Abstract
In this paper, I describe some of the highlights of Melchior’s checking account and then suggest that its explanatory value could be enhanced with a less analyzed concept of checking. This thought inspires a rearguard defense of sensitivity, by no means aiming to rescue it from all its well-known problems, wherein it is suggested that sensitivity fares better as a necessary condition for knowledge when all the bells and whistles with which it has been adorned over the years are stripped away. Finally, I investigate a recognizably Moorean position involving methods that can be construed as sensitive, such that persons using them can claim to have checked that skeptical hypotheses are false.
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Notes
In “Certainty” (Moore, 1959). He went on, curiously, to doubt that all his sensory experiences, together with his memories, are logically compatible with dreaming. He took memory to be a source of immediate knowledge, unlike sensory experience. Does that help? Only if memories are veridical and can be assumed to be, but what they are immediate knowledge of is one’s past sense experience, not directly of facts about the external world, so I don’t see how it helps.
One final concern, addressed in a note so as not to detract too much from the flow of this section, where my aim is simply to sketch a neo-Moorean response to Melchior, is that [D]Moore’s higher-level method for checking, of their belief that they’re not a BIV that it is true, is not a genuine checking method because it is synchronous with their first-level method of believing they’re not a BIV. Synchronous methods, like checking a second copy of The Times to verify what the first said, always give the same result, and therefore do not constitute genuine checking (KC, 201). [D]Moore can reply that the methods aren’t synchronous because they check different things—the first level method checks whether one is a BIV, and the higher-level method checks whether one’s first-level method has the appropriate warrant. [D]Moore might add that, because good case first-level and higher-level methods are factive, by their nature yielding true beliefs, the concern that synchronous methods are inadequate because they might just get the wrong result twice over, in the same way, is not applicable.
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This paper is a significantly revised version of “Balancing the Checking Account,” presented at the book symposium for Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation on October 27, 2021. Here I pick up on and elaborate the central strands of thought in the conference paper and leave out many smaller points. I thank all the symposium participants, and especially Guido Melchior for the inspiration and for thoughts on my original presentation.
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Becker, K. Sensitivity: Checking into Knowing?. Acta Anal 38, 27–43 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-022-00529-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-022-00529-w