Work in Progress Seminar

I gave a talk at last week’s graduate work in progress (WiP) seminar on Williamson’s account of knowledge and some of the issues I’ve blogged about here recently. In particular, I developed an objection concerning the explanatory value of Williamson’s account, which I then tried to defend the account against on the basis of the burden of proof argument given below.

I think it would be fair to say that my suggestions met with mixed reactions. On the one hand, not everyone felt that I was being fair to Williamson by characterising his account as saying nothing particularly substantive about the nature of knowledge given the fact that he had written an entire book on the subject. On the other hand, some found it difficult to accept that there could be a satisfying explanation of something—in this case whether a given belief either does or does not constitute knowledge—without providing a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions, which was exactly the position I was arguing against. Conversely, others felt that the constraints upon a theory of knowledge I set up begged the question against the Williamsonian view, even though I was claiming that these constraints could be met by the view provided that they are not interpreted too strongly (i.e. as mandating a set of general principles for knowledge, rather than the requirement to give a principled explanation of each of its instances).

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.

Williamson on Knowledge

I’m currently reading Timothy Williamson’s book, Knowledge and Its Limits, and there are a few aspects of his view that I find troubling. On the whole, I’m quite sympathetic to Williamson’s project of rehabilitating epistemology as a branch of the philosophy of mind and the idea that knowing is a (purely) mental state. This is of course highly controversial given standard analyses of knowledge as some kind of justified true belief. Given that knowledge is factive and truth is normally taken to be non-mental, most standard analyses deem knowledge to be non-mental (or at least not purely mental) due to the presence of the truth condition. Williamson, on the other hand, argues that the state of knowing is analysable and instead of explaining knowledge in terms of belief, truth, justification, etc., the state of knowing should be taken to be implicated in the latter concepts, hence the slogan ‘knowledge first’.

Williamson’s position is comparable to McDowell’s, who conceives of perception and knowing as ‘taking in’ the relevant facts such that the subject’s mental state cannot be described as being purely internal to its body. McDowell takes this to have major epistemological benefits in that it explains mental states in terms of object-involving Russellian acquaintance-like relations. It also tallies nicely with semantic externalism and the extended mind hypothesis, essentially pushing the boundary of the mental out into the world where (some might say) they belong. In a way, Williamson is simply applying the insight of semantic externalism—that meaning “ain’t in the head”—to the metaphysics of mental states, which, according to Williamson and McDowell, ain’t in the head either.