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  1. Testimony and the epistemic uncertainty of interpretation.Andrew Peet - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (2):395-416.
    In the epistemology of testimony it is often assumed that audiences are able to reliably recover asserted contents. In the philosophy of language this claim is contentious. This paper outlines one problem concerning the recovery of asserted contents, and argues that it prevents audiences from gaining testimonial knowledge in a range of cases. The recovery problem, in essence, is simply that due to the collective epistemic limitations of the speaker and audience speakers will, in certain cases, be insensitive to the (...)
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  • The Role Functionalist Theory of Absences.Justin Tiehen - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (3):505-519.
    Functionalist theories have been proposed for just about everything: mental states, dispositions, moral properties, truth, causation, and much else. The time has come for a functionalist theory of nothing. Or, more accurately, a role functionalist theory of those absences that are causes and effects.
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  • Semantic Plasticity and Speech Reports.Cian Dorr & John Hawthorne - 2014 - Philosophical Review 123 (3):281-338.
    Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it is (...)
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  • Can disjunctivists explain our access to the sensible world?Adam Pautz - 2011 - Philosophical Issues 21 (1):384-433.
    Develops an empirical argument against naive realism-disjunctivism: if naive realists accept "internal dependence", then they cannot explain the evolution of perceptual success. Also presents a puzzle about our knowledge of universals.
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  • Mentalism and Epistemic Transparency.Declan Smithies - 2012 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (4):723-741.
    Questions about the transparency of evidence are central to debates between factive and non-factive versions of mentalism about evidence. If all evidence is transparent, then factive mentalism is false, since no factive mental states are transparent. However, Timothy Williamson has argued that transparency is a myth and that no conditions are transparent except trivial ones. This paper responds by drawing a distinction between doxastic and epistemic notions of transparency. Williamson's argument may show that no conditions are doxastically transparent, but it (...)
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  • (1 other version)The impossibility of vagueness.Kit Fine - 2008 - Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1):111-136.
    I wish to present a proof that vagueness is impossible. Of course, vagueness is possible; and so there must be something wrong with the proof. But it is far from clear where the error lies and, indeed, all of the assumptions upon which the proof depends are ones that have commonly been accepted. This suggests that we may have to radically alter our current conception of vagueness if we are to make proper sense of what it is.
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  • Deception and evidence.Nicholas Silins - 2005 - Philosophical Perspectives 19 (1):375–404.
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  • Privileged access without luminosity.Giovanni Merlo - forthcoming - In Giovanni Merlo, Giacomo Melis & Crispin Wright (eds.), Self-knowledge and Knowledge A Priori. Oxford University Press.
    Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument has been thought to be in tension with the doctrine that we enjoy privileged epistemic access to our own mental states. In this paper, I will argue that the tension is only apparent. Friends of privileged access who accept the conclusion of the argument need not give up the claim that our beliefs about our own mental states are mostly or invariably right, nor the view that mental states are epistemically available to us in a way that (...)
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  • Foundations for Knowledge-Based Decision Theories.Zeev Goldschmidt - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (4):939-958.
    Several philosophers have proposed Knowledge-Based Decision Theories (KDTs)—theories that require agents to maximize expected utility as yielded by utility and probability functions that depend on the agent’s knowledge. Proponents of KDTs argue that such theories are motivated by Knowledge-Reasons norms that require agents to act only on reasons that they know. However, no formal derivation of KDTs from Knowledge-Reasons norms has been suggested, and it is not clear how such norms justify the particular ways in which KDTs relate knowledge and (...)
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  • Know Your Way Out of St. Petersburg: An Exploration of “Knowledge-First” Decision Theory.Frank Hong - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (6):2473-2492.
    This paper explores the consequences of applying two natural ideas from epistemology to decision theory: (1) that knowledge should guide our actions, and (2) that we know a lot of non-trivial things. In particular, we explore the consequences of these ideas as they are applied to standard decision theoretic puzzles such as the St. Petersburg Paradox. In doing so, we develop a “knowledge-first” decision theory and we will see how it can help us avoid fanaticism with regard to the St. (...)
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  • Prime Cuts and the Method of Recombination.David-Hillel Ruben - 2022 - Episteme 19 (1):21-30.
    Whether some condition is equivalent to a conjunction of some conditions has been a major issue in analytic philosophy. Examples include: knowledge, acting freely, causation, and justice. Philosophers have striven to offer analyses of these, and other concepts, by showing them equivalent to such a conjunction. Timothy Williamson offers a number of arguments for the idea that knowledge is ‘prime’, hence not equivalent to or composed by some such conjunction. I focus on one of his arguments: the requirement that such (...)
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  • Metaphysics, bullshit, and the analysis of philosophical problems.Bryan Frances - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11541-11554.
    Although metaphysics has made an impressive comeback over the past half century, there are still a great many philosophers today who think it is bullshit, under numerous precisifications of ‘That’s just bullshit’ so that it’s a negative assessment and doesn’t apply to most philosophy. One encounters this attitude countless times in casual conversations, social media, and occasionally in print. Is it true?
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  • *Perception* (2021, preview).Adam Pautz - 1996 - In Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception. Ridgeview Pub. Co.
    A preview of my book *Perception*. Discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world and the issue of whether reality is as it appears. Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the puzzles of perception, including hallucinations, illusions, the laws of appearance, blindsight, and neuroscientific explanations of our experience of pain, smell and color. The book covers both traditional philosophical arguments and more recent empirical arguments deriving from research in psychophysics and neuroscience. The addition of chapter summaries, (...)
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  • The puzzle of the laws of appearance.Adam Pautz - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):257-272.
    In this paper I will present a puzzle about visual appearance. There are certain necessary constraints on how things can visually appear. The puzzle is about how to explain them. I have no satisfying solution. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is a puzzle. I will develop the puzzle as it arises for representationalism about experience because it is currently the most popular theory of experience and I think it is along the right lines. However, everyone faces a (...)
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  • Practical Knowledge and Luminosity.Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock - 2019 - Mind 129 (516):1237-1267.
    Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...)
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  • Fragmented Truth.Andy Demfree Yu - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    This thesis comprises three main chapters—each comprising one relatively standalone paper. The unifying theme is fragmentalism about truth, which is the view that the predicate “true” either expresses distinct concepts or expresses distinct properties. -/- In Chapter 1, I provide a formal development of alethic pluralism. Pluralism is the view that there are distinct truth properties associated with distinct domains of subject matter, where a truth property satisfies certain truth-characterizing principles. On behalf of pluralists, I propose an account of logic (...)
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  • Probability and Danger.Timothy Williamson - 2009 - Amherst Lecture in Philosophy.
    What is the epistemological structure of situations where many small risks amount to a large one? Lottery and preface paradoxes and puzzles about quantum-mechanical blips threaten the idea that competent deduction is a way of extending our knowledge. Seemingly, everyday knowledge involves small risks, and competently deducing the conjunction of many such truths from them yields a conclusion too risky to constitute knowledge. But the dilemma between scepticism and abandoning MPC is false. In extreme cases, objectively improbable truths are known. (...)
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  • Inexact Knowledge, Margin for Error and Positive Introspection.Julien Dutant - 2007 - Proceedings of Tark XI.
    Williamson (2000a) has argued that posi- tive introspection is incompatible with in- exact knowledge. His argument relies on a margin-for-error requirement for inexact knowledge based on a intuitive safety prin- ciple for knowledge, but leads to the counter- intuitive conclusion that no possible creature could have both inexact knowledge and posi- tive introspection. Following Halpern (2004) I put forward an alternative margin-for-error requirement that preserves the safety require- ment while blocking Williamson’s argument. I argue that the infallibilist conception of knowledge (...)
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  • Are We Luminous?Amia Srinivasan - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (2):294-319.
    Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin-for-error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin-for-error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (...)
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  • Luminosity Regained.Selim Berker - 2008 - Philosophers' Imprint 8:1-22.
    The linchpin of Williamson (2000)'s radically externalist epistemological program is an argument for the claim that no non-trivial condition is luminous—that no non-trivial condition is such that whenever it obtains, one is in a position to know that it obtains. I argue that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument succeeds only if one assumes that, even in the limit of ideal reflection, the obtaining of the condition in question and one's beliefs about that condition can be radically disjoint from one another. However, no (...)
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  • Vagueness and Margin for error principles.Mario Gómez-Torrente - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (1):107-125.
    Timothy Williamson’s potentially most important contribution to epistemicism about vagueness lies in his arguments for the basic epistemicist claim that the alleged cut-off points of vague predicates are not knowable. His arguments for this are based on so-called ‘margin for error principles’. This paper argues that these principles fail to provide a good argument for the basic claim. Williamson has offered at least two kinds of margin for error principles applicable to vague predicates. A certain fallacy of equivocation seems to (...)
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  • Dogmatism and Inquiry.Sam Carter & John Hawthorne - 2024 - Mind 133 (531):651-676.
    Inquiry aims at knowledge. Your inquiry into a question succeeds just in case you come to know the answer. However, combined with a common picture on which misleading evidence can lead knowledge to be lost, this view threatens to recommend a novel form of dogmatism. At least in some cases, individuals who know the answer to a question appear required to avoid evidence bearing on it. In this paper, we’ll aim to do two things. First, we’ll present an argument for (...)
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  • Peer Disagreement: A Call for the Revision of Prior Probabilities.Sven Rosenkranz & Moritz Schulz - 2015 - Dialectica 69 (4):551-586.
    The current debate about peer disagreement has so far mainly focused on the question of whether peer disagreements provide genuine counterevidence to which we should respond by revising our credences. By contrast, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the question by which process, if any, such revision should be brought about. The standard assumption is that we update our credences by conditionalizing on the evidence that peer disagreements provide. In this paper, we argue that non-dogmatist views have good reasons (...)
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  • Against Right Reason.Robert Steel - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (2):431-460.
    I argue against ‘right reason’ style accounts of how we should manage our beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence. I start from the observation that such views seem to have bad practical consequences when we imagine someone acting on them. I then catalogs ways that Williamson, Weatherson, and Lasonen-Aarnio have tried to block objections based on these consequences; I argue all fail. I then move on to offer my own theoretical picture of a rational ‘should believe,’ and show that, (...)
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  • Decisions and Higher‐Order Knowledge.Moritz Schulz - 2017 - Noûs 51 (3):463-483.
    A knowledge-based decision theory faces what has been called the prodigality problem : given that many propositions are assigned probability 1, agents will be inclined to risk everything when betting on propositions which are known. In order to undo probability 1 assignments in high risk situations, the paper develops a theory which systematically connects higher level goods with higher-order knowledge.
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  • Higher-Order Sorites Paradox.Elia Zardini - 2013 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 42 (1):25-48.
    The naive theory of vagueness holds that the vagueness of an expression consists in its failure to draw a sharp boundary between positive and negative cases. The naive theory is contrasted with the nowadays dominant approach to vagueness, holding that the vagueness of an expression consists in its presenting borderline cases of application. The two approaches are briefly compared in their respective explanations of a paramount phenomenon of vagueness: our ignorance of any sharp boundary between positive and negative cases. These (...)
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  • Knowledge and practical reasoning.Igor Douven - 2008 - Dialectica 62 (1):101–118.
    The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assuming is the right one, and that hence (...)
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  • An anti-epistemicist consequence of Margin for error semantics for knowledge.Delia Graff Fara - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (1):127-142.
    Let us say that the proposition that p is transparent just in case it is known that p, and it is known that it is known that p, and it is known that it is known that it is known that p, and so on, for any number of iterations of the knowledge operator ‘it is known that’. If there are transparent propositions at all, then the claim that any man with zero hairs is bald seems like a good candidate. (...)
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  • Evidentialism, circularity, and grounding.Bob Beddor - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (7):1847-1868.
    This paper explores what happens if we construe evidentialism as a thesis about the metaphysical grounds of justification. According to grounding evidentialism, facts about what a subject is justified in believing are grounded in facts about that subject’s evidence. At first blush, grounding evidentialism appears to enjoy advantages over a more traditional construal of evidentialism as a piece of conceptual analysis. However, appearances are deceiving. I argue that grounding evidentialists are unable to provide a satisfactory story about what grounds the (...)
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  • Disproportional mental causation.Justin T. Tiehen - 2011 - Synthese 182 (3):375-391.
    In this paper I do three things. First, I argue that Stephen Yablo’s influential account of mental causation is susceptible to counterexamples involving what I call disproportional mental causation. Second, I argue that similar counterexamples can be generated for any alternative account of mental causation that is like Yablo’s in that it takes mental states and their physical realizers to causally compete. Third, I show that there are alternative nonreductive approaches to mental causation which reject the idea of causal competition, (...)
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  • How to Supplement Mentalist Evidentialism: What Are the Fundamental Epistemological Principles?Philipp Berghofer - 2022 - Theoria 88 (3):679-700.
    Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 3, Page 679-700, June 2022.
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  • What is my evidence that here is a cup? Comments on Susanna Schellenberg.Adam Pautz - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (4):915-927.
    This paper is about Susanna Schellenberg's view on the explanatory role of perceptual experience. I raise a basic question about what the argument for her view might be. Then I develop two new problem cases: one involving “seamless transitions” between perception and hallucination and another involving the graded character of perceptual evidence and justification.
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  • (1 other version)Reliability, margin for error, and self-knowledge.Paul Egré - 2007 - In Vincent Hendricks (ed.), New Waves in Epistemology. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT, USA: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 215--250.
    Forthcoming in D.H. Pritchard & V. Hendricks, New Waves in Epistemology,.
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