Chapter 12 - False negatives

Summary

In Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick suggested that knowing that some proposition, p, is true is a matter of being "sensitive" to p's truth value. This chapter criticizes Nozick's view of knowledge as "sensitivity" to truth-value. It begins with a review of Nozick's notion of sensitivity and his analysis thereof. The chapter suggests that Nozick's tracking account and the adherence account are both fatally flawed. Given that truth sensitivity is constituted by truth adherence, one might have expected that falsity sensitivity would amount to falsity adherence. The truth adherence condition, which is part of the tracking account and the adherence account, is false. The chapter considers four accounts of epistemic sensitivity. If knowledge is indeed inconsistent with false negatives, we will need to reconsider the avoidance and the combined safety accounts.