Explanatory Constraints upon the Theory of Knowledge

A potential objection to Williamson’s account of knowledge that I mentioned in a previous post turns upon the issue of whether such an account needs to provide a finite set of principles for determining whether and why individual justified beliefs constitute knowledge. JTB theories of knowledge meet this constraint by providing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. This makes it possible both to identify cases of knowledge (in terms of whether all of the necessary conditions are met) and to say in cases where knowledge isn’t present why this is the case (for example because the subject’s belief fails to be sufficiently reliable, or because the truth condition isn’t met).

Williamson, on the other hand, holds that it is impossible to provide a set of sufficient conditions for knowledge, although his account does entail certain necessary conditions that are spelt out in terms of ‘the metaphysics of states’ (for Williamson, knowledge is semantically unanalysable, and therefore primitive). As previously described, Williamson characterises knowledge both as a mental state (whatever that term turns out to mean) and as ‘the most general factive stative attitude, that which one has to a proposition if one has any factive stative attitude to it at all’ (Williamson 2000: 34). On the face of it, this would seem to severely weaken the explanatory power of Williamson’s account since it is no longer possible to say purely with reference to terms set out within the account whether a given state constitutes knowledge or not. Consequently, Williamson appears to render the state of knowing, and the concept of knowledge, somewhat mysterious and unexplained. This in turn makes his account unsatisfying when taken as a theory of knowledge whose purpose is, by most accounts, to explain such things.