On Williamson’s Argument for (I<sub><i>i</i></sub>) in His Anti‐Luminosity Argument

Blackson, Thomas A.

doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2007.00024.x

Cited by 5 publications

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“…In particular, Wong's defence of (MAR) does not appeal to a safety condition on knowledge, which Williamson clearly intends to be part of the justification for (MAR). 6 There is no standard presentation of Williamson's argument in the literature, so (MAR), or its analogues in terms of possible worlds and times (rather than in the terminology of world-bound cases), is variously labelled (I i ) (Williamson 2000;Weatherson 2004;Blackson 2007;Ramachandran 2009); (R) (Vogel 2010); (C) (Wong 2008); (1) (Cohen 2010); and (KMAR) (Zardini forthcoming). I borrow (MAR) from Berker (2008).…”

Section: The Problem With (Mar)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin‐for‐error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires a plausible interpretation of the safety requirement together with other implausible, often soritical, assumptions (Leitgeb ; Weatherson ; Blackson ; Wong ; Berker ; Ramachandran ; Vogel ; Cohen ; Zardini forthcoming). Either way, the margin‐for‐error premise, and thus the anti‐luminosity argument, is in trouble.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… There is no standard presentation of Williamson's argument in the literature, so (MAR), or its analogues in terms of possible worlds and times (rather than in the terminology of world‐bound cases), is variously labelled (I i ) (Williamson ; Weatherson ; Blackson ; Ramachandran ); (R) (Vogel ); (C) (Wong ); (1) (Cohen ); and (KMAR) (Zardini forthcoming). I borrow (MAR) from Berker (). …”

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confidence: 99%

“…This non‐standard distinction has created a lot of confusion about Williamson's argument (e.g. Blackson ). Cf.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Are We Luminous?

Srinivasan

2013

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti‐luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin‐for‐error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin‐for‐error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (and soritical) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin‐for‐error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two‐part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two‐part defence (the first in terms of outright belief, the second in terms of degrees of confidence) are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin‐for‐error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti‐luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous.

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Section: The Problem With (Mar)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This non‐standard distinction has created a lot of confusion about Williamson's argument (e.g. Blackson ). Cf.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Are We Luminous?

Srinivasan

2013

Philos Phenomenol Research

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“…24 24 For example, (Leitgeb, 2002, 202ff. ), (Blackson, 2007, 204–205), (Berker, 2008, §4), (Ramachandran, 2009, §VI), (Cohen, 2010, 726), and (Zardini, 2012, §6ff. ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Some Problems with the Anti‐Luminosity‐Argument

Vanrie

2020

Pacific Philosophical Qtr

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I argue that no successful version of Williamson's anti‐luminosity‐argument has yet been presented, even if Srinivasan's further elaboration and defence is taken into account. There is a version invoking a coarse‐grained safety condition and one invoking a fine‐grained safety condition. A crucial step in the former version implicitly relies on the false premise that sufficient similarity is transitive. I show that some natural attempts to resolve this issue fail. Similar problems arise for the fine‐grained version. Moreover, I argue that Srinivasan's defence of the more contentious fine‐grained safety condition is also unsuccessful, again for similar reasons.

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