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Full Idea
The psychological mechanism that Williamson proposes as the supposedly reliable source of our knowledge of necessities only seems applicable to counterfactuals that are distinctively causal, not metaphysical, in character.
Gist of Idea
Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals
Source
comment on Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007]) by E.J. Lowe - What is the Source of Knowledge of Modal Truths? 5
Book Ref
-: 'Mind' [-], p.15
A Reaction
My rough impression of Williamson's account is that it is correct but unilluminating. We have to assess necessities by counterfactual thinking, because nothing else is available (apart from evaluating the coherence of the findings).
| 16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
| 9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
| 9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
| 9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
| 9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
| 9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
| 9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
| 9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
| 9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
| 9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
| 9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
| 9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
| 20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |