Is philosophy really just wordplay, or can thought experiments and counterfactuals tell us something substantive about reality?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Timothy Williamson is Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, and his research focuses primarily on epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.
2. Interview Summary
Timothy Williamson opens by pushing back on the idea that metaphysics (or philosophy more generally) is mostly verbal or merely “about language.” His main move is to emphasize how deeply philosophy overlaps with neighboring disciplines—especially in theoretical areas—so that many of the questions philosophers ask are continuous with questions scientists and mathematicians ask about reality (not just about words). He also argues that “linguistic” or “purely conceptual” approaches didn’t deliver a stable way to cordon off a special, non-substantive class of philosophical problems, since that project depends on contentious assumptions about concepts, meaning, and rules of language that were never adequately worked out.
On the frequent charge that philosophy relies on a mysterious faculty of “intuition,” Williamson tries to demystify what’s going on in thought experiments. Using a classic Gettier-style example (a person forms a justified true belief by glancing at a stopped clock that luckily reads the correct time), he says our verdicts aren’t occult or uniquely philosophical—rather, they’re ordinary judgments we’d happily make if we observed the situation in real life. He then suggests that “intuition,” in a psychologically respectable sense, is just judgment without conscious step-by-step reflection—and that all reasoning ultimately depends on lots of such judgments (including perception and even the micro-steps in calculation), so philosophy isn’t unusually “intuition-driven,” even if it makes these background judgments more explicit.
The discussion then turns to counterfactual conditionals, where Williamson resists a “pure supposition” picture on which the antecedent alone fixes whether the consequent holds. He emphasizes that counterfactual evaluation typically depends on substantial (often implicit) background information—sometimes including laws of nature in deterministic settings—and we’re frequently not in a position to state precisely what background we’re holding fixed, even if our counterfactual judgments are still stable and useful. He also notes that counterfactuals can be grounded in imaginative “fantasy” scenarios (e.g., a tiger in the room) rather than strict hold-fixed-from-actuality constraints, which highlights how context supplies assumptions that may resist full formulation. Framing all this is a broader methodological theme: we shouldn’t treat the limits of what we can vividly picture as the limits of what’s real—an attitude he recommends for logic as much as for physics.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - How substantive is philosophy
06:23 - Verbal disputes
10:24 - Intuitions
17:36 - Philosophy too reliant on intuitions?
22:59 - Intuitions in philosophy vs. elsewhere
25:33 - Intuitions as arbitrary?
29:21 - Suppositional view of subjunctives
31:57 - Fixed background
34:50 - Evaluating counterfactuals
36:30 - Counterfactuals as context-sensitive
38:41 - Shifting contexts or shifting antecedents?
40:53 - Counterpossibles
48:36 - Explanatory weakness
50:55 - Nonclassical logics
56:52 - Theoretical virtues of logics
58:10 - Simplicity
1:00:24 - Necessitism
1:00:50 - Possible objects and logic
1:03:18 - Understanding possible objects
1:07:23 - Imagining non-concrete objects
1:09:37 - Resolving the dispute
1:13:18 - Basic intuitions
1:14:33 - Epistemic contextualism
1:19:23 - Tracking contexts
1:21:20 - Different knowledge concepts?
1:27:37 - Value of philosophy
1:33:27 - Conclusion
