Epistemology In John Williamson's Knowledge And Its Limits

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Williamson in his book Knowledge and It’s Limits primarily seeks to support his novel perspective of “knowledge first” epistemology (v). This approach sets forth the idea that knowledge cannot be analyzed into more basic concepts, such as belief or truth. The basis for this argument is that knowledge is a mental state, and thus it cannot be broken down into the combination of external conditions – like the state of the world such that it makes a proposition true – and internal conditions – like belief in a proposition or the justification of that belief (6). Certainly, Williamson is able to illustrate in his introduction the way in which he equates belief and knowledge as mental states, and refutes the idea that belief is conceptually prior to knowledge. However, Williamson takes the assertion that knowledge is a general factive mental state and supports this claim by offering it as a new approach to epistemology that avoids the problems of trying to analyze knowledge, and instead allows for knowledge to be the central concept used to elucidate others, like justification and eviden...

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