Knowing and Believing, Acting and Intending

Conférence en anglais.

The lecture will develop and refine an analogy between knowledge and action (intentional doing). The general schema is: knowledge is to belief as action is to intention. The analogy reverses direction of fit: the former side should fit mind to world; the latter should fit world to mind. The knowledge/belief side of the analogy corresponds to the inputs to practical reasoning, the action/intention side to its output. Insofar as desire is an input to practical reasoning, it belongs to the former side (the desire-as-belief thesis is considered sympathetically). When all goes globally well with practical reasoning, one acts on what one knows. Beliefs play the same local role as knowledge, and intentions the same local role as action, in practical reasoning. This is the appropriate setting in which to understand knowledge norms for belief and practical reasoning. Marginalizing knowledge in epistemology is as perverse as marginalizing action in the philosophy of action.

Timothy Williamson

Timothy Williamson has been the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford since 2000. His main research interests are in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is the author of Identity and Discrimination (Blackwell 1990, updated edition 2013), Vagueness (Routledge 1994), Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford 2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (Blackwell 2007), Modal Logic as Metaphysics (Oxford 2013), Tetralogue (Oxford 2015) and about two hundred articles. Williamson on Knowledge, edited by Patrick Greenough and Duncan Pritchard (Oxford 2009) contains fifteen critical essays on his work and his replies. A similar volume, Williamson on Modality (Routledge), edited by Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, is also in preparation.

Professor Williamson was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1955. After an undergraduate degree in mathematics and philosophy and a doctorate in philosophy, both at Oxford, he was a lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, a fellow and tutor at University College Oxford, and Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a visiting professor at MIT and Princeton, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), a visiting scholar at the centre for advanced study in Oslo, a Nelson distinguished professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a Townsend Visitor at Berkeley and Tang Chun-I visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Williamson gave a Henriette Hertz lecture at the British Academy in 1996, the 1998 Weatherhead Lecture in Philosophy of Language at Tulane, the 2001 Jacobsen Lecture in London, the 2004 Skolem Lecture in Oslo, the 2005 Jack Smart Lecture in Canberra, the 2005 Blackwell Brown Lectures at Brown University, the 2006 Wedberg Lectures in Stockholm, the 2006 Gaos Lectures in Mexico City, the Hempel Lectures at Princeton in 2006, the 2009 Amherst Lecture in Philosophy, the 2010 Mesthene Lecture at Rutgers, the 2012 Ortlieb Lecture at Claremont, the 2012 Petrus Hispanus Lectures in Lisbon, the 2012 George Myro Lecture at Berkeley, the 2013 Hägerstrom Lectures in Uppsala, the 2013 Kim Young-Jung Lectures at Seoul National University and a Nanqiang Lecture at Xiamen University in 2014. In 2015 he will give the Bergmann Lecture at the University of Iowa. For 2009-12 he held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. He has been President of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association and Vice-President of the British Logic Colloquium. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, a member of the Academia Europaea, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College Oxford. He is the Nelson Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for periods in 2013-15 and will be a visiting professor at Yale for four weeks in each of 2016 and 2017.