Epistemicism

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http://youtube.com/watch?v=gFeFgIsaPsM

Title: Epistemicism • Speaker: Prof. Timothy Williamson (Oxford University, UK) • Time: 2021-11-13, 18:30-21:00, Beijing time (UTC+8) • Chair: Prof. Yong CHENG (School of Philosophy, Wuhan University) • Interlocutor: Professor Wenfang WANG (School of Philosophy and Social Development, Shandong University) • • Abstract: • This lecture is related to my second book, Vagueness (1994). I will explain the problem of vagueness in all thought and talk and why it is significant for logic, semantics, the philosophy of language, and even computer science. I will explain two popular approaches to the problem, known as ‘fuzzy logic’ and ‘supervaluationism’, which both involve revisions of classical logic, and why they do not provide satisfactory solutions. In particular, I will discuss the difficulties raised by the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness. I will then explain how my own approach, epistemicism, solves the problem while preserving classical logic by predicting and explaining the phenomena of vagueness on epistemological grounds, in terms of a safety condition on knowledge. In the final part of the lecture, I will discuss some of my more recent work on vagueness, concerning the ‘tolerance principles’ which generate sorites paradoxes, and explain their apparent plausibility by their role as efficient but imperfectly reliable heuristics for applying vague terms.

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