Filtering and Generating: Two Roles for Method-Specification in Epistemic-Possibility Anti-Luck Conditions

Abstract

Method-relative modal conditions on knowledge are standardly assessed against a similarity ordering over possible worlds fixed independently of the method: the specification restricts which worlds are quantified over, while the metric is given by the world-space. I distinguish this filtering role from a second role, in which the specification does not select among independently ordered items but anchors the ordering itself. The distinction is operative and unnamed in Collin's (2018) epistemic-possibility framework, whose Revised Safety-1 principle discharges both roles at once: a same-way clause filters the scenarios quantified over, while a nearby-star clause re-anchors closeness to a partial scenario constituted by the specification. Collin offers a pure-filter alternative on the same page and treats the two as interchangeable repairs. I argue that the generating role is what makes the framework's unfixed specification consequential in a way the familiar generality problem is not. Applying the framework's own addition–divergence metric across the four cases in which source provenance bears on the verdict, I show that provenance falls outside the specification in three and inside it in the fourth, with no stated criterion governing the difference, and that regularizing the placement yields a dilemma: uniform exclusion loses the textbook verdict, uniform inclusion loses Penelope. Three repairs are examined; each relocates the underdetermination, and only the third preserves the extension, at the price of a second circularity. Rodríguez (2026) applies the generality problem to the similarity relation itself and comes nearest to the present point without reaching it.