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Williamson on Knowledge, Action, and Causation
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Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen
Published/Copyright:
March 19, 2010
Abstract
In his Knowledge and its Limits (2000) Timothy Williamson argues that knowledge can be causally efficacious and as such figure in psychological explanation. His argument for this claim figures as a response to a key objection to his overall thesis that knowing is a mental state. In this paper I argue that although Williamson succeeds in establishing that knowledge in some cases is essential to the power of certain causal explanations of actions, he fails to do this in a way that establishes knowledge itself as a causal factor. The argument thus fails to support his overall claim that knowledge should be conceived as a state of mind.
Published Online: 2010-03-19
Published in Print: 2005-May
© Philosophia Press 2005
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Articles in the same Issue
- Williamson on Knowledge, Action, and Causation
- Standard-relative rationality
- Heidegger's Conscience
- What are performative self-contradictions?
- Mercy and Justice in Criminal Law
- Limited Neutrality
- Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental. A Pragmatic View, Humanity Books, New York, 2003, 390 pp.
- Tuomela, Raimo, The Philosophy of Social Practices – A Collective Acceptance View, Cambridge University Press, 2002, 274 pp. + xi
- Sara Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Lanham Rowman & Littlefield, 2003, 184 pp.
- Review of Lars Bo Gundersen, Dispositional Theories of Knowledge: A Defense of Aetiological Foundationalism, Ashgate Publishers 2003, 150 pp.