How to be sure: sensory exploration and empirical certainty

This is the accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley.In the first part of the paper (sections I-III), I describe and discuss a kind of knowledge-gathering activity that I call sensory exploration, and motivate the notion that it eliminates grounds for empirical doubt. Sensory exploration is a distinctive source of knowledge, hitherto unrecognized by philosophers. It relies (of course) on the senses; I’ll argue, further, that it does not rely on background non-sensory beliefs. It involves sensory experience (which has been discussed extensively in the philosophical literature), but, as I shall show, it cannot be reduced to sensory experience—both because it involves something more, and because its epistemic authority does not rest on that of experience alone. In the second part of the paper (sections IV-VII), I discuss the epistemic warrant that sensory exploration provides. The position I espouse in this part of the paper somewhat resembles that of G. E. Moore (1959), who thought that clear deliverances of the senses (e.g., “I am standing up, and not either sitting or lying down”) are immune from all doubt. My position is not, however, quite as forward as Moore’s. Sensory exploration can free us of certain sorts of doubt, I argue, but it cannot neutralize sceptical doubt. I will attempt to define and differentiate sceptical and empirical doubt, and thus to delimit the scope of the certainty that sensory exploration is capable of delivering. Cumulatively, the argument of the paper lends support to a central tenet of traditional empiricism, namely that the senses give us autonomous knowledge of a special domain of properties. Thus, my position opposes those who hold that the knowledge given to us by the senses invariably requires background theoretical (i.e., non-sensory) knowledge