On Certainty and Sensitive Knowledge: A Response to Rickless

In an earlier paper ‘Certainty and Sensitive Knowledge’, published in this journal in 2014, I offered some remarks about Locke’s understanding of certainty and its implications for his account of sensitive knowledge. As a way of setting up and concluding that paper I made a few critical remarks about Professor Samuel Rickless’s thesis that, given Locke’s own identification of knowledge and certainty, what Locke calls sensitive knowledge falls short of his own criterion of knowledge. The current issue of this journal contains a paper by Professor Rickless which defends and further articulates his thesis and also offers some criticisms of my account of Locke’s views on certainty. I will make a few remarks about each