Timothy Williamson

The thesis is an investigation into the logical pluralism debate, aiming to understand how the philosophical commitments sustaining each side to the debate connects to more general issues connected to the foundations of logic. My investigation centers on the following three notions: (1) Epistemic justification, (2) The metaphysical "ground" for logical truth, and (3) Normativity. Chapter 1 traces the monistic and pluralistic conception of logic back to its philosophical/mathematical roots, which we find in the writings of Rudolf Carnap and Gottlob Frege. I argue that logical pluralism - in its more plausible, epistemic (rather than ontic) form - was enabled by the semantic shift which Carnap seems to have anticipated and that, from a conventionalist perspective, his 'Principle of Tolerance' follows as a consequence of that shift. Chapter 2 concerns the issues ensuing from Willard V. O Quine’s critique of Carnap's conventionalism, which had a devastating effect for his foundationalist project. The aim is in particular to address the issue of meaning-variance, a crucial assumption for the conventionalist approach to pluralism. In chapter 3, I present another framework for pluralism, due to Stewart Shapiro’s [2014] ‘modelling’ conception of logic, according which logic is conceived as a mathematical model of natural language. Shapiro argues that our concept of logical consequence is vague and in need of a sharpening to attain a fixed meaning. Pluralism follows from there being two or more equally "correct" such sharpenings; i.e., relative to our theoretical aims. I argue that the modelling-conception is the best way to approach a justification of basic logical laws. However, since that conception also grounds Timothy Williamson’s [2017] argument for monism, I argue that the conception ultimately fails to establish logical pluralism. Since both Williamson and Shapiro take a pragmatic approach to justification, I conclude that the question of pluralism does not turn on epistemological commitments (i.e., on (1)), and suggest instead that it is a matter of (2), i.e., of one's conception of the "ground" for logical truth.

I argue that no successful version of Williamson's notorious anti-luminosity-argument-which aims to show that there are no non-trivial conditions such that, if they obtain, we are always in a position to know that they obtain-has yet been presented, even if Srinivasan's important further elaboration and defence is taken into account. There are two versions of the argument: one invoking a coarse-grained safety condition on knowledge, and one invoking a fine-grained safety condition. The problem with the coarse-grained version is that a crucial step in the argument seems to implicitly rely on the false premise that sufficient similarity is transitive. I present some natural attempts to mend the argument and show that they fail, leaving us with a gap that remains to be filled. Next, I show that the fine-grained version of the argument faces similar problems. Finally, I argue that Srinivasan's defence of the more contentious fine-grained safety condition is also unsuccessful, again for similar reasons. Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity-argument (henceforth: ALA) from Knowledge and Its Limits (henceforth: KAIL) aims to show that there are no non-trivial conditions such that, if they obtain, we are always in a position to know that they obtain. The ALA stands to overturn, inter alia, several deep-seated philosophical commitments with regards to the mental and its status in epistemology and the philosophy of mind 1. Since it is crucial to know whether it succeeds, the ALA has generated much critical discussion. In her paper Are We Luminous?

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused to talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.

(pre-publication version) This article takes its point of departure in a criticism of the views on meta-philosophy of P.M.S. Hacker for being too dismissive of the possibility of philosophical theory-construction. But its real aim is to put forward an explanatory hypothesis for the lack of a body of established truths and universal research programs in philosophy along with the outline of a positive account of what philosophical theories are and of how to assess them.

These are the slides for an introductory talk about modal epistemology that I was invited to give in the context of the "What's up with …?" series at our department in Graz.
For more on this series of talks see:
http://philosophie-gewi.uni-graz.at/de/veranstaltungen/detail/cal/event/tx_cal_phpicalendar/2014/11/24/whats_up_with_modal_epistemology/

The volume contains fourteen papers by Eva Picardi, one of the leading experts on Frege. The papers focus on Frege's views about logic, language and his anti-psychologism. Picardi masterfully reconstructs the milieu in which Frege's ideas developed, the influence they had on other logicians and philosophers of his time, such as Peano, Russell and Wittgenstein, and later ones, such as Carnap and Davidson, up to present-day debates between inferentialists (such as Dummett and Brandom) and representationalists (such as Williamson and Fodor).

Timothy Williamson has recently proposed to undermine modal skepticism by appealing to the reducibility of modal to counterfactual logic (Reducibility). Central to Williamson’s strategy is the claim that use of the same non-deductive mode of inference (counterfactual development, or CD) whereby we typically arrive at knowledge of counterfactuals suffices for arriving at knowledge of metaphysical necessity via Reducibility. Granting Reducibility, I ask whether the use of CD plays any essential role in a Reducibility-based reply to two kinds of modal skepticism. I argue that its use is entirely dispensable, and that Reducibility makes available replies to modal skeptics which show certain propositions to be metaphysically necessary by deductive arguments from premises the modal skeptic accepts can be known.

Gilbert Ryle has made the famous distinction between intellectual knowing-that and practical knowing-how. Since knowledge in Confucianism is not merely intellectual but also practical, many scholars have argued that such knowledge is knowing-how or, at least very similar to it. In this essay, focusing on Wang Yangming’s moral knowledge (liangzhi 良知), I shall argue that it is neither knowing-that nor knowing-how, but a third type of knowing, knowing-to. There is a unique feature of knowing-to that is not shared by either knowing-that or knowing-how: a person with knowing-to (for example, knowing to love one’s parents) will act accordingly (for example, love his or her parents), while neither knowing-that (for example, the knowing that one ought to love one’s parents) nor knowing-how (for example, the knowing how to love one’s parents), whether separately or combined, will dispose or incline its possessor to act accordingly (for example, love one’s parents).

A widespread assumption in debates about trust and trustworthiness is that the evaluative norms of principal interest on the trustor’s side of a cooperative exchange regulate trusting attitudes and performances whereas those on the trustee’s side regulate dispositions to respond to trust. The aim here will be to highlight some unnoticed problems with this asymmetrical picture – and in particular, how it elides certain key evaluative norms on both the trustor’s and trustee’s side the satisfaction of which are critical to successful cooperative exchanges – and to show that a symmetrical, ‘achievement-first’ approach to theorising about trust and trustworthienss (and their relation to each other) has important advantages by comparison. The view I develop is guided by a structural analogy with practical reasoning. Just as practical reasoning is working as it should only when there is realisation (knowledge and action) of states (belief and intention) with reverse directions of fits (mind-to-world and world-to-mind), likewise, cooperation between trustor and trustee is functioning as it should only when there is an analogous kind of realisation on both sides of the cooperative exchange – viz., when the trustor ‘matches’ her achievement in trusting (an achievement in fitting reliance to reciprocity) with the trustee’s achievement in responding to trust (an achievement in fitting reciprocity to reliance). An upshot of viewing cooperation between trustor and trustee as exhibiting achievement-theoretic structure is that we will be better positioned to subsume trustworthiness (and its cognates on the trustee’s side), like trust, under a wider suite of evaluative norms that regulate attempts, dispositions, and achievements symmetrically on both sides of a cooperative exchange, with ‘matching achievements’ as the gold standard.

If the word 'philosophy' itself is hard to define, then it will be even harder to define 'metaphilosophy'.

One of the main questions about metaphilosophy is whether or not it's actually part of philosophy. Since one has to philosophise about “the nature of philosophy”, it can hardly help but be part of philosophy. Or, as Timothy Williamson puts it, the“philosophy of philosophy [is] automatically part of philosophy". (Williamson's use of the label “philosophy of philosophy” gives the game away.) It's conceivable that there could be sociological, political, scientific., etc. analyses of philosophy which could also be deemed to be metaphilosophical in nature.

Philosophers know a great deal about how reasoning can go wrong but very little about what can go wrong with the conclusions that philosophers try to establish by their reasonings.  It is Stove’s great merit that he tackles the latter problem directly, though a certain dogmatism in his approach and a contemptuous attitude towards the ‘great’ philosophers have almost certainly led to a neglect of his work.

This paper inquires into the appropriateness of the label ‘neo-positivist’ that he applies to his own position and considers his view that there are probably, but not certainly, innumerable ways in which a philosophical claim can be wrong, mistaken, untrue, absurd even.  An attempt is made to relate our lack of knowledge here to the Chomsky/McGinn thesis that there may be kinds of problem with which the human intellect is just not equipped to deal.

The semantics of racial slurs has recently become a locus of debate amongst philosophers. While everyone agrees that slurs are offensive, there is disagreement about the linguistic mechanism responsible for this offensiveness. This paper places the debate about racial slurs into the context of a larger issue concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and argues that even on minimalist assumptions, the offensiveness of slur words is more plausibly due to their semantic content rather than any pragmatic mechanism (including conventional implicature). Finally, I note that slurs make a good test case for expanding our semantic theories beyond the truth conditional tradition of Frege, which will be necessary in order to broaden the types of expressions handled by semantic theories.

The paper argues against Williamson's and Cappelen's attacks on intuition, claiming that it is actually possible to develop a philosophy with intuitions. More precisely, the analysis rests on the claim that the intuition under discussion in the current metaphilosophical debate is the wrong kind of intuition. The right kind of intuition is a sharply-defined faculty which should be drawn from the debate in philosophy of mathematics. When mathematical intuition enters the picture, the objections lose their grip, being grounded on features not present in the new characterization. Therefore, after sketching generic intuition and related objections, the paper outlines the feature of mathematical intuition through the view of its most prominent advocate, namely Charles Parsons, and shows how this faculty dodges Williamson's and Cappelen's critiques. The possibility and the method for extending this kind of intuition to the metaphilosophical debate is then envisaged, alongside with a comment on how this whole framework copes with philosophical Anti-exceptionalism.

This is a critical notice of Timothy Williamson's, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Blackwell, 2007).  It focuses on criticizing the book's two main positive proposals: that we should “replace true belief by knowledge in a principle of charity constitutive of content”, and that “the epistemology of metaphysically modal thinking is tantamount to a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking”.

The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively free logical approach to the intensional paradoxes and note how the free logical outlook allows one to distinguish two different, though allied themes in higher-order necessitism. We examine the costs of this solution and compare it with the more familiar ramificationist approaches to higher-order logic. Our assessment of both approaches is largely pessimistic, and we remain reluctantly inclined to take Prior’s and Kaplan’s derivations at face value.

Anti-exceptionalists about logic claim that logical methodology is not different from scientific methodology when it comes to theory choice. Two anti-exceptionalist accounts of theory choice in logic are abductivism (defended by Priest and Williamson) and predictivism (recently proposed by Martin and Hjortland). These accounts have in common reliance on pre-theoretical logical intuitions for the assessment of candidate logical theories. In this paper, I investigate whether intuitions can provide what abductivism and predictivism want from them and conclude that they do not. As an alternative to these approaches, I propose a Carnapian view on logical theorizing according to which logical theories do not simply account for pre-theoretical intuitions, but rather improve on them. In this account, logical theories are ameliorative, rather than representational.

It is widely held that (truth-conditional) meaning is context-dependent. According
to John Searle‘s radical version of contextualism, the very notion of meaning “is
only applicable relative to a set of [...] background assumptions” (Searle 1978, p.
207), or background know-how. In earlier work, I have developed a (moderately
externalist) “neo-Husserlian” account of the context-dependence of meaning and
intentional content, based on Husserl’s semantics of indexicals. Starting from this
semantics, which strongly resembles today’s mainstream semantics (section 2) I
describe the (radical) contextualist challenge that mainstream semantics and
pragmatics face in view of the (re-)discovery of what Searle calls the background
of meaning (section 3). Following this, and drawing upon both my own neo-
Husserlian account and ideas from Emma Borg, Gareth Evans and Timothy Willi-
amson, I sketch a strategy for meeting this challenge (section 4) and draw a so-
cial-epistemological picture that allows us to characterize meaning and content in
a way that takes account of contextualist insights yet makes it necessary to tone
down Searle‘s “hypothesis of the Background” (section 5).
Keywords
Background hypothesis | Borg | Content | Context | Contextualism | Evans | Ex-
ternalism | Husserl | Intentionality | Interpretation | Knowledge | Meaning | Min-
imalism | Reference | Searle | Williamson

There has been a swathe of writing in Analytic philosophy during the past decade or two aiming to undercut the ‘Rylean’ category of ‘knowing-how’. The “intellectualist” desire, focal in the work of Timothy Williamson and his followers, to convert know-how into knowledge-that, is a seemingly-captivating desire, one that is troublingly easy for philosophers to fall into and not be able to get out of again. But, I argue here, it is not a desire best countered simply by a defence of know-how as an independent category of knowledge. Nor even by claiming it necessarily to be a more fundamental category of knowledge. To the contrary: we ought to question whether there is any such thing as an over-arching category of ‘knowledge’ at all; we ought to question therefore whether know-how is well-understood as a kind of that (of knowledge); and, only insofar as it might (not ‘must’) be seen thus ought we, roughly, to follow Ryle et al in inverting the supposed pre-eminence of knowledge-that over ‘knowledge-how’. Understanding the heart of Wittgenstein’s discussion of knowledge and understanding, which opens with PI 149, enables one to do these things; that is, enables one to appreciate the depth of the difference between know-how and our ‘paradigms’ of knowledge(-that), a difference that recent Anglo-American philosophy has tended to obliterate. Such understanding requires one to place this sequence in its correct context: which goes back ultimately to PI 16.

A counterpossible conditional is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Common sense delivers the view that some such conditionals are true, and some are false. In recent publications, Timothy Williamson has defended the view that all are true. In this paper we defend the common sense view against Williamson's objections.

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the legitimacy of using the term “to know” in morality and I develop an approach based on Kantian morality. In my analysis, I take the notion “to know” in the sense that Timothy Williamson does. That is to say, I regard it in opposition to the perspectives that claim “knowledge is jus-tified true belief”. Therefore, in the first part, I briefly introduce “knowledge first epistemology”. In the second part, I build a perspective pointing to the strong correlation between acting and knowing. After that, I provide an analysis of Kantian morality in connection with my discussion. I show how Kant argues for a lawful certainty in morality that allows us to use the verb “know” (in the sense that is evaluated in the first part of this paper). In the next part, I comment on the un-analyzability of knowing in the practical sphere with reference to free will. In my conclusion, upon a general review of the paper, I introduce very briefly an alternative epistemology from Islamic thought regarding the theoreti-cal and practical sphere distinctions.
Keywords: Knowledge, Timothy Williamson, Kant, practical cognition, belief.

There is a fundamental disagreement about which norm regulates assertion. Proponents of factive accounts argue that only true propositions are assertable, whereas proponents of non-factive accounts insist that at least some false propositions are. Puzzlingly, both views are supported by equally plausible (but apparently incompatible) linguistic data. This paper delineates an alternative solution: to understand truth as the aim of assertion, and pair this view with a non-factive rule. The resulting account is able to explain all the relevant linguistic data, and finds independent support from general considerations about the differences between rules and aims.

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Vol. 46, Nos, 4-5, August 2016) is dedicated to Timothy Williamson's work on modality. It consists of a new paper by Williamson followed by papers on Williamson's work on modality, with each followed by a reply by Williamson. -/- Contributors: Andrew Bacon, Kit Fine, Peter Fritz, Jeremy Goodman, John Hawthorne, Øystein Linnebo, Ted Sider, Robert Stalnaker, Meghan Sullivan, Gabriel Uzquiano, Barbara Vetter, Timothy Williamson, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri.

Descriptions of Gettier cases can be interpreted in ways that are incompatible with the standard judgment that they are cases of justified true belief without knowledge. Timothy Williamson claims that this problem cannot be avoided by adding further stipulations to the case descriptions. To the contrary, we argue that there is a fairly simple way to amend the Ford case, a standard description of a Gettier case, in such a manner that all deviant interpretations are ruled out. This removes one major objection to interpreting our judgments about Gettier cases as strict conditionals.

According to Timothy Williamson, one of the marks of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy is the idea that philosophical theses are somewhat insubstantial qua epistemologically analytic. Williamson criticises such a meta-philosophical view by reaching sceptical conclusions about epistemological analyticity. He comes to such conclusions by building up two imaginary cases that are counterexamples to understanding-assent necessary links for analytic sentences. This paper attempts
to show that such thought-experiments work only on the implicit assumption that philosophy is not a certain kind of a priori conceptual analysis, namely connective analysis (but it is, rather, a somewhat substantial theory). This, however, is what should have been proved, rather than assumed, in the overall argument against the meta-philosophical views of linguistic philosophers such as the later Wittgenstein and Strawson. Therefore, Williamson’s argument begs the question against such linguistic philosophers.

Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) and Stanley (forthcoming) argue that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. Roughly, if an agent S knows how to φ then there is some relevant proposition that S knows. The target of their arguments is Gilbert Ryle who claimed that a distinction must be drawn between knowledge-that and knowledge-how, where, according to Ryle, the first is a relation between an agent and a true proposition whilst the latter is an ability. Whilst not defending Ryle’s position, I present a case in which I argue that know-how comes apart from know-that. Such a case indicates that knowledge-how is not a species of knowledge-that for one can luckily know how to φ thanks to a kind of luck that is standardly taken to destroy propositional knowledge. Knowing-how is therefore not a kind of knowing-that.

Контекстуальное определение знания, предложенное Д. Льюисом, не решает проблему Гетье. Проблемы, с которыми сталкивается подход Льюиса, скорее свидетельствуют в пользу того, что удовлетворительная эпистемологическая теория должна принять первичность знания и эквивалентность знания и очевидности, что приводит к эпистемологии сначала-знания Т. Уильямсона. Правила, которые вводит Льюис для определения релевантных возможных сценариев и которые должны быть приняты во внимание в рамках его подхода к знанию, являются правилами ad hoc. В частности, Льюис признается, что он не знает, каким образом переформулировать правило подобия, чтобы исключить сценарий радикального скептицизма не способом ad hoc. В качестве общего принципа для правил Льюиса мы предлагаем принцип семейного сходства, понятый как наличие общего витгенштейновского правила, и в частности общих петлевых предложений. Скорректированное соответствующим образом льюисовское определение знания совместимо как с витгенштейновской петлевой эпистемологией, так и с подходом сначала-знания Уильямсона.

Towards the end of the 1990s, two new forms of externalism about mental states were proposed. Both went beyond the earlier semantic externalism of Putnam and Burge in arguing that environmental factors are relevant to more than just the contents of mental states. One was Williamson’s (1995, 2000) externalism about the attitudes to mental contents;  the other was Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) externalism about the realizers of mental states.  These two positions are logically distinct, and have generated entirely separate research programmes. Williamson’s externalism is part of his ‘knowledge-first’ epistemological programme which aims to get past Gettier-style problems for the analysis of knowledge by taking knowledge to be fundamental and unanalysable. Clark and Chalmers’ externalism raises issues for philosophy of mind and cognitive science: they suggest that the boundaries of the mind need not map on to the boundaries of the human organism.
The purpose of this paper is to explore hitherto unconsidered parallels between these two forms of externalism. The argument that Williamson uses to establish the indispensability of externalist propositional attitudes is, I suggest, the same argument used by Clark and Chalmers to establish the indispensability of externally-realized mental states. If one is persuaded of the existence of externalist propositional attitudes by Williamson’s argument then, ceteris paribus, one should also be persuaded of the existence of externally-realized mental states by Clark and Chalmers’ argument – and vice versa.

How do philosophical accusations of talking nonsense relate to the layperson’s notions of meaning and meaningfulness?  If one were to explain carefully what philosophical nonsense was supposed to be, would one be greeted with incredulity?  How do people react to being accused of talking nonsense themselves?  Is anything analogous to an illusion of meaning recognised in everyday life?  In dream-reports perhaps?  Or in the utterances of schizophrenics or those under the influence of drugs?  Or in certain jokes and hoaxes?  Are contradictions felt to be meaningless?  I argue that, though it is clear that experimental philosophy could shed some light on these questions, their subject matter creates special difficulties.  First, it is more difficult than usual to formulate questions and produce ‘vignettes’ that do not subtly encourage certain responses at the expense of others.  Second, the fact that philosophical nonsense is a metaphilosophical concept ensures that its investigation is going to be more indirect than would be that of knowledge or intention, for example.

Статья представляет собой обзор одной из ключевых работ Т. Уильямсона «Knowledge and Its Limits», в котором кратко излагаются основные идеи двенадцати глав книги. [The paper reviews "Knowledge and Its Limits", one of the importnat works of Timothy Williamson, by summarizng the main ideas of the book's twelve chapters.]

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. I provide arguments for the existence of such concepts and offer an account of the role they play in the guidance of skilled action and the formation of what I call when-beliefs and where-beliefs. The account I offer allows us to explain how organisms that do not possess linguistic capacities are able to form seemıngly complex beliefs about the world. I argue that many of our beliefs may not be essentially linguistically structured, including seemingly complex beliefs such as the belief that Olga played chess in the kitchen yesterday. Instead such beliefs can be explained in terms of creating a link between an atomic event concept and positions on cognitive maps. Such beliefs should not be thought of as propositional attitudes.

Arguably, a theory of assertion should be able to provide (i) a definition of assertion, and (ii) a set of conditions for an assertion to be appropriate. This paper reviews two strands of theories that have attempted to meet this challenge. Commitment-based accounts à la Peirce define assertion in terms of commitment to the truth of the proposition. Restriction-based accounts à la Williamson define assertion in terms of the conditions for its appropriate performance. After assessing the suitability of these projects to meet the desiderata of a theory of assertion, I argue that a speech act theoretic account à la Searle is more suitable for this purpose: it integrates the core intuitions of both restriction-based and commitment-based accounts while avoiding their respective problems, and has the further advantage of determining how assertion fits into a more general theory of illocutionary acts.

Structural analogies connect Williamson's (2000; 2017) epistemology and action theory: for example, action is the direction-of-fit mirror image of knowledge, and knowledge stands to belief as action stands to intention. These structural analogies, for Williamson, are meant to illuminate more generally how 'mirrors' reversing direction of fit should be understood as connecting the spectrum of our cognitive and practically oriented mental states. This paper has two central aims, one negative and the other positive. The negative aim is to highlight some intractable problems with Williamson's preferred analogical picture, which links the cognitive and the practical through the nexus of direction-of-fit mirroring. The positive aim of the paper is to propose a better alternative. In particular, we show that an achievement-theoretic proposal captures what is in common across the range of attitudes that exhibit the kind of structure that knowledge-belief, action-desire/intention do, while at the same time avoiding the problems shown to face Williamson's proposed picture. Moreover, we draw attention to several key theoretical benefits of embracing our proposed achievement-theoretic picture, including some of the key benefits of the knowledge-first programme that Williamson's own analogies were designed to secure.

Timothy Williamsons work in metaphilosophy sounds familiarly naturalistic. He argues for the obscurity of the a priori/a posteriori distinction, rejecting the 'linguistic turn', saying that there is no special method or subject domain of philosophy and that there is no special evidential status for intuitions; to sum it up Williamsons anti-exceptionalism about philosophy always rang naturalistic to me. So why does Williamson not call himself a naturalist? This paper shows his reasons for that attitude. It argues, that he is right to criticize orthodox naturalism, but that there are new forms of a more liberal naturalism currently developed, which are not only coherent with Williamsons positions, but also profit from his arguments.