge alone does not matter too much; what matters is the feeling attached with "one knows", when, in fact, he does not.