Taking knowledge as a starting point › A True Answer Can Still Be a Guess

Imagine that a colleague asks whether a report has been submitted. You say yes. Perhaps you watched the successful submission and checked the receipt. Perhaps you merely hoped someone had done it. In both versions the report really has been submitted, and you believe that it has. Yet your colleague has good reason to care which version occurred. The truth of your answer does not settle whether you knew it.

One philosophical approach starts with that contrast and asks what must be added to true belief to produce knowledge. Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits proposes reversing the investigation. Knowledge should help us understand belief, evidence, and justification, rather than receive its definition from a combination of those concepts. This is the central proposal of knowledge-first epistemology. The book was first published in 2000; the Oxford online edition is dated 2002. Williamson's Oxford bibliography and the publisher's account of the book distinguish those reference points.

The reversal is demanding because knowledge seems harder to establish than belief. You can sincerely report your conviction and still be wrong about whether you know. Williamson accepts that difficulty. His project asks whether a good theory of knowledge must begin with a state whose presence we can always recognize. The book's account of the limits of self-knowledge challenges that requirement.