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Williamson On Knowledge |
This page contains details about the new volume of articles on the work of Timothy Williamson that I will be editing for Oxford University Press with Patrick Greenough. Please note that all the entries below are provisional, and will be subject to regular changes and updates.
Volume Overview This volume will consist of around 15 commissioned articles from some of the leading philosophers in the world today, with each article commentated on by Timothy Williamson himself. Although contributors will not be limited in their discussion of Williamson's work to his most recent book, Knowledge and Its Limits (OUP, 2000), it is this text that will be the focus of the volume. Primarily this is because it is in this work that a number of the key threads of Williamson's thought are brought together, for the first time, into a single cohesive whole. The essays will be preceded with an introduction by the editors that will survey Williamson's work and introduce the articles in the light of this survey. The volume will close with a full bibliography of Williamson's writings to date, along with a select bibliography of critical reactions to his most recent work.
Contributors, Titles and Abstracts
'E=K and Perceptual Knowledge' ABSTRACT. According to Williamson, all evidence is knowledge, and all knowledge is evidence: E=K. He argues for the following theses: (1) All evidence is propositional. (1)-(3) entail E=K. In an earlier paper, I argued that Williamson's views on knowledge, justification and evidence commit him to an implausible view about perceptual knowledge and justification. Williamson has responded to my criticism, and in this paper I wish to reconsider the issues.
'Can the Concept of Knowledge be Analysed?' ABSTRACT. I discuss three of Williamson's arguments in support of the hypothesis that the concept of knowledge can't be analysed into more basic concepts. I argue that at least two of these arguments are unsuccessful. I then turn to Williamson's modest positive account of the concept of knowledge in chapter 1 of Knowledge and its Limits. I consider whether, and in what sense, this account amounts to an analysis. I argue that Williamson's proposal is inadequate in a number of respects and suggest some possible improvements. I focus in this connection on the relationship between seeing and knowing.
'Why Knowledge is Not a State of Mind' ABSTRACT. Williamson argues claims that 'knows' is not analysable, and this claim paves the way for his further claim that knowing is a simple mental state, not a compound. I argue thus: Suppose it is true that 'knows' has no analysis; this does not entail Williamson's thesis regarding knowing; rather, it is one of several alternative competing explanatory hypotheses for this datum. Moreover, an alternative anti-realist account of the ordinary language term 'knows', and of its semantics, is equally viable, and indeed does a better job in explaining various linguistic and other data.
'The Knowledge Account of Assertion and the Nature of Testimonial Knowledge' ABSTRACT Most discussions of the knowledge account of assertion focus on the perspective of the speaker: they ask whether the knowledge account provides a plausible characterization of the conditions under which it is appropriate to make an assertion. But it is noteworthy that we can take another perspective, that of the hearer, who consumes assertion. In this paper I examine the suggestion that the knowledge account enjoys an unappreciated virtue in this respect. The unappreciated virtue is that the knowledge account yields a simple and highly attractive account of knowledge through testimony. After outlining how such an account might go, I suggest that it is premature to conclude that the knowledge account enjoys the virtue in question. This is because such an account involves empirical assumptions regarding the conditions under which hearers accept observed assertion, and we have some reason to think that these assumptions are less true to the facts than are the corresponding empirical assumptions of competitor accounts. This result does not call the knowledge account of assertion into question, but it does suggest that this account cannot yet claim what otherwise might have seemed an important, and heretofore unrecognized, virtue.
'Williamson on Knowledge and Evidence' ABSTRACT. I raise a number of problems for Williamson's account of knowledge and evidence.
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'Primeness, Internalism, Externalism, Explanation' ABSTRACT. We often explain in terms of the possession of factive mental states. Jones turned up on time because he remembered to wind his watch. Smith won the spelling bee because she knew how to spell 'antimacassar'. Factive mental states are broad in a very obvious and non-controversial way. Jones can't have remembered to wind his watch unless he in fact did so. But surely, runs an attractive line of thought, what caused Jones to arrive on time, as far as Jones himself is concerned, is how he is, not how his watch is. There is Jones's contribution to the state of affairs of his remembering to wind his watch and there is the contribution from the world, and we gain a better understanding of what is going on when we explain his turning up on time if we give these two elements their separate roles. The usual implementation of this approach involves analysing remembering into a non-factive mental state and a factive 'add on', and then giving the two resulting elements distinct roles in causal explanations of behaviour. Williamson holds that this strategy is a mistake on the ground that it wrongly assumes that the broad mental states in question are composite, whereas in fact they are prime: they are not decomposable into the conjunction of some narrow condition with an environmental one. I argue for a middle position on the issue.
'Williamson’s Casual Approach to Probability' ABSTRACT. It has been a tradition amongst writers on probability to be rather careful about what exactly is supposed to be measured by the probabilities they have in mind. In Knowledge and its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that this tradition is misguided. Interested in evidential probability (the probability of a proposition on our evidence), Williamson argues that, not only do the tradition’s most visible adherents--the Bayesians--lack the tools for producing an adequate account of what this sort of probability is, but the tradition itself is a product of an unnecessary fussiness. He suggests that we pursue a theory of evidential probability without worrying overly much about what exactly evidential probability measures. One apparent benefit of his approach is that it frees Williamson to accommodate an otherwise worrisome consequence of his identification of evidence with knowledge: namely, that everything one knows must have a probability equal to one on one’s evidence. On, say, a Bayesian view of matters, this would have the dire consequence that one could only regard oneself as knowing propositions on whose truth one was willing to bet all and everything. The trouble is that there are very good reasons why writers on probability have been as careful they have. And there are more sophisticated Bayesian ways of making sense of evidential probability than Williamson has considered. In the light of all this, Williamson's insouciance turns out to be both ill-advised and, in the end, capable of affording him the freedom he needs only at an insupportable price.
'Knowledge, Assertion, and Lotteries' ABSTRACT. One of the central claims of Williamson's epistemology is the claim that knowledge is the norm of assertion. I have argued elsewhere that to the extent that assertion is governed by epistemic norms, the central norms have more to do with justification than with knowledge. I will first explain Williamson's path to the conclusion he holds, identifying the two major arguments that he uses to support his claim that knowledge is the norm of assertion. I will then and then rehearse a prima facie case for my viewpoint, following which I will address the tension between this prima facie case and Williamson's arguments. I will argue that a proper resolution of the conflict results in a denial of the idea that knowledge is the norm of assertion. Instead, the proper conclusion to draw is that to the extent that appropriate assertion is subject to epistemic constraints, those constraints have to do with justification rather than knowledge.
'Defeating the Dogma of Defeasibility (Williamson on Conditionalization)' ABSTRACT. I argue that Williamson can hold onto the claim that knowledge has evidential probability = 1 while also accepting Jeffrey conditionalization (which Williamson denies). He can do this because he can reject the claim that knowledge is defeasible. Furthermore, I maintain: (a) that Williamson's argument for the defeasibility of knowledge doesn't work; and (b) there is a good argument for the indefeasibility of knowledge, and that Williamson doesn't have the resources necessary to reject the latter.
'Williamson on Knowledge, Scepticism, and Evidence' ABSTRACT. We want to say that six-year-old Johnny knows that there is a blue ball before him. The sceptic is prepared to challenge us with an argument which entails that Johnny has that knowledge only if his evidence that there is a blue ball before him is different from what it would be if he were a brain in a vat whose sensory experiences were qualitatively indistinguishable from those he is actually having. Many epistemologists would encourage us not to deny that Johnny's evidence would be the same but to try to meet the sceptic's challenge by taking issue with other features of her argument. Williamson, however, offers an original theory of evidence according to which one’s evidence is one's knowledge, thus allowing him to say that Johnny does have evidence which he would not have if he were a brain in a vat enjoying qualitatively indistinguishable sense experiences - namely, his knowledge that there is a blue ball before him. But Williamson's theory is incomplete in certain ways having to do with the connection between evidence and justified belief, and the theory has prima facie problems, one of which is that it is questionable whether anything Johnny knows about his sense experience could account for his being justified in the counterfactual scenario in which his belief is justified but false. I argue that the best completions of Williamson's theory may not make the prima facie problems disappear. In any case, there are positive lessons to be learned about how beliefs get justified from trying to come to terms with Williamson’s ingenious theory.
'Williamson on the Place of Intuitions in Philosophy' ABSTRACT. A critical examination of Williamson's account of the methodology of armchair philosophy and the place of distinctively philosophical intuitions in that methodology (or their absence therefrom).
'Luminosity, Anti-Luminosity, and the Transparency of Rationality' ABSTRACT. Williamson has argued that mental states such as feeling cold are not luminous: they are not such that if they obtain, one is in a position to know that they obtain. Moreover, Williamson has argued that one's evidence is not luminous: one is not always in a position to know what one's evidence is. As a result, rationality is not transparent: one does not always know what rationality requires of one. I will defend luminosity of one's mental states and evidence, as well as the transparency of rationality, against Williamson's arguments.
'Cognitive Phenomenology, Semantic Qualia and Luminous Knowledge' ABSTRACT. This paper employs an account of game-theoretical semantics in a thought-experiment designed to make vivid and plausible the claim that there is something that it is like to understand a sentence as expressing a thought. Knowing that one grasps a sentence as meaningful is offered as a paradigm case of 'luminous' knowledge, in Williamson's sense.
'The Shifting Sands of Meaning' ABSTRACT. Williamson and I are interested in overlapping ranges of phenomena. In the overlap, we have mutually incompatible understandings of what is going on. Williamson has criticized mine. I have three points to make about the difference. 1. Williamson's account of the overlap is, in certain respects, closely akin to Donald Davidson's (vide 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs'.) It fails for the same reason. Meaning may well change over time, perhaps in unknowable ways. But the slippage between meaning and what is said, within the overlap area - between the understanding meaning confers on words and the understanding they bear as used to say something - is a slippage between something meaning does and what may be said in words with given meanings at a given time. The key point is that what words mean is compatible with their saying, on one occurrence or another, any of and indefinite variety of distinguishable things. The idea of meaning change does not allow for the phenomena this fundamental fact makes for. 2. Williamson has suggested that my account of the relevant phenomena is incoherent. The incoherency results if we allow ourselves a certain way of reading logical forms into the things we say - a certain way of allowing logic to apply to them. But that way is not compulsory. There are, in fact, good reasons enough to reject it. 3. Williamson wants it to be the case that what we actually say to be so in the words we use may be in principle unknowable. I do not want to suggest that, on the contrary, what we say to be so in our words must always be in principle knowable. But I do not think that what we say in using the words we do could be unknowable in the way it would have to be for Williamson's account of the matter to work. If choices between the relevant differences between things that might be said were not effected knowably (in principle), that would sabotage the notion of saying altogether. It could be argued that we are driven to these lengths if the only alternative is logical contradiction. But the actual alternative threatens us with on such dire result.
'Knowledge Nowhere?' ABSTRACT. This paper offers a critical appraisal of Williamson's 'knowledge first' epistemology.
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