forum 5: week of 6 Feb. Hawthorne and lotteries

I feel like there is a difference between the example of winning a lottery and having a heart attach or inheriting money from a dead family member and I am going to explain why? He uses the safari example and he says because i know i will not have enough money to go on the safari then he knows that he will not win a lottery. And since no one can know this then he can NOT know that he will not have enough money to go on the safari. In fact he MAY win the lottery and go on the safari. See I don't think someone who has purchased a lottery ticket can actually say they KNOW they will not will in because they MAY and hence they cannot make conclusion about this which are related to winning the ticket. (like going away on a safari). What i mean is that a person therefore cannot know that they will or will not have money to go on a safari if they have bought a ticket for a lottery. However i don't think it is the same with the heart attach situation. If i plan on going away to the safari tomorrow I can SAY that regardless of the fact that i may have a heart attack and actually not go. Because in the position which i was in when i made that assertion i have every right and reason for making it and KNOWING it. If we consider all the possibilities and things that could happen to prevent our knowledge then we would not have knowledge of anything. Because even the zoologist could in fact be deceive if someone had drugged him or if someone was just that good at disguising a mule. So the state you are in when u make an assertion of knowledge matters. If you have no reason to think you will have a heart attack tom or no reason to think it is a mule you can say you know....or at least you are in a better position than the person who has bought a lottery ticket because that person in their present situation that they are about to make the assertion that they will not go on the safari in fact knows they have bought a ticket so they must keep the in might and therefore cannot concluded they will NOT will or will not Go on the safari. In order to say you know something you must consider all the facts present to you NOW. One can never predict the future so anything is possible but i think we can say we know things (if nothing out of the ordinary happens-based on our reasons) and later turn out to be wrong. But if we were wrong because there were facts which we didn't consider and should have and if we did would not have believed that then i don't think we can say that we in fact did know that-we did NOT know that. Hope that makes some sense :s