17 ideas
| 6841 | Some continental philosophers are relativists - Baudrillard, for example [Baudrillard, by Critchley] |
| Full Idea: There are philosophers in the continental tradition who are relativists - Baudrillard, for example. | |
| From: report of Jean Baudrillard (works [1976]) by Simon Critchley - Interview with Baggini and Stangroom p.192 | |
| A reaction: This remark is in the context of Critchley denying that most continental philosophers are relativists. |
| 19527 | We don't acquire evidence and then derive some knowledge, because evidence IS knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When we acquire new evidence in perception, we do not first acquire unknown evidence and then somehow base knowledge on it later. Rather, acquiring new is evidence IS acquiring new knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: This makes his point much better than Idea 19526 does. |
| 19528 | Knowledge is prior to believing, just as doing is prior to trying to do [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowing corresponds to doing, believing to trying. Just as trying is naturally understood in relation to doing, so believing is naturally understood in relation to knowing. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.4) | |
| A reaction: An interesting analogy. You might infer that there can be no concept of 'belief' without the concept of 'knowledge', but we could say that it is 'truth' which is indispensible, and leave out knowledge entirely. Belief is to truth as trying is to doing? |
| 19529 | Belief explains justification, and knowledge explains belief, so knowledge explains justification [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: If justification is the fundamental epistemic norm of belief, and a belief ought to constitute knowledge, then justification should be understood in terms of knowledge too. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5) | |
| A reaction: If we are looking for the primitive norm which motivates the whole epistemic game, then I am thinking that truth might well play that role better than knowledge. TW would have to reply that it is the 'grasped truth', rather than the 'theoretical truth'. |
| 19530 | A neutral state of experience, between error and knowledge, is not basic; the successful state is basic [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A neutral state covering both perceiving and misperceiving (or remembering and misrembering) is not somehow more basic than perceiving, for what unifies the case of each neutral state is their relation to the successful state. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.5-6) | |
| A reaction: An alternative is Disjunctivism, which denies the existence of a single neutral state, so that there is nothing to unite the two states, and they don't have a dependence relation. Why can't there be a prior family of appearances, some of them successful? |
| 19531 | Internalism about mind is an obsolete view, and knowledge-first epistemology develops externalism [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: A postulated underlying layer of narrow mental states is a myth, whose plausibility derives from a comfortingly familiar but obsolescent philosophy of mind. Knowledge-first epistemology is a further step in the development of externalism. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson is a real bruiser, isn't he? I don't take internalism about mind to be obsolescent at all, but now I feel so inferior for clinging to such an 'obsolescent' belief. ...But then I cling to Aristotle, who is (no doubt) an obsolete philosopher. |
| 19536 | Knowledge-first says your total evidence IS your knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge-first equate one's total evidence with one's total knowledge. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.8) | |
| A reaction: Couldn't lots of evidence which merely had a high probability be combined together to give a state we would call 'knowledge'? Many dubious witnesses confirm the truth, as long as they are independent, and agree. |
| 19526 | Surely I am acquainted with physical objects, not with appearances? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: When I ask myself what I am acquainted with, the physical objects in front of me are far more natural candidates than their appearances. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.3) | |
| A reaction: Not very impressive. The word 'acquainted' means the content of the experience, not the phenomena. Do I 'experience' the objects, or the appearances? The answer there is less obvious. If you apply it to colours, it is even less obvious. |
| 6871 | We can't only believe things if we are currently conscious of their justification - there are too many [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: Strong internalism says only current conscious states can justify beliefs, but this has the problem of Stored Beliefs, that most of our beliefs are stored in memory, and one's conscious state includes nothing that justifies them. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §2) | |
| A reaction: This point seems obviously correct, but one could still have a 'fairly strong' version, which required that you could always call into consciousness the justificiation for any belief that you happened to remember. |
| 6872 | Internalism must cover Forgotten Evidence, which is no longer retrievable from memory [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: Even weak internalism has the problem of Forgotten Evidence; the agent once had adequate evidence that she subsequently forgot; at the time of epistemic appraisal, she no longer has adequate evidence that is retrievable from memory. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §3) | |
| A reaction: This is certainly a basic problem for any account of justification. It will rule out any strict requirement that there be actual mental states available to support a belief. Internalism may be pushed to include non-conscious parts of the mind. |
| 6874 | Internal justification needs both mental stability and time to compute coherence [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: The problem for internalists of Doxastic Decision Interval says internal justification must avoid mental change to preserve the justification status, but must also allow enough time to compute the formal relations between beliefs. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §4) | |
| A reaction: The word 'compute' implies a rather odd model of assessing coherence, which seems instantaneous for most of us where everyday beliefs are concerned. In real mental life this does not strike me as a problem. |
| 6873 | Coherent justification seems to require retrieving all our beliefs simultaneously [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: The problem of Concurrent Retrieval is a problem for internalism, notably coherentism, because an agent could ascertain coherence of her entire corpus only by concurrently retrieving all of her stored beliefs. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §3) | |
| A reaction: Sounds neat, but not very convincing. Goldman is relying on scepticism about short-term memory, but all belief and knowledge will collapse if we go down that road. We couldn't do simple arithmetic if Goldman's point were right. |
| 6875 | Reliability involves truth, and truth is external [Goldman] |
| Full Idea: Reliability involves truth, and truth (on the usual assumption) is external. | |
| From: Alvin I. Goldman (Internalism Exposed [1999], §6) | |
| A reaction: As an argument for externalism this seems bogus. I am not sure that truth is either 'internal' or 'external'. How could the truth of 3+2=5 be external? Facts are mostly external, but I take truth to be a relation between internal and external. |
| 19534 | How does inferentialism distinguish the patterns of inference that are essential to meaning? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Inferentialism faces the grave problem of separating patterns of inference that are to count as essential to the meaning of an expression from those that will count as accidental (a form of the analytic/synthetic distinction). | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a rather persuasive objection to inferentialism, though I don't personally take that as a huge objection to all internalist semantics. |
| 19535 | Internalist inferentialism has trouble explaining how meaning and reference relate [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The internalist version of inferentialist semantics has particular difficulty in establishing an adequate relation between meaning and reference. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that this was a big problem for referentialist semantics too, though evidently Williamson doesn't think so. If he is saying that the meaning is in the external world, dream on. |
| 19533 | Inferentialist semantics relies on internal inference relations, not on external references [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: On internalist inferential (or conceptual role) semantics, the inferential relations of an expression do not depend on what, if anything, it refers to, ...rather, the meaning is something like its place in a web of inferential relations. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Williamson says the competition is between externalist truth-conditional referential semantics (which he favours), and this internalist inferential semantics. He is, like, an expert, of course, but I doubt whether that is the only internalist option. |
| 19532 | Truth-conditional referential semantics is externalist, referring to worldly items [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Truth-conditional referential semantics is an externalist programme. In a context of utterance the atomic expressions of a language refer to worldly items, from which the truth-conditions of sentences are compositionally determined. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Knowledge First (and reply) [2014], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I just don't see how a physical object can be part of the contents of a sentence. 'Dragons fly' is atomic, and meaningful, but its reference fails. 'The cat is asleep' is just words - it doesn't contain a live animal. |