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One of the central projects in epistemology has traditionally been to give an analysis of the concept of knowledge, i.e. a specification of the necessary and sufficient conditions that determine whether or not someone knows something. Typically, such approaches proceed by trying to analyse knowledge in terms of a combination of truth, belief, and other factors such as a justification. However, in his pioneering book Knowledge and Its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that this explanatory programme should be reversed, developing a conception of epistemology on which knowledge itself is used to explain a variety of other phenomena such as belief, evidence, and assertion. On this picture, knowing is itself a mental state (like believing or imagining) but is a distinctively externalist state since one can only be in the state of knowing a proposition if that proposition is true. Exploring the "knowledge first'' approach to epistemology, Williamson argues for a number of striking claims such as a) that one can know something without being in a position to know that one knows it, b) that we are often in a position to know that we are not being deceived, and c) that our evidence is just what we know. This course will examine the central aspects of Williamson's picture — its motivations, components, and consequences — and assess whether the radical departure from traditional epistemology that he recommends pays dividends, and is furthermore intended to provide a clear introduction to a broad range of central topics in epistemology. The course will be taught in English. |
