I have a paper now available (based on, but not identical to, a paper that Steve Stich and I presented last year at Arche) at Phil Studies in a book symposium on Williamson's The Philosophy of Philosophy, and Williamson's reply is also available. I must say, there are a number of things in it that I don't understand:
- Where Williamson's claims about my claims about what is or isn't "urgent" come from, since as near as I can tell, the question of urgency doesn't arise much in my paper; if anything, I suggest a certain kind of non-urgency, in that I say that it should be legitimate to continue to rely on philosophical intuitions while investigations are ongoing.
- How on earth Williamson's men/women analogy (which was funnier in the original Hofstadter, btw) is supposed to apply to my arguments, since I say very explicitly that such challenges may well apply to the sciences! I claim that the question becomes the difficult one of looking at particulars about what challenges really arise and what different moves might be available to different practices to respond to such challenges; what has to happen next, I claim, would involve a close attention to what really goes on in those different practices. His analogy seems to me baldly inconsistent with what I actually say in, and really I find his misreading very mystifying.
- Why the "if we look at this at the level of 'informal qualitative epistemological judgments', then science and philosophy come out the same" isn't just a straightforward fallacy. (Note that one could say of any bit of belief-formation performed by anyone at any time, that it is an instance of 'human cognition' -- so, by parity of reasoning, how could we fail to credit one piece of human cognition while giving credence to another?)
- How his arguments he offers here are meant to square with his own discussions in the Afterword of his book; as I note, they seem to be offered in very much the same spirit that my own discussion is offered.


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