Abstract
Guido Melchior’s important and rich book (Melchior Knowing and Checking. An Epistemological Investigation 2019) draws our attention to the much neglected topic of checking. There are many new leads to follow. Here, I will pick a few that seem to me to allow the most room for discussion and disagreement: the alleged modal profile of checking (Sect. 1), the contrastive aspects of checking (Sect. 2), and the relation of checking to closure (Sect. 3). I will end with two smaller points worth bringing up here (Sect. 4).
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Notes
Single page numbers refer to pages in the book.
Over the last three decades, sensitivity accounts of knowledge have been strongly criticized by many authors, while safety accounts have gotten away with not nearly as much criticism even though many important points made against sensitivity accounts also apply to safety accounts, mutatis mutandis. So, sensitivity has not been treated that fairly. Guido is helping to “rehabilitate” the idea of sensitivity by assigning it a new place in epistemology.
I will sometimes use expressions like “case of checking” by which I mean (if not indicated differently) that the case is one in which the subject is using a particular method of checking.
Assuming that the reasoning is competent and without fault.
Guido remarks that his term “checking that” is a “purely technical term” (34). I have doubts about this because it seems to be built on the ordinary notion of checking and the exact modal profile of checking is also left open which isn’t necessary when the relevant notion is purely technical. If Guido’s notion of checking is a partially technical one, then the question is whether it is still close enough to the ordinary notion (whether, for instance, it is still a good Carnapian explication: see Carnap 1950, Chap. 1). I doubt that it is.
I am assuming, again, that the reasoning is competent and without fault.
Guido explains the difference in terms of checking methods (120–121). I deviate in my formulation for reasons of exposition; nothing relevant depends on this here.
We may assume here that none of the premises nor the conclusion are true by necessity — thus avoiding unnecessary complications (see on this also ch.5.3).
See in this context also Goldman 1992, 117 on conditional reliability.
Choosing true rather than false premises seems to go beyond internalist conditions. I am assuming it also goes beyond Guido’s internalist conditions on checking methods, though I can see room for disagreement here.
Guido leaves it open whether the weak adherence condition:
“M fulfills the weak adherence condition with respect to p iff: If p were true and M were used to determine whether p is true, then M would not indicate that p is false.” (42).
or the weak negative safety condition:
“M fulfills the weak negative safety condition with respect to p iff: If M were used to determine whether p is true and if M were to indicate that p is false, then p would be false.” (43).
are also necessary for checking methods (see 66; see, however, also the first sentence on 89 which seems to be in tension with the idea of leaving this open). I won’t go into this here, but given my more internalist interpretation of “checking,” I would draw conclusions similar to the ones above about weak sensitivity and safety.
On repeated checking see, e.g., Friedman (2019).
One might suspect that “checking that p” is synonymous with “checking that p, given that p.” “S checked that p” thus reduces to “p and S checked whether p.” Checking whether would be genuine checking, and checking that would not constitute a different type of checking. So, one could still say that checking that is factive and a success term, but this would be misleading because the factivity would not be due to checking whether but due to the fact that p.
I will talk about checking whether, assuming that similar things hold, mutatis mutandis for checking that. I will focus in this section on Guido’s notion of checking but similar things hold, mutatis mutandis, for what I take to be ordinary checking.
What counts as cleaning might depend on the object (on what is being cleaned): the kinds of efforts sufficient for cleaning the corridor might not suffice for cleaning the bathroom. I will put this complication aside here.
Interestingly, Guido makes the following remark: “checking whether a proposition is true simpliciter … might be the exception” (96). I don’t know why he thinks so.
The same holds mutatis mutandis for the safety condition. I will focus here on the more salient sensitivity condition.
We are talking about de dicto checking here, not about de re checking (see also 94–95). We’re not concerned with checking for kitchen cleaning whether it was Peter who did it but rather with checking whether Peter cleaned the kitchen.
Does all this not lead to abominable conjunctions like “He did not check whether Peter cleaned the kitchen but he did check whether it was Peter who cleaned the kitchen”? I think that all this leads to such conjunctions but also that they are only apparently abominable. I cannot go into this here.
One might object that only checking simpliciter is required here: whether this is Peter, whether this is cleaning, and whether this is the kitchen. To be sure, one would then still have to show how to construct the whole proposition (Peter cleaned the kitchen) out of its constituents (Peter, cleaned, the kitchen). My main worry and doubt about this objection, however, is that checking whether this is, say, Peter requires more than knowing (justifiedly believing, etc.) that this is Peter; one needs to distinguish and tell Peter from others. And this brings in contrasts essentially. By the way, It seems to me that this last claim is the best target for anyone who would like to argue that checking simpliciter is not reducible to contrastive checking.
We may assume that the number of foci is finite. We may even assume that that number is manageably small. So, checking should not be too demanding.
According to this, one cannot check simpliciter when the methods of inquiring about the different foci are no checking methods.
See Baumann (2008).
Again, my remarks above on contrastive checking and checking simpliciter are framed in terms of Guido’s notion of checking. I think similar things hold for ordinary checking.
He also thinks that knowledge is closed. There is no problem for him here. Some knowledge is not based on checking. And those cases of knowledge that are based on checking might still be closed due to other factors than checking.
One could add, on Guido’s behalf, that S did intend to check whether q. I will leave this condition aside here for the sake of simplicity.
One could add further conditions (whistles and bells) to this but I won’t attempt this here. I suspect that searching for sufficient conditions for checking the conclusion is as endless as the post-Gettier debate on sufficient conditions for knowledge (not to speak of necessary and sufficient conditions!).
but not here!
I don’t know who first thought of this kind of case.
To be sure, the 2-step inference from “there is a barn” and “that thing is red” to “there is a red barn” and from that to “there is a barn” is not badly but still uninterestingly circular. But this need not concern us here as far as questions about closure are concerned.
It doesn’t help to deny counter-closure here. The heterogeneity would still be there, if only in conditional form: Given counter-closure, irrelevant factors would make a difference as to knowledge and checking.
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