Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy

Timothy Williamson is Wykeham Professor of Logic Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale University. He has also taught at MIT, Princeton, Edinburgh, Trinity College Dublin, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and elsewhere. He works on logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. His books include Doing Philosophy, Tetralogue, Knowledge and its Limits, Vagueness, The Philosophy of Philosophy, and Suppose and Tell. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Member of the Academia Europaea.

Preface

Chapter 1. Heuristics
1.1 Counterexamples
1.2 What are heuristics?
1.3 The persistence heuristic
1.4 The suppositional heuristic for conditionals
1.5 Disquotation and heuristics for belief ascription
1.6 The weighing heuristic for reasons
1.7 Implications for philosophical methodology

Chapter 2. Overfitting and Degrees of Freedom
2.1 Error-fragility
2.2 Data fitting
2.3 Overfitting in philosophical analysis
2.4 Overfitting in semantics
2.5 Overfitting in logic
2.6 Overfitting in philosophical model-building
2.7 Summing up

Chapter 3. Case Study: Hyperintensionalism
3.1 Two revolutions?
3.2 Extensional, intensional, hyperintensional
3.3 Hyperintensional semantics: impossible worlds
3.4 Hyperintensional semantics: truthmakers
3.5 Hyperintensional semantics: Russellian propositions
3.6 The 'why?' heuristic

Chapter 4. Frege puzzles
4.1 Representational hyperintensionality
4.2 The Fregean consensus
4.3 The failure of the Fregean consensus
4.4 Frege puzzles and synonymy
4.5 Frege puzzles from the inside
4.6 The necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori
4.7 Heuristics for belief ascription
4.8 Heuristics for knowledge ascription
4.9 Evidence
4.10 Probability
4.11 Epistemic and doxastic logic
4.12 Drawing the threads together

Chapter 5. Intensional metametaphysics
5.1 Semantic challenges to metaphysics
5.2 The coarse-grained challenge to metaphysics
5.3 Generalizing the problem
5.4 The metalinguistic strategy
5.5 Reconceiving the problem
5.6 In brief

Bibliography
Index