There is one common thing among lotteries from all over the world: there is
small number of winning tickets and considerably bigger number of losing
tickets. Therefore, the probability that a ticket wins a lottery is quite
low, usually so low that we think that it is almost sure the ticket loses.
But, we would never say that we know that a ticket will lose, until we see
results of the lottery in, for example, some newspapers. And the probability
of newspapers making a mistake does not seem to affect our knowledge claims.
But why is that, since newspapers could make a mistake more often than a
ticket wins? This question presents trouble for fallibilism, which claim that
S could know that p, even when the probability that p is less than 1.
Contextualist theories give their typical brand of solution: we have a change
of context between the two cases, and in one case standard for knowledge
claims are higher than the standard in the other case. Because of that, one
can know that S lost the lottery when she reads it in newspapers. In this
paper, I will present analysis of the lottery paradox, and two types of
epistemic contexutalism: simple conversational contextualism and inferential
contextualism. I will also present two of the most popular solution based on
simple conversational contextualism, made by Lewis and Cohen. Finally, I will
introduce some problems for such solutions, and show that the problems could
solved if we apply strategy and explanation of inferential contextualism,
type of contextualism proposed by Michael Williams.