Philosophy Dept Colloquium: Timothy Williamson (Yale and Oxford)
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Location: WLH 208
Title: “Why Knowledge is First”
Abstract:
Knowledge is not exclusive to humans. Non-human animals have it too, and obtain it in some of the same ways as humans do. Indeed, knowledge is central to intelligent life. Contrary to the twentieth-century tradition of understanding knowledge in terms of belief, belief should be understood in terms of knowledge. This priority holds from both the theorist’s and the agent’s perspective. I will explain why the distinction between knowledge and ignorance is easier to grasp than the distinction between true and false belief, and why mindreading others start from the default that the world is open to view. Although cases of justified true belief without knowledge have been thought to show that ‘knowledge’ is a very sophisticated and complex category, I will explain how such cases arise naturally for very simple ways of tracking knowledge.
