At any rate, I enjoy it.
Acknowledgments
First come the acknowledgments from the first edition. My three Blackwell/Brown lectures, given at Brown University in September 2005, constituted the occasion for the book, although the material had evolved considerably since then. I thank both Blackwell Publishing and Brown University for the invitation and their generous hospitality. Jeff Dean at Blackwell was a helpful and supportive editor.
My further debts of gratitude are huge. An earlier version of some of the material was presented as the Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University in July 2005. Various later versions were presented as four Anders Wedberg Lectures at the University of Stockholm in April 2006, where the commentators were Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Sören Häggqvist, Anna-Sara Malmgren, and Åsa Wikforss, as eight José Gaos Lectures at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico in September–October 2006, and as three Carl G. Hempel Lectures at Princeton University in December 2006. Other occasions on which the material in one form or another came under scrutiny included a week-long graduate course at the University of Bologna in May–June 2005, a week-long Kompaktseminar at the University of Heidelberg in February 2006, three lectures I gave as the Townsend Visitor in Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in September 2006, a lecture and workshop at the University of Munich in June 2005, two lectures I gave as Tang Chun-I Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in March 2007, and lectures at a graduate conference on epistemology at the University of Rochester in September 2004, where Richard Feldman was the commentator, the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and a meeting of the Aristotelian Society (my Presidential Address) in October 2004, a workshop on the epistemology of philosophy atthe University of Bristol in May 2005, a conference on philosophical methodology at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in July 2005, a conference on philosophical knowledge in Erfurt, and at Rutgers University in September 2005, the University of Warwick in November 2005, an Arché workshop on modality at the University of St. Andrews in December 2005, a workshop on metaphysics at the University of Nottingham in January 2006, the first conference of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Analytic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leeds in March 2006, the Universities of Turin and Milan, the “Is there anything wrong with Wittgenstein?” conference in Reggio Emilia and the third conference of the Portuguese Society for Analytic Philosophy at the University of Lisbon in June 2006, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association at the University of Southampton in July 2006 (my address as President of the Mind Association), the GAP.6 conference of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy and the subsequent workshop on Implicit Definitions and A Priori Knowledge, where Frank Hofmann was the commentator, at the Free University of Berlin in September 2006, the University of Santiago de Compostela in November 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, for which Gillian Russell was the commentator, in December 2006, the Royal Institute of Philosophy and the University of Calgary in February 2007, and the University of Cambridge in June 2007. I presented still earlier versions of the ideas at a workshop on intuition and epistemology at the University of Fribourg, where Manuel García Carpintero was the commentator, a conference on modalism and mentalism in contemporary epistemology hosted by Aarhus University at the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen, a conference in the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo, which also hosted me for a term of leave in the summer of 2004, a workshop at the University of Amiens on John Cook Wilson and Oxford realism, a conference on externalism, phenomenology, and understanding in memory of Greg McCulloch at the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, a summer school on epistemology at the Sorbonne, and a conference on meaning and truth at St. Andrews, and talks at the universities of Bilkent, Edinburgh, Michigan, Minnesota, Padua, Rijeka, and Stirling. Most of the material had also been presented in classes and discussion groups at Oxford. Much of the development of themes in this book was provoked by reflection on the questions and objections raised on those occasions. It would be hopeless to try to enumerate the questioners and objectors, but they may be able to trace their influence.
Those who had helped with discussion or written comments outside the occasions above include Alexander Bird, Stephan Blatti, Davor Bodrožić, Berit Brogaard, Earl Conee, Keith DeRose, Dorothy Edgington, Pascal Engel, Tamar Szabó Gendler, Olav Gjelsvik, John Hawthorne, Thomas Kroedel, Brian Leftow, Brian Leiter, Peter Lipton, Ofra Magidor, Mike Martin, Nenad Miščević, Michael Pendlebury, Oliver Pooley, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Helge Rückert, Joe Salerno, Laura Schroeter, Nico Silins, Jason Stanley, Scott Sturgeon, Hamid Vahid, Alberto Voltolini, and Ralph Wedgwood. John Hawthorne, Joshua Schechter, and two referees read the book in manuscript and provided comments on which I drew extensively during the final revisions.
That list of acknowledgments is undoubtedly incomplete: special thanks to those who have been undeservedly omitted.
The book was based on a series of articles in which earlier versions of the ideas were formulated, although hardly any pages have survived completely unchanged. Chapters 1 and 2 derive from “Past the Linguistic Turn?,” in The Future for Philosophy, edited by Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 106–28. Most of Chapter 3 was new. The first section of Chapter 3 and much of Chapter 4 constitute an expanded version of “Conceptual Truth,” Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 80 (2006), pp. 1–41, with much subsequent material (for example, on tacit knowledge and on normative conceptions of analyticity); the germ is to be found in “Understanding and Inference,” Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 77 (2003), pp. 249–93. Chapters 5 and 6 derive from an initial sketch in my Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society, “Armchair Philosophy, Metaphysical Modality and Counterfactual Thinking,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, volume 105 (2005): 1–23. An intermediate step on the way to Chapter 5 was “Philosophical Knowledge and Knowledge of Counterfactuals,” Grazer Philosophische Studien, volume 74 (2007): 89–123, also appearing as Philosophical Knowledge – Its Possibility and Scope, edited by Christian Beyer and Alex Burri (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), the proceedings of the Erfurt conference on philosophical knowledge. Chapters 7 and 8 derive from “Philosophical ‘Intuitions’ and Scepticism about Judgement,” Dialectica 58 (2004), pp. 109–53; the volume constitutes the proceedings of the workshop on intuition and epistemology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, in November 2002 (the talk I gave there is not recognizable in this book; I gave it to make myself think seriously about the topic). Chapter 7 in particular was greatly expanded; sections 1 and 7 were new; the probabilistic material in section 4 was expanded from pp. 683–5 of “Knowledge and Scepticism,” The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 681–700. The Afterword is a slightly modified version of “Must Do Better,” in Truth and Realism, edited by Patrick Greenough and Michael Lynch (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2006), pp. 177–87; that volume constitutes the proceedings of the St. Andrews conference on meaning and truth.
The enlarged edition reprints the following previously published pieces, sometimes rearranged; for each, I was the sole author and all required permissions have been obtained, which I hereby acknowledge: “Replies to Kornblith,
