Sensitivity, Discrimination, and Perspective

Abstract

Abstract The sensitivity condition in epistemology says that S knows that p only if, were p false, S would not believe that p. Sensitivity theorists typically espouse epistemological externalism, according to which not everything that contributes to the positive epistemic status of a belief must be cognitively accessible to the agent. Even so, sensitivity theorists typically hold that a belief’s basis, which largely determines its epistemic status, depends only on facts (involving states, processes, and events) about the individual independently of the external environment. But from a standpoint common to knowledge-first epistemology, naive realism, and epistemological disjunctivism, restricting the individuation of belief bases to facts about the individual seems curiously unmotivated. Responding on behalf of the original sensitivity theorists, this chapter suggests that their basis individualism aims to capture the idea that what one knows depends on one’s perspective—on resources available, or on how things appear from here.