Sensitivity: Checking into Knowing?

Abstract

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.