Luminosity Regained

Berker, Selim

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Luminosity Regained

Selim Berker

March 2008, Volume 8, No. 2, pp. 1-22

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0008.002

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Abstract

The linchpin of Williamson (2000)'s radically externalist epistemological program is an argument for the claim that no non-trivial condition is luminous-that no non-trivial condition is such that whenever it obtains, one is in a position to know that it obtains. I argue that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument succeeds only if one assumes that, even in the limit of ideal reflection, the obtaining of the condition in question and one's beliefs about that condition can be radically disjoint from one another. However, no self-respecting defender of the luminosity of the mental would ever make such an assumption. Thus Williamson can only secure his controversial claims in epistemology by taking for granted certain equally controversial claims in the philosophy of mind. What emerges is that the best bet for defending an internalist epistemology against Williamson's attack is to take there to be a tight, intimate connection between (to take one example) our experiences and our beliefs upon reflection about the obtaining of those experiences, or between (to take another example) the rationality of our beliefs and our beliefs upon reflection about the rationality of those beliefs.

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Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument forms the backbone of Knowledge and Its Limits: not only does he take it to show that no non-trivial condition is luminous, but he also uses the argument (or variants of it) to reply to an important objection to his claim that knowledge is a mental state (ch. 4); to contest Dummett’s argument for an anti-realist theory of meaning (ch. 4); to argue against a version of the KK-principle according to which one is always in a position to know when one knows a given proposition (ch. 5); to provide a solution to the surprise-examination paradox (ch. 6); to rebut any argument for skepticism about the external world that assumes that we and the envatted versions of ourselves possess the same evidence (ch. 8); and to buttress his claim that our evidence is all and only what we know (ch. 9). Moreover, similar uses of a safety requirement on knowledge to derive margin-for-error principles play a crucial role in Williamson’s theory of vagueness. And more generally, Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument constitutes a novel way of criticizing a venerable philosophical tradition — a way which Williamson uses to lay the foundation for a radical new theory of (as he puts it) knowledge and its limits.

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