Dancy on Acting for the Right Reason

Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2008)

Why Williamson should be a sceptic

Philosophical Quarterly

Timothy Williamson's epistemology leads to a fairly radical version of scepticism. According to him, all knowledge is evidence. It follows that if S knows p, the evidential probability for S that p is 1. I explain Williamson's infallibilist account of perceptual knowledge, contrasting it with Peter Klein's, and argue that Klein's account leads to a certain problem which Williamson's can avoid. Williamson can allow that perceptual knowledge is possible and that all knowledge is evidence, while at the same time avoiding Klein's problem. But while Williamson can allow that we know some things through experience, there are very many things he must say we cannot know. Given just how very many these are, he should be considered a sceptic.

How Basic is the Basic Revisionary Argument?

Co-authored with Luca Incurvati

Perceiving Temporal Properties

forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy (submitted version, please do not quote)

The Indexicalty of 'Knowledge'

published in 'Philosophical Studies', 2008.

Epistemic contextualism—the view that the content of the predicate ‘know’ can change with the context of utterance—has fallen into considerable disrepute recently. Many theorists have raised doubts as to whether ‘know’ is context-sensitive, typically basing their arguments on data suggesting that ‘know’ behaves semantically and syntactically in a way quite different from recognised indexicals such as ‘I’ and ‘here’ or ‘flat’ and ‘empty’. This paper takes a closer look at three pertinent objections of this kind, viz. at what I call the Error-Theory Objection, the Gradability Objection and the Clarification-Technique Objection. The paper concludes that none of these objections can provide decisive evidence against contextualism.