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.