Thinker · TH-0409
Timothy Williamson
Timothy Williamson is a British philosopher who held the Wykeham Professorship of Logic at Oxford after teaching at Edinburgh. In Knowledge and Its Limits…
b. 1955 · Oxford, Edinburgh
Traditions: Analytic
Timothy Williamson is a British philosopher who held the Wykeham Professorship of Logic at Oxford after teaching at Edinburgh. In Knowledge and Its Limits he proposed knowledge-first epistemology: knowledge is a basic mental state that cannot be analysed into belief plus further conditions, and a person's evidence is just what they know. He is also known for an epistemic theory of vagueness, for work on modal logic and metaphysics, and for defending philosophy's methods as continuous with other disciplines.
Key ideas
- Knowledge is a fundamental mental state, not analysable as justified true belief plus something.
- One's evidence is exactly what one knows (E = K).
- Vague terms have sharp boundaries that we cannot know: vagueness is a kind of ignorance.
- Not every condition is luminous: we are not always in a position to know our own mental states.
Major works
- Vagueness (1994)
- Knowledge and Its Limits (2000)
- The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007)
- Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013)
In the conversation
- Debate Knowledge-first epistemology is surrender dressed up as a theory
- Question My model was right for the wrong reason. Which answer to Gettier explains why that matters?
- Debate Judges make law in hard cases, and pretending they discover it does more harm than good
- Debate The KK principle is false: you can know something without knowing that you know it
- Debate S5 is the right logic for metaphysical necessity
- Debate Fuzzy logic is good engineering and a poor theory of vagueness
In the Journal
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Timothy Williamson takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 2.1 Theories of Knowledge What has to be added to a true belief to make it knowledge?