Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 8th, 2012
I’m re-reading Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits for a reading group at UBC. I’m struck by this passage, from the introduction to Chapter 9 on Evidence. [W]e may speculate that standard accounts of justification have failed to deal convincingly with the traditional problem the regress of justifications—what justifies the justifiers?—because they have forbidden themselves to [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 24th, 2010
I’ve just completed a draft of a new paper on modals and modal epistemology, developing some of the ideas in my last few blog posts, and engaging with Timothy Williamson’s discussion of counterfactuals and modal epistemology. Here’s the abstract: Modals and Modal Epistemology Abstract. I distinguish (§§1-2) two projects in modal epistemology, and suggest (§3) [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 19th, 2010
This post is an exercise in Williamson exegesis. I’m looking primarily at chapter five — the modal epistemology chapter — of The Philosophy of Philosophy. (That chapter substantially overlaps a couple of earlier papers as well.) As many readers will know, Williamson emphasises the equivalence of claims of metaphysical modality with particular counterfactuals (such as the [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 8th, 2010
I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’ says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 16th, 2009
Timothy Williamson has famously defended these two claims: (1) Knowledge cannot be analyzed (2) Knowledge can play lots of important explanatory roles all over the place These two claims, if true, give us reason to think about the role of knowledge very differently; use it to explain things, instead, of as something we’re trying to [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual, (2009) Philosophical Studies, 145(3), September 2009: 435-443. Please refer to published version here. For a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy. See also Williamson’s response here. I criticize Timothy Williamson’s characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. (2009) Philosophical Studies 142 (2), January 2009: 221-246. Please refer to published version, available online here. What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this [...]