Williamson’s Woes

Abstract

This is a reply to Timothy Williamson’s paper ‘Tennant’s Troubles’. It defends against Williamson’s objections the anti-realist’s knowability principle based on the author’s ‘local’ restriction strategy involving Cartesian propositions, set out in The Taming of the True. Williamson’s purported Fitchian reductio, involving the unknown number of books on his table, is analyzed in detail and shown to be fallacious. Williamson’s attempt to cause problems for the anti-realist by means of a supposed rigid designator generates a contradiction with arithmetic right away, upon instantiating the obviously relevant theorem that every natural number is provably odd or provably even. The paper also explains and formulates a globally restricted knowability principle, which likewise blocks the attempted reductio.