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52Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of ScepticismPhilosophical Review 102 (4): 604. 1993.
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64Groundless belief: an essay on the possibility of epistemologyYale University Press. 1977.Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation.
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78Coherence, Justification, and TruthReview of Metaphysics 34 (2). 1980.THE central idea of modern empiricism has been that, if there is to be such a thing as justification at all, empirical knowledge must be seen as resting on experiential "foundations." To claim that knowledge rests on foundations is to claim that there is a privileged class of beliefs the members of which are "intrinsically credible" or "directly evident" and which are able, therefore, to serve as ultimate terminating points for chains of justification. An important development in current epistem…Read more
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473Why (Wittgensteinian) Contextualism Is Not RelativismEpisteme 4 (1): 93-114. 2007.This article distinguishes Wittgensteinian contextualism from epistemic relativism. The latter involves the view that a belief ’s status as justified depends on the believer’s epistemic system, as well as the view that no system is superior to another. It emerges from the thought that we must rely, circularly, on our epistemic system to determine whether any belief is justified. Contextualism, by contrast, emerges from the thought that we need not answer a skeptical challenge to a belief unless …Read more
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349Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to EpistemologyOxford University Press. 2001.In this exciting and original introduction to epistemology, Michael Williams explains and criticizes traditional philosophical theories of the nature, limits, methods, possibility, and value of knowing. All the main contemporary perspectives are explored and questioned, and the author's own theories put forward, making this new book essential reading for anyone, beginner or specialist, concerned with the philosophy of knowledge.
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248In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.
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22L7 Meaning, truth and normativitylIn Dirk Greimann & Geo Siegwart (eds.), Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 5--377. 2007.
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231Contextualism, externalism and epistemic standardsPhilosophical Studies 103 (1). 2001.I want to discuss an approach to knowledge that I shall call simple conversational contextualism or SCC for short. Proponents of SCC think that it offers an illuminating account of both why scepti- cism is wrong and why arguments for scepticism are so intuitively appealing. I have my doubts
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120Pyrrhonian Skepticism and Two Kinds of KnowledgeInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1 (2): 124-137. 2011.In his Reflective Knowledge, Ernest Sosa offers a theory of knowledge, broadly virtue-theoretic in character, that is meant to transcend simple ways of contrasting "internalist" with "externalist" or "foundationalist" with "coherentist" approaches to knowledge and justification. Getting beyond such simplifications, Sosa thinks, is the key to finding an exit from "the Pyrrhonian Problematic": the ancient and profound skeptical problem concerning the apparent impossibility of validating the reliab…Read more
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6Groundless Belief: An Essay on the Possibility of Epistemology: With a New Preface and AfterwordPrinceton University Press. 1977.Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation. The point of this wider-than-normal usage of the term "phenomenalism," according to which even some forms of direct realism deserve to be called phenomenalistic, is to call attention to important continuities of thought between theories often thought to be competitors. Williams's target is…Read more
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46Understanding Human Knowledge PhilosophicallyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2). 1996.Hume thinks that scepticism is “a malady, which can never be radically cur’d.” By this he means that scepticism is theoretically unassailable. Thus
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8Hume's SkepticismIn John Greco (ed.), The Oxford handbook of skepticism, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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61Wittgenstein on representation, privileged objects and private languageCanadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (March): 57-78. 1983.
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288Pragmatism, Minimalism, ExpressivismInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (3): 317-330. 2010.Although contemporary pragmatists tend to be sympathetic to expressivist accounts of moral, modal and other problematic vocabularies, it is not clear that they have any right to be. The problem arises because contemporary pragmatists tend to favour deflationary accounts of truth and reference, thereby seeming to elide the distinction between expressive and repressentational uses of language. To address this problem, I develop a meta-theoretical framework for understanding what is involved in exp…Read more
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5Descartes' transformation of the sceptical traditionIn Richard Bett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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85The Agrippan argument and two forms of skepticismIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Pyrrhonian skepticism, Oxford University Press. pp. 121--145. 2004.This essay argues that the Pyrrhonian regress argument presupposes a Prior Grounding conception of justification. This is contrasted with a Default and Challenge structure, which leads to a contextualist picture of justification. Contextualism is said to incorporate the best features of its traditionalist rivals — foundationalism and coherentism — and also to avoid skepticism. It is argued that we should not ask which conception is really true, but instead give up epistemological realism.
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104Inference, justification, and the analysis of knowledgeJournal of Philosophy 75 (5): 249-263. 1978.
Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |