JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH VOLUME 34, 2009 I THE LOTTERY PUZZLE AND PRITCHARD’S SAFETY ANALYSIS OF KNOWLEDGE MARK McEVOY HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY ABSTRACT: The safety analysis of knowledge, due to Duncan Pritchard, has it that for all contingent propositions, p, S knows that p iff S believes that p, p is true, and (the “safety principle”) in most nearby worlds in which S forms his belief in the same way as in the actual world, S believes that p only if p is true. Among the other virtues claimed by Pritchard for this view is its supposed ability to solve a version of the lottery puzzle. In this paper, I argue that the safety analysis of knowledge in fact fails to solve the lottery puzzle. I also argue that a revised ver- sion of the safety principle recently put forward by Pritchard fares no better. n a number of recent publications Duncan Pritchard has outlined and de- fended what he calls the safety analysis of knowledge. 1 According to this view, for all contingent propositions, p, S knows that p iff S believes that p, p is true, and (the “safety principle”): (S1) In most nearby worlds in which S forms his belief in the same way as in the actual world, S believes that p only if p is true (Pritchard 2005, 156). 2 This is an externalist analysis of knowledge, which can perhaps best be understood as a descendant of the tracking account of knowledge, proposed by Nozick and Dretske (though there are, as we shall see, signiicant differences between Prit- chard’s proposal and the tracking analyses of Nozick and Dretske). 3 While I am in broad sympathy with Pritchard’s externalist approach, I do not think that his analysis solves all of the problems he believes it to; speciically I ind the safety analysis inadequate to a version of the lottery puzzle which Pritchard believes it can solve. In this paper, following exposition of the main points of, and motivation for, the safety analysis, I shall show that it does not solve this version of the puzzle.