1st Edition

Knowing and Checking An Epistemological Investigation

By Guido Melchior Copyright 2019
    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    286 Pages
    by Routledge

    Checking is a very common concept for describing a subject’s epistemic goals and actions. Surprisingly, there has been no philosophical attention paid to the notion of checking. This is the first book to develop a comprehensive epistemic theory of checking. The author argues that sensitivity is necessary for checking but not for knowing, thereby finding a new home for the much discussed modal sensitivity principle. He then uses the distinction between checking and knowing to explain central puzzles about knowledge, particularly those concerning knowledge closure, bootstrapping and the skeptical puzzle. Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation will be of interest to epistemologists and other philosophers looking for a general theory of checking and testing or for new solutions to central epistemological problems.

    Part I: Checking

    Chapter 1: Introduction: The Methodological Approach

    Chapter 2: Modal Knowledge Accounts

    Chapter 3: SAC: A Sensitivity Account of Checking

    Chapter 4: Checking, Alternatives, and Discrimination

    Chapter 5: Checking, Inferences, and Necessities

    Part II: Checking and Knowledge Puzzles

    Chapter 6: SAC and Knowledge Puzzles

    Chapter 7: Checking and Bootstrapping

    Chapter 8: SAC and the Skeptical Puzzle

    Biography

    Guido Melchior is Privatdozent and project leader at the University of Graz and recurring visiting scholar at the University of Arizona. He has previously published in Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, and Episteme among other journals.

    "Knowing and Checking explores several important issues, providing an account of checking, charting the connections between checking and knowing, and further investigating the role of sensitivity within epistemology."
    -Robert Weston Siscoe, Acta Analytica