Zalabardo on closure and sensitivity

Zalabardo develops a novel tracking account of knowledge which appears to be immune to counterexamples and can withstand at least some of the most pressing skeptical challenges without compromising the closure principle. On his view, sensitivity without method-relativity is a sufficient but not necessary condition on non-inferential knowledge. Beliefs that are insensitive can nevertheless amount to inferential knowledge when adequately evidentially supported. Zalabardo needs inference as an independent source of knowledge as an alternative to method-relativizing, but we argue that problems about lottery propositions, epistemic bootstrapping and higher-order beliefs seem to evaporate once we follow Zalabardo in paying attention to the role played by inference in knowledge acquisition. Zalabardo's motivation for introducing competent inference as an additional sufficient condition on knowledge is thus undermined.