# How To Be Sure Sensory Exploration and Empirical Certainty **Opening (not a real abstract):** The senses can completely dispel rational grounds for one kind of doubt, which I shall call empirical doubt, but they cannot dispel another kind, sceptical doubt. In this paper, I elaborate this claim and argue in its support. 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. 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 **Authors:** [[Matthen]]