Timothy Williamson Quotes on Knowledge

Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits (2000) gave Anglophone epistemology its most influential systematic treatment of the past quarter-century. The principal thesis is knowledge first: knowledge is not to be analyzed as justified true belief plus some further condition, in the post-Gettier tradition that has produced ever more elaborate definitions, but is itself a fundamental mental state — the most general factive mental state — in terms of which other epistemological notions (justification, evidence, assertion) should be understood. The framework grounds Williamson's distinctive accounts of evidence (one's evidence is one's knowledge), the safety condition on knowledge (one knows only if one could not easily have been wrong), and the analysis of margin-for-error principles whose iteration generates the well-known anti-luminosity arguments.