Approaching Skepticism with Sensitivity

Tim Black (California State University at Northridge) and

Peter Murphy (Augustana College)

The sensitivity condition on knowledge says that one knows that P only if one would not believe that P if P were false.  Difficulties for this condition are now well documented.  Keith DeRose has recently suggested a revised sensitivity condition that is designed to avoid some of these difficulties.  We argue, however, that there are decisive objections to DeRose’s revised condition.  Yet rather than simply abandoning his proposed condition, we uncover a rationale for its adoption.  This rationale suggests a further revision, one that avoids the objections to DeRose’s condition.  In addition to generating a more advanced sensitivity condition on knowledge, the payoff of our discussion is considerable: along the way to our revision, we learn important lessons that bear on how the debate between skeptics and anti-skeptics should be conducted.  These lessons concern the epistemic significance of certain explanatory relations, how we ought to envisage epistemic closure principles, and the epistemic significance of methods of belief formation.