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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 391-405 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Philosophical Studies |
| Volume | 160 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 9 Apr 2011 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2012 |
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Keywords
- interpretation
- reference
- content
- knowledge
- skepticism