Epistemological accounts that make use of a safety condition on knowledge, historically, face serious problems regarding beliefs that are necessarily true. This is because necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, and so such beliefs can be safe even when the bases for the beliefs are epistemically problematic. The existence of such problematically safe beliefs would undermine a major motivation for the condition itself: the ability to evaluate how well a belief tracks the truth. This paper argues that incorporating impossible worlds into the evaluation of beliefs solves this problem, but only if the relevant account of impossible worlds entails that many impossible worlds are incredibly similar to the actual world. Further, the paper argues that, as a result of including impossible worlds, some philosophical beliefs are unsafe, and many more are potentially unsafe. But, it argues, even if this is the case, we can still make philosophical progress.

中文翻译：

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不可能的世界和哲学信仰的安全

从历史上看，利用知识安全条件的认识论说明在必然为真的信念方面面临严重问题。这是因为必要真理在所有可能的世界中都是真实的，因此即使这些信念的基础在认识论上存在问题，这种信念也可以是安全的。这种有问题的安全信念的存在会破坏这种情况本身的主要动机：评估信念跟踪真相的能力。本文认为，将不可能世界纳入信念评估可以解决这个问题，但前提是对不可能世界的相关说明需要许多不可能世界与现实世界极其相似。此外，该论文认为，由于包含了不可能的世界，一些哲学信仰是不安全的，还有更多可能不安全。但是，它认为，即使是这样，我们仍然可以在哲学上取得进步。