The lottery paradox was designed to demonstrate that three attractive principles governing rational acceptance lead to contradiction: The paradox remains of continuing interest because it raises several issues at the foundations of knowledge representation and uncertain reasoning: the relationships between fallibility, corrigible belief and logical consequence; the roles that consistency, statistical evidence and probability play in belief fixation; the precise normative force that logical and probabilistic consistency have on rational belief.
Although the first published statement of the lottery paradox appears in Kyburg's 1961 Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief, the first formulation of the paradox appears in his "Probability and Randomness", a paper delivered at the 1959 meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, and the 1960 International Congress for the History and Philosophy of Science, but published in the journal Theoria in 1963.
The lottery paradox has become a central topic within epistemology, and the enormous literature surrounding this puzzle threatens to obscure its original purpose.
Most of the literature in epistemology approaches the puzzle from the orthodox point of view and grapples with the particular consequences faced by doing so, which is why the lottery is associated with discussions of skepticism (e.g., Klein 1981), and conditions for asserting knowledge claims (e.g., J. P. Hawthorne 2004).
Finally, philosophers of science, decision scientists, and statisticians are inclined to see the lottery paradox as an early example of the complications one faces in constructing principled methods for aggregating uncertain information, which is now a discipline of its own, with a dedicated journal, Information Fusion, in addition to continuous contributions to general area journals.