Why Epistemology Cant be Operationalized


Timothy Williamson 
University of Oxford
Timothy.williamson@philosophy.ox.ac.uk


ABSTRACT: Operational epistemology is, to a first approximation, the
attempt to provide cognitive rules such that one is in principle always
in a position to know whether one is complying with them. In Knowledge
and its Limits, I argue that the only such rules are trivial ones. In
this paper, I generalize the argument in several ways to more thoroughly
probabilistic settings, in order to show that it does not merely
demonstrate some oddity of the folk epistemological conception of
knowledge. Some of the generalizations involve a formal semantic
framework for treating epistemic probabilities of epistemic
probabilities and expectations of expectations. The upshot is that
operational epistemology cannot work, and that knowledge-based
epistemology has the right characteristics to avoid its problems.