Timothy williamson
Timothy Williamson (Uppsala, Sweden, 1955) is a world-renowned epistemologist, philosopher of language, and ontologist, philosophical logician and metaphilosopher. He has held the Wykeham Chair in Logic at the University of Oxford since 2000. After obtaining a BA in mathematics and philosophy and a Ph.D. in philosophy, both from Oxford, he was Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, fellow and tutor at University College, Oxford, and Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh.
Timothy Williamson is the author of Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell 2007), Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford 2013), Doing Philosophy: From Common Curiosity to Logical Reasoning ( Oxford 2018, Paperback Philosophical Method: A Very Short Introduction 2020), Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals (Oxford 2020), (with Paul Boghossian) Debating the A Priori (Oxford 2020), and more than two hundred articles. The texts Williamson on Knowledge and Williamson on Modality contain multi-author essays on their work, as well as Williamson's responses to their comments. So far, his work has been translated into twenty languages.
Timothy Williamson
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Epistemological Ambivalence
Abstract: The lecture will argue that there can be epistemic dilemmas: situations where different epistemic norms conflict, so whatever the agent does will violate at least one of those norms. The norms will be conceived as broadly functional in nature: they are conditions on good cognitive functioning. Some norms are local: they concern particular cognitive acts or states, such as whether a belief is true, or based on good evidence. Other norms are global: they concern cognitive policies, the general well-functioning of a cognitive system. In some situations, local and global norms conflict; what satisfies a local norm violates a global norm, and what satisfies a global norm violates a local norm. Failure to distinguish between local and global aspects of normativity has led to confusion about the nature of rationality.