Table Of Content

Contents Page: ix Introduction Page: 1 1 Knowing and acting Page: 1 2 Unanalysable knowledge Page: 2 3 Factive mental states Page: 5 4 Knowledge as the justification of belief and assertion Page: 8 5 The myth of epistemic transparency Page: 11 6 Unknowable truths Page: 18 1 A State of Mind Page: 21 1.1 Factive attitudes Page: 21 1.2 Mental states, first-person accessibility, and scepticism Page: 23 1.3 Knowledge and analysis Page: 27 1.4 Knowing as the most general factive mental state Page: 33 1.5 Knowing and believing Page: 41 2 Broadness Page: 49 2.1 Internalism and externalism Page: 49 2.2 Broad and narrow conditions Page: 51 2.3 Mental differences between knowing and believing Page: 54 2.4 The causal efficacy of knowledge Page: 60 3 Primeness Page: 65 3.1 Prime and composite conditions Page: 65 3.2 Arguments for primeness Page: 66 3.3 Free recombination Page: 73 3.4 The explanatory value of prime conditions Page: 75 3.5 The value of generality Page: 80 3.6 Explanation and correlation coefficients Page: 83 3.7 Primeness and the causal order Page: 88 3.8 Non-conjunctive decompositions Page: 89 4 Anti-Luminosity Page: 93 4.1 Cognitive homes Page: 93 4.2 Luminosity Page: 94 4.3 An argument against luminosity Page: 96 4.4 Reliability Page: 98 4.5 Sorites arguments Page: 102 4.6 Generalizations Page: 106 4.7 Scientific tests Page: 109 4.8 Assertibility conditions Page: 110 5 Margins and Iterations Page: 114 5.1 Knowing that one knows Page: 114 5.2 Further iterations Page: 120 5.3 Close possibilities Page: 123 5.4 Point estimates Page: 130 5.5 Iterated interpersonal knowledge Page: 131 6 An Application Page: 135 6.1 Surprise Examinations Page: 135 6.2 Conditionally Unexpected Examinations Page: 143 7 Sensitivity Page: 147 7.1 Preview Page: 147 7.2 Counterfactual sensitivity Page: 148 7.3 Counterfactuals and scepticism Page: 150 7.4 Methods Page: 152 7.5 Contextualist sensitivity Page: 156 7.6 Sensitivity and broad content Page: 161 8 Scepticism Page: 164 8.1 Plan Page: 164 8.2 Scepticism and the non-symmetry of epistemic accessibility Page: 164 8.3 Difference of evidence in good and bad cases Page: 169 8.4 An argument for sameness of evidence Page: 170 8.5 The phenomenal conception of evidence Page: 173 8.6 Sameness of evidence and the sorites Page: 174 8.7 The non-transparency of rationality Page: 178 8.8 Scepticism without sameness of evidence Page: 181 9 Evidence Page: 184 9.1 Knowledge as justifying belief Page: 184 9.2 Bodies of evidence Page: 186 9.3 Access to evidence Page: 190 9.4 An argument Page: 193 9.5 Evidence as propositional Page: 194 9.6 Propositional evidence as knowledge Page: 200 9.7 Knowledge as evidence Page: 203 9.8 Non-pragmatic justification Page: 207 10 Evidential Probability Page: 209 10.1 Vague probability Page: 209 10.2 Uncertain evidence Page: 213 10.3 Evidence and knowledge Page: 221 10.4 Epistemic accessibility Page: 224 10.5 A simple model Page: 228 10.6 A puzzling phenomenon Page: 230 11 Assertion Page: 238 11.1 Rules of assertion Page: 238 11.2 The truth account Page: 244 11.3 The knowledge account Page: 249 11.4 Objections to the knowledge account, and replies Page: 255 11.5 The BK and RBK accounts Page: 260 11.6 Mathematical assertions Page: 263 11.7 The point of assertion Page: 266 12 Structural Unknowability Page: 270 12.1 Fitch's argument Page: 270 12.2 Distribution over conjunction Page: 275 12.3 Quantification into sentence position Page: 285 12.4 Unanswerable questions Page: 289 12.5 Trans-world knowability Page: 290 Appendix 1 Correlation Coefficients Page: 302 Appendix 2 Counting Iterations of Knowledge Page: 305 Appendix 3 A Formal Model of Slight Insensitivity Almost Everywhere Page: 307 Appendix 4 Iterated Probabilities in Epistemic Logic (Proofs) Page: 311 Appendix 5 A Non-Symmetric Epistemic Model Page: 316 Appendix 6 Distribution over Conjunction Page: 318 Bibliography Page: 321 Index Page: 333 A Page: 333 B Page: 333 C Page: 333 D Page: 334 E Page: 334 F Page: 335 G Page: 335 H Page: 335 I Page: 336 J Page: 336 K Page: 336 L Page: 336 M Page: 337 N Page: 337 O Page: 337 P Page: 337 Q Page: 338 R Page: 338 S Page: 339 T Page: 339 U Page: 340 V Page: 340 W Page: 340 Y Page: 340 Z Page: 340

Description:

Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a fundamental kind of mental stage sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analysing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts light on a wide variety of philosophical issues: the problem of scepticism, the nature of evidence, probability and assertion, the dispute between realism and anti-realism and the paradox of the surprise examination. Williamson relates the new conception to structural limits on knowledge which imply that what can be known never exhausts what is true. The arguments are illustrated by rigorous models based on epistemic logic and probability theory. The result is a new way of doing epistemology for the twenty-first-century.