Why Williamson should be a sceptic

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 57, Issue 229, 2007, Pages 635-649

  Dodd, Dylan ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949498163     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.500.x     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. What I, following Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford UP, 2000), ch. 10, am calling 'evidential probability' is often called 'epistemic probability'
2. For example, Stewart Cohen thinks he must make this choice. 'The acceptance of fallibilism in epistemology is virtually universal. Any theory of knowledge that endorses the principle that S knows q on the basis of reason r only if r entails q is doomed to a sceptical conclusion. Fallibilist theories reject this entailment principle, thereby avoiding this immediate sceptical result': S. Cohen, 'How to be a Fallibilist', Philosophical Perspectives, 2 (1988), pp. 91-123, at p. 91
3. For Williamson's views on scepticism, see Knowledge and its Limits, ch. 8. The discussions in ch. 11 and in his 'Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism and Knowledge of Knowledge', The Philosophical Quarterly, 55 (2005), pp. 213-35, seem to me to presuppose anti-scepticism
4. For Williamson's defence of (A), which is similar to the one offered here but more elaborate, see Knowledge and its Limits, pp. 203-7
5. Many Bayesians assume that experience cannot raise the probability of a proposition up to I, for they think it is a requirement of rationality that a subject never has the highest degree of belief in any contingent proposition. For a discussion and criticism of this Bayesian requirement, see A. Hájek, 'Interpretations of Probability', in E.N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition), http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2003/entries/probability-interpret
6. Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits, pp. 213-21
7. See Klein, Certainty: a Refutation of Scepticism (Minnesota UP, 1981)
8. and 'Scepticism and Closure: Why the Evil Genius Argument Fails', Philosophical Topics, 23 (1995), pp. 213-36
9. Klein, 'Scepticism and Closure', pp. 219-21
10. Dretske, 'Epistemic Operators', Journal of Philosophy, 67 (1970), pp. 1007-23
11. This feature of Klein's view is criticized by A. Brueckner, 'Klein on Closure and Scepticism', Philosophical Studies, 98 (2000), pp. 139-51, at pp. 142-6. The argument against Klein's view which I am about to give borrows heavily from Brueckner's discussion
12. See J. Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries (Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 1-2
13. I am grateful to Anthony Brueckner, Yual Chiek, Aaron Zimmerman and two anonymous referees for discussion and feedback on previous versions