Abstract
Timothy Williamson has proposed that we should give a ‘knowledge first’ twist to David Lewis’s account of content, maintaining that for P to be the content of one’s belief is for P to be the content that would be attributed by an idealized interpreter working under certain constraints, and that the fundamental constraint on interpretation is a principle of knowledge maximization. According to this principle, an interpretation is correct to the extent that it maximizes the number of knowledgeable judgments the subject comes out as making. Here I will argue against knowledge maximization and two fallback positions suggested by Williamson’s discussion. Williamson intends the principle of knowledge maximization to form the basis of an argument against a certain sort of skepticism about judgment. In the final section I argue that the kind of general response to judgment skepticism envisaged by Williamson is neither desirable nor necessary.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
As emphasized to me by Mark Sainsbury and a referee. See Sainsbury (2005, Chap. 4) for relevant discussion.
It is worth noting that Williamson’s discussion hints at one response he might make to the worry. He suggests in one place that the force of single examples for a holist is that they can show that a proposed constraint on interpretation has implausible consequences concerning which interpretation is defeasibly favored by a given case (see Williamson 2007, p. 265). More needs to be said to flesh this out if it’s to silence the objection, and I won’t pursue the issue further here.
It is worth noting that Williamson has recently offered a formulation of safety which is identical to Safety, except that, in line with the version of safety he defends in Knowledge and its Limits, it is close cases—centered worlds, in David Lewis’s terminology—rather than simply close worlds that are deemed relevant to whether one’s belief counts as safe. See Williamson (2009a, p. 325).
See Sainsbury (2005) for an attractive alternative.
A referee has suggested an interesting variant of this second fallback position. Recall Williamson’s claim, discussed above: ‘Roughly: a causal connection to an object (property, relation, …) is a channel for reference to it only if it is a channel for the acquisition of knowledge about the object (property, relation, …)’ (2007, p. 264). We might accept that Hallucinogen provides a counterexample to this claim, but advance a related claim about causal connection types in its place: roughly, a causal connection type to some objects (properties, relations, …) is a channel for reference to those objects (properties, relations, …) only if it is a channel for the acquisition of knowledge about those objects (properties, relations, …). If I’ve understood it, the suggestion is now that a causal connection type can count as a channel for the acquisition of knowledge so long knowledge is acquired via its tokens in normal cases. That’s compatible with Hallucinogen, if we grant both that it’s an abnormal case, and that the token causal connection in the example is a token of a type that is a channel for knowledge, in the proposed sense. It’s not at all clear that my objection in the text to Williamson’s own version of the fallback applies with the same degree of force here; perhaps a presumption is generated that our beliefs are normally knowledgeable, and perhaps we should allow that this would be a significant victory against the judgment sceptic (though see the next section for doubts about Williamson’s whole strategy here). But I have some misgivings about the proposal. First, as the referee points out, we might well wonder how we are to determine which causal connection type is relevant in a given case, and in particular whether we can do so in a way that let’s us avoid getting snagged in analogues of precisely the difficulties that Williamson takes to scupper an unadorned causal theory of reference, or whether we have enabled ourselves to say something more informative about which causal connection tokens are reference relations only by assuming we have an independent grasp on which causal relation types are relevant to reference. Second, we need some control on the notion of normality in play here, since if the normal cases are characterized with reference to those in which knowledge is acquired, the proposal seems rather empty and ad hoc.
The qualification ‘typically’ is to leave room for eliminativist materialism—there is a manifest awkwardness in taking this to be a form of judgment skepticism in Williamson’s sense, since this kind of skepticism presupposes rather than denies the existence of judgments.
Williamson recognizes a role for naturalness, of the sort familiar from Lewis (1974) and elsewhere, in determining the reference relation, and he suggests that this ‘holds the anti-skeptical effect of knowledge maximization within reasonable limits’ (2007, p. 268). But the worry Williamson is responding to here is that knowledge maximization might force us to interpret Stone Age people as talking and thinking about quantum mechanics, as this interpretation might have them come out as expressing more knowledge than one that has them believing and asserting the (presumably false) theories of the world in currency at that time. The appeal to naturalness isn’t enough to escape the present worry, however. Naturalness may ensure that we don’t interpret Stone Age people as believing aspects of contemporary quantum theory, but it can’t help ensure that we do, despite being constrained to maximize knowledge, interpret them as believing the largely false theories of the day.
As Unger argued in Ignorance (1975).
References
Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78, 67–90.
Davidson, D. (1983). A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In D. Henrich (Ed.), Kant oder Hegel? (pp. 423–438). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Grandy, R. (1973). Reference, meaning, and belief. Journal of Philosophy, 70, 439–452.
Hawthorne, J. (2004). Knowledge and lotteries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horgan, T. (1995). Transvaluationism: A Dionysian approach to vagueness. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 33(supplement), 97–126.
Lewis, D. (1969). Convention: A philosophical study. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lewis, D. (1974). Radical interpretation. Synthese, 23, 331–344.
Lewis, D. (1975). Languages and language. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 12, 3–35.
Martin, M. G. F. (2009). Reupholstering a discipline: Comments on Williamson. Philosophical Studies, 145, 445–453.
Pritchard, D. (2009). Safety-based epistemology: Whither now? Journal of Philosophical Research, 34, 33–45.
Sainsbury, R. M. (1997). Easy possibilities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57, 907–919.
Sainsbury, R. M. (2005). Reference without referents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Unger, P. (1975). Ignorance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weatherson, B. (2004). Luminous margins. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 82, 373–383.
Williamson, T. (1996). Knowing and asserting. Philosophical Review, 105, 489–523.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williamson, T. (2004). Philosophical ‘Intuition’ and skepticism about judgment. Dialectica, 58, 109–153.
Williamson, T. (2007). The philosophy of philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Williamson, T. (2009a). Replies to critics. In P. Greenough & D. Pritchard (Eds.), Williamson on knowledge (pp. 282–384). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williamson, T. (2009b). Replies to Ichikawa, Martin and Weinberg. Philosophical Studies, 145, 465–476.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to audiences at the University of Texas at Austin, the Northern Institute of Philosophy, and the 2010 Episteme conference at the University of Edinburgh, as well as to Ray Buchanan, Brian Cutter, Josh Dever, Richard Heck, Bryan Pickel, and Crispin Wright. Particular thanks are owed to Mark Sainsbury, David Sosa, and a very helpful referee for this journal.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McGlynn, A. Interpretation and knowledge maximization. Philos Stud 160, 391–405 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9725-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9725-2