I agree that “right for the wrong reasons” is an indictment of your epsitemic process: it says that you made a prediction that turned out correctly, but that actually you just got lucky. What is important for making future predictions is being able to pick the option that is most likely, since “being lucky” is not a repeatable strategy.
The moral for making better decisions is that we should not praise people who predict prima facie unlikely outcomes—without presenting a strong rationale for doing so—but who then happen to be correct. Amongst those who have made unusual but successful predictions we have to distinguish people who are reliably capable of insight from those who were just lucky. Pick your contrarians carefully.
There’s a more complex case where your predictions are made for the “wrong” reasons, but they are still reliably correct. Say you have a disorder that makes you feel nauseous in proportion to the unlikeliness of an option, and you habitually avoid options that make you nauseous. In that case, it seems more that you’ve hit upon a useful heuristic than anything else. Gettier cases aren’t really like this because they are usually more about luck than about reliable heuristics that aren’t explicitly “rational”
I agree that “right for the wrong reasons” is an indictment of your epsitemic process: it says that you made a prediction that turned out correctly, but that actually you just got lucky. What is important for making future predictions is being able to pick the option that is most likely, since “being lucky” is not a repeatable strategy.
The moral for making better decisions is that we should not praise people who predict prima facie unlikely outcomes—without presenting a strong rationale for doing so—but who then happen to be correct. Amongst those who have made unusual but successful predictions we have to distinguish people who are reliably capable of insight from those who were just lucky. Pick your contrarians carefully.
There’s a more complex case where your predictions are made for the “wrong” reasons, but they are still reliably correct. Say you have a disorder that makes you feel nauseous in proportion to the unlikeliness of an option, and you habitually avoid options that make you nauseous. In that case, it seems more that you’ve hit upon a useful heuristic than anything else. Gettier cases aren’t really like this because they are usually more about luck than about reliable heuristics that aren’t explicitly “rational”