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It was Marissa Koors, Philosophy editor at Wiley-Blackwell, who in 2018 proposed renewing The Philosophy of Philosophy in a second edition, with extra material on developments since 2007, when the book was first published. I liked the idea, without feeling tempted to rewrite the first edition. Since its publication, I have continued to stand behind all its main ideas and most of the details. In subsequent writings, I have further clarified and developed its lines of thought, responded to critics, and filled in omissions. However, those later pieces were scattered about, hard to survey and in some cases hard to find even for me, let alone anyone else. It may be helpful for readers to have all this material collected together into one volume, constituting a more comprehensive philosophy of philosophy, with replies to the sorts of questions and objections it tends to provoke.

My other projects delayed work on the second edition for over two years. This preface, written in the Oxford of 2020, under partial lockdown as a result of Covid-19, is an opportunity to look back, and forward, in briefly introducing the new material.

The most constructive additions are Sections 9.1–9.4, four essays that substantially extend the first edition’s picture of philosophy, both its methods and its recent history. Each was written not so much as a contribution to an ongoing conversation as an attempt to start a new one. Those attempts already seem to be succeeding. Section 1, “Widening the picture,” explains the topics of the new conversations, and how I came to be interested in them.

The other new sections, most of them quite short, and some of them quite polemical, were all written in something more like response-mode. Thus the distribution of topics in them is some evidence of what was happening in the philosophy of philosophy in the years after the publication of the first edition. The two response-mode sections of full article length, Sections 10.2 and 10.4, are defenses of armchair philosophy against attacks from “experimental philosophers.” Of the shorter sections, twenty were my invited replies to book symposia on the first edition, in Analysis, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Analisi (the bulletin of SIFA, the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy), and the Croatian Journal of Philosophy, and to a symposium in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (Moscow) on a paper in which I briefly summarized my updated view of philosophical methods (2019c).¹ Another five short sections originated as book reviews invited for The Times Literary Supplement, Philosophy, the European Journal of Philosophy, and The Journal of Philosophy. One commentary (14.5) originated in an invitation to review a large group of works of popular philosophy collectively for The Times Literary Supplement, another (14.6) in an invitation to contribute to the blog Daily Nous. Section 11.5 developed out of an invited reply for the New York Times’ philosophy blog “The Stone” to a defense of naturalism by Alex Rosenberg against my original post, out of which developed Section 11.4, itself provoked by “naturalist” responses to the first edition. I usually accept invitations to contribute to symposia on my books and articles, and to review books on topics on which I am currently working, though for many years my policy has been not write unsolicited replies to reviews or criticisms of my work; life is too short. Thus the balance of topics discussed in the additional response-mode sections is not an artefact of my selection.

All the sections have been written to be readable by themselves, which occasionally involves some local repetition. The response-mode material is overtly one-sided, since it includes only my half of each exchange – altogether, with nearly thirty philosophers, based in Australia, Canada, Croatia, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Of course, to judge properly whether I have been fair to my interlocutors, readers will have to read their side too. In any case, I am deeply grateful to all those who have spent so much time and effort carefully reading my work and articulating their responses.

In contrast to the first edition, the additional material is designed to be read selectively, according to the reader’s interests. It also varies in how wide a readership it was written for, depending on its original place of publication, another dimension on which readers may wish to choose. But the underlying view of philosophy is the same throughout.

Sections 2 to 5 of this Preface briefly introduce the new response-mode material. Section 1 concerns the more spontaneous sections.

1. Widening the picture

My deepest instincts about the nature of philosophy have changed little over my career. For instance, I recall thinking as an undergraduate that transposing philosophical questions from the material to the formal mode, Carnap’s way of unmasking them as inviting linguistic decisions, really just disguised quite intelligible non-linguistic questions behind linguistic masks. Taken all the way, the “Linguistic Turn” struck me as in practice not clarifying but obscuring. Such critical instincts are manifest in The Philosophy of Philosophy.

However, soon after the book was published, I started to regret not having said more in it about aspects of philosophy which had long mattered greatly to me, but had been occluded by my more urgent preoccupations in writing the book. One such occluded topic was the abductive nature of theory choice, in philosophy as it should be, and to some extent in philosophy as it is. Just like theories in natural science, philosophical theories can be compared for fit with the evidence –both their consistency with it and their ability to bring it under illuminating and powerful generalizations – but also for strength, in the sense of informativeness, and for simplicity, elegance, and avoidance of the ad hoc. The method is sometimes called inference to the best explanation, though philosophical explanations are constitutive rather than causal. The first edition is quite consistent with the abductive aspect of philosophy, which is implicit in the chapter on evidence in philosophy, but somehow it remained in the background.² The omission was brought home to me when I gave a week-long colloquium based on the book at the University of Göttingen in 2009, invited by the students: I found myself answering question after question with reference to the role of abduction in philosophy, and wondering why I had not said more about it in the book itself. For the abductive aspect of philosophy was nothing new to me. During my doctoral studies at Oxford in 1976–1980, my closest friend amongst my fellow graduate students in philosophy was Peter Lipton, whose DPhil thesis later turned into his classic treatment Inference to the Best Explanation.³ The relevance of the topic to assessing philosophical theories was salient to me even then. In my book Vagueness, the overall case for classical logic was fundamentally abductive (e.g. 1994a: 186). In this second edition, the additional Section 9.2, “Abductive Philosophy,” fills this gap in the first edition; Section 9.5 briefly responds to some criticisms of the approach.⁴

Another omission was the methodology of model-building. I had started thinking seriously about it thanks to having the economist Hyun Song Shin as a colleague at University College Oxford in 1990–1994, trained in philosophy too, with a degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) from Oxford. We shared an interest in epistemic logic, on which we published two joint papers (Shin and Williamson 1994, 1996). Our collaboration gave me fascinating experience of the differences in research culture between two disciplines when dealing with the same phenomena, in this case knowledge and ignorance of one’s own or another’s knowledge and ignorance. As an economist, he was used to a model-building approach, on which models are assumed from the outset to involve drastic simplifications of the reality under study, so that a mere discrepancy between model and reality is not news, and just pointing it out is not considered a significant intellectual contribution. Rather, what displaces a model is a better model. He once remarked to me, of Gettier’s seminal paper (1963) refuting the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief by counterexamples, that in economics it would have been considered unpublishable. As a philosopher, used to treating counterexamples as the gold standard, I was shocked. Did these economists not care about truth? On second thoughts, however, I realized that the model-building methodology was just as oriented towards truth as the potentially naïve falsificationism of conjectures and refutations by counterexamples (thought experiments), though in a subtler and less direct way. One of our joint papers used an explicitly model-building methodology, and it was employed in an increasingly prominent role in some of my own publications from that period on.⁵ “Must Do Better,” the Afterword to the first edition, recommends the use of mathematical models to test philosophical ideas (293, this volume), though without discussing such methods in detail. Later reflection on the nature of progress in philosophy convinced me that, like progress in natural science, much of it takes the form of building better and better models of the phenomena under study, rather than discovering exceptionless universal laws, and that failure to recognize the model-building methodology is one of the reasons for widespread overestimation of the difference between philosophy and natural science. In that respect, the additional Section 9.3, “Model-Building in Philosophy,” goes far beyond the first edition, while Section 9.6 briefly considers a proposed alternative.⁶

A recent side interest, which played no role in the first edition, has been the surprisingly effective dialectical role of moral and political considerations in philosophical debates which seem to have nothing specifically to do with the moral or political – for example, over general relativism, general skepticism, and general internalism in epistemology. The story of how I first came to notice this phenomenon tempts me into a digression.

As a graduate student at Oxford, I used to attend meetings of the Radical Philosophy group, associated with the journal Radical Philosophy. In practice, what was philosophically radical about it was its rejection (and often ignorance) of analytic philosophy, in favor of just about anything which then counted as “continental” – they discussed Nietzsche, Saussure, Althusser, Derrida, the more arid parts of Foucault’s corpus, and so on, with varying degrees of reverence. The “analytic”-“continental” distinction cut at an obvious joint in the sociology of philosophy, however artificial it may have been in other respects. I experimented with those alternative traditions because I felt oppressed by the style and assumptions of the kind of analytic philosophy then most fashionable in Oxford, and hoped that I might find different ideas for use in my own work. I didn’t get much out of the experiments, though I enjoyed reading Nietzsche and Saussure. I came to realize that those who led the discussion often understood the obscure texts they talked about no more clearly than I did, although they certainly had a far more extensive acquaintance with them than mine, and were willing to “go on in the same way” as their authors. On the rare occasions when I asked a question or made an objection, they never seemed in danger of getting the point. There were one or two exceptions, fully open to rational discussion of ideas from both sides of the divide – one was Michael Rosen, now at Harvard. After I had left Oxford for my first proper teaching job, at Trinity College Dublin, I felt liberated to discover that what had really oppressed me about the then-predominant style of Oxford philosophy was not that it was too analytic but that it was not analytic enough. However, one of the things I did learn from my Oxford experience of Radical Philosophy was this: within such an intellectual world, much of the resistance to the relativist-sounding extremes of Post-Modernism came from Marxists and others on the far Left, who feared relativism as a threat to their political hopes. How far will those who view the case for revolution from a relativist stance commit to the revolutionary cause? In that world, objections to relativism from common sense, natural science, or logic had much less credibility. Later, while in Dublin (1980–1988), I was intrigued to hear from a talk by Richard Kearney (now at Boston College) of Richard Rorty describing absolutism about justice as much harder to give up than absolutism about truth. I was never tempted to give up either, but I could imagine how someone more concerned with morality and politics than with logic might feel that way.

I did nothing with those thoughts at the time, but they stayed with me. Much more recently, in responding to Paul Boghossian’s epistemological internalism, I found myself objecting that it counts as justified (though false) a consistent neo-Nazi’s belief that he ought to kill members of a target group, and wondering whether such a view would also count as justified (though wrong) his acting on that belief (Boghossian and Williamson 2020). That got me thinking more carefully about why emotive cases are dialectically effective, and whether invoking them is some kind of cheat. That is an obvious danger, especially in the current philosophical climate, where morally or politically wrong-footing one’s opponent is all too often used as a convenient excuse for not engaging properly with their arguments or objections. Nevertheless, I came to the conclusion that it is legitimate to use such examples in order to make vivid the practical consequences of a philosophical theory, especially one which had seemed to have none. The justification of belief and the justification of action should not be treated as orthogonal issues: the considerations for and against internalism are similar in the two cases, and after all the distinguishing mark of a belief is the agent’s willingness to act on it. The additional Section 9.4, “Morally Loaded Cases in Philosophy,” encapsulates my reflections on these issues.

The Preface to the first edition starts by expressing my long-held view that the self-images then salient for contemporary philosophy failed to fit its actual development over the preceding decades. The book aimed to help put that right. I had also long been aware of a related strangely growing gap in the historiography of analytic philosophy. When I started as an undergraduate at Oxford in 1973, historical narratives of analytic philosophy tended to stop the story around 1960. Naturally, I expected that, as time went on, the lag between the time of writing and the end of the period written about in narratives of analytic philosophy would remain roughly constant. It did not happen. Thirty years later, historical narratives of analytic philosophy still tended to stop the story around 1960. Although that generalization is not exceptionless, there really was very little serious historical work on post-1960 developments in analytic philosophy. The time lag was far longer than needed to gain some historical perspective on the past – it was far shorter for serious historical work on post-1960 (and indeed post-1989) developments in politics, society, and culture. Many younger philosophers felt that Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others had effected a revolution in philosophy after 1960. I found it frustrating that no one seemed interested in achieving a proper historical understanding of so significant a change.

It was as though such a revolution was not supposed to happen. Whether historians of analytic philosophy preferred its logical positivist or its ordinary language strand, its predicted further development would not be in the direction of pre-Kantian metaphysics. From an older perspective, philosophers such as Kripke and Lewis looked like anomalies, anachronisms, to be swept away by the zeitgeist, unworthy of serious historical treatment. Instead, the opposite happened. Their ways of doing philosophy gradually prevailed, to an extent increasingly hard to marginalize historically, whether one approved of them or not. The first edition of this book was obviously a product of that turn in philosophy, but did not say very much about its history.

Some years later, the historian of philosophy Miroslava Trajkovski encouraged me to give a talk at the University of Belgrade, to help bring later developments in analytic philosophy alive for her students by drawing on my personal acquaintance with many of the protagonists. I used the opportunity to reflect historically on the transition from linguistic philosophy to contemporary metaphysics, and describe how it felt to one person at the time. The result was my article “How did we get here from there? The transformation of analytic philosophy”, now included as the additional Section 9.1. It is not meant as a work of serious historical scholarship, but rather as a provocation to others to produce such works on post-1960 developments in analytic philosophy. Indeed, things had already begun to improve in that respect. Such historiography is now flourishing. For example, the massive influence of David Lewis has become well-recognized, and his key role in the history of post-1960 analytic philosophy is being analyzed in detail. After all, the period from 1960 to 2020 is just as long as that from 1900 to 1960, and just as deserving of historical study.^7,8

The reception of the first edition and of “How did we get here from there?” was in many ways gratifying. However, I will not resist one grumble. The experience brought home to me that not all historians of philosophy read a contemporary philosophical text with the professional accuracy or empathy one might expect. I give samples without naming names. Where I wrote “looked,” it was irritating to be read as if I had written “is”; I used the past (not present) tense and the verb “to look” (not “to be”) for a reason. It was irritating too to be read as if I must be using the word “analytic” in Kant’s sense, not in the clearly broader sense standard in analytic philosophy for the last half-century. It was also irritating when my deliberately casual introduction of the phrase “armchair knowledge” for an overtly heterogeneous range of cases was read as aiming to replace the term “a priori” by a more precise substitute better suited to epistemological theorizing (171, this volume). Alas, no philosophical text is proof against determined attempts to interpret it to suit the interpreter’s purposes.

2. Experimental philosophy

The first edition treated another topic only briefly: the “negative program” of some “experimental philosophers” against “armchair philosophy.” It explained why their talk of “philosophical intuitions” failed to pick out a psychologically distinctive kind, and why thought experiments are not cognitively exceptional, as they assumed, but I did not engage with their texts in much detail.

However, the fashion for experimental philosophy was growing, and I often encountered (and still encounter) surprisingly crude misunderstandings of my objections to the negative program. Do the rejected obsolescent armchair methods include reading a philosophical text carefully and grasping its dialectical structure? In particular, many people took for granted that the book “defended philosophical intuitions,” when in fact it argued that thinking in terms of philosophical “intuitions” leads one hopelessly astray. I was also persistently classified as an “enemy of experimental philosophy,” despite having engaged in it myself (Bonini, Osherson, Viale, and Williamson 1999). Indeed, given the book’s keynote anti-exceptionalism about philosophy, it would have been absurd for me to argue that experimental results are in principle irrelevant to assessing the reliability of a philosophical method. But to assess it properly, you must first understand both what the method is and how it is being applied in particular cases. In practice, proponents of the negative program often – though not always – violated these conditions, either by seeing the methodological issues through the distorting lens of the category “philosophical intuitions,” or by making sundry naïve or impatient errors in handling the first-order philosophical issues themselves.

The negative program worried me because it had the potential to do serious damage to intellectual standards in philosophy – though its proponents’ intention was undoubtedly the opposite. Of course, no particular thought experiment is above criticism, just as no particular experiment in natural science is above criticism. But the negative program aimed at a much less banal conclusion: roughly, that no thought experiment in philosophy should carry significant weight until its result has been independently endorsed by a large and varied sample of non-philosophers. That is one step towards doing philosophy by opinion poll.

If the negative program were to triumph, its effect would be to drastically impede the use of ordinary examples in philosophy, since each example would require a large and expensive research program over several years to test whether folk worldwide agree that it exemplifies what the philosopher takes it to exemplify (the “philosophical intuition”). That would constitute a strong disincentive to introducing new examples in the first place, since they could always be neutralized, at least for several years, by the generic demand for such experimental testing. Yet, from Socrates on, in both Western and non-Western philosophy, apt and ingenious ordinary examples have been one of the most effective ways of keeping philosophers honest. Without them, high-sounding abstract generalities are liable to go unchecked. Examples bring us back down to earth.

But why should not experiments themselves provide an alternative reality-check on philosophical theorizing? The trouble is that experimental philosophers’ experiments do not test most philosophical hypotheses. They test psychological hypotheses as to whether people’s judgments accord with philosophical hypotheses. For example, they do not test the moral hypothesis that it is a wrong to torture a child for fun; they test the psychological hypothesis that most people think that it is wrong to torture a child for fun. Of course, one can derive a moral hypothesis from the psychological hypothesis that most people accept it, given the auxiliary hypothesis that a moral hypothesis is true if most people accept it, but how is the auxiliary hypothesis itself to be tested? One can experimentally test the psychological hypothesis that most people accept the auxiliary hypothesis, but that is just to embark on an infinite regress of auxiliary hypotheses. I have never seen a plausible account of how philosophy would in practice work better (or at least not worse) once reformed in line with the negative program.

Fortunately, within experimental philosophy, the negative program has receded in recent years. Perhaps the main reason has been that many of the original results suggesting variation with ethnicity and gender in verdicts on thought experiments have failed to replicate, when the experiments were repeated to higher standards. In other cases, the experiments were irrelevant because the questions asked of ordinary subjects involved terms (like “refer”) which philosophers use in technical senses. Indeed, to a surprising extent, philosophers’ thought experiments may be tapping into a universal human cognitive system. As one small branch of cognitive psychology, experimental philosophy is well-suited to investigating nuances of the human cognitive system, including how far they are products of nature, how far of culture. For that fruitful inquiry, an animus against thought experiments is merely a source of bias, conscious or otherwise. The five additional sections, 10.1–10.5, on experimental philosophy in this edition are mainly directed against the negative program, to combat the danger it posed to standards of argument in philosophy, although they also consider problems for the category of “philosophical intuitions” irrespective of the negative program. However, none of this implies any hostility on my part to the general idea that experimentation sometimes plays a legitimate part in philosophical activity.

Reflection on the negative program did help persuade me that, by itself, the method of cases is insufficiently robust. In principle, there is nothing wrong with using thought experiments to learn about possibilities, some of which are counterexamples to philosophical generalizations. Our verdicts on thought experiments are not peculiarly liable to error. But, on the same anti-exceptionalist grounds, they are also not peculiarly immune to error. The general fallibility of human cognitive faculties applies as much to our verdicts on thought experiments as to our judgments in any other sphere. Of course, when a philosopher makes an idiosyncratic mistake, it will probably be picked up by other philosophers. But suppose that some glitch in our cognitive system disposes humans in general to misjudge a specific thought experiment, perhaps because we are unconsciously relying on a usually reliable heuristic which goes wrong in this special case. How will we notice our collective mistake? By hypothesis, in this case there is no significant variation in ethnicity or gender for experimental philosophy to identify. We may thus treat our false judgment as giving us a datum or Moorean fact, which we use as a counterexample to philosophical theories. If the rest of our data come from verdicts on other thought experiments, what is to alert us to our error about this thought experiment? The danger is that we treat the thought experiment as refuting what is in fact the true philosophical theory in the vicinity, sweep it off the table, and never return to it. That is naïve falsificationism at its worst.

A good strategy to deal with this problem is to hedge one’s bets, by using more than one method. Each method acts as a potential corrective to the others. Where different methods converge on the same answer, our acceptance of it is correspondingly more robust. In particular, we can sometimes use both the case method and the method of model-building, neither having priority over the other. For example, I have used formal models of epistemic logic to argue that knowledge is not equivalent to justified true belief (as epistemologists traditionally use the word “justified”), the same conclusion normally reached in epistemology by Gettier-style thought experiments. Thus the two methods converge on the same answer.⁹ Although each method by itself may provide knowledge under normal conditions, in the long run we can expect more reliable results from using two or more methods to explore overlapping aspects of an issue and keep a check on each other.

One kind of normal human judgment about hypothetical cases which may sometimes go systematically wrong concerns conditionals. In Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals (2020a), I explore what is arguably the primary human heuristic for cognitively assessing conditionals, a procedure which works well under most conditions, allowing us to extract and communicate valuable information stored in our dispositions to judgment about hypothetical cases, which are miniature thought experiments. This procedure is what we use to make judgments for or against the sample “if” sentences which provide most of the data for semantic and logical theories of conditionals in natural language. However, the heuristic cannot be fully reliable, for it is internally inconsistent. That explains why philosophers and linguists have had so much trouble agreeing on how “if” works. But the usual methods of experimental philosophy would not bring the limitations of the heuristic to light, if it is indeed a human universal, since all those who apply it are liable to the same errors. Rather, the heuristic’s inconsistency is demonstrated by logical and mathematical argument.The role of psychological experimentation lies elsewhere: in testing how far humans do indeed rely on that heuristic. That is a task for cognitive psychology, though not specifically for experimental philosophy.

In general, philosophy and cognitive psychology have much to learn from each other about the nature of human thought and its characteristic vices and virtues. Collaborations between philosophers and cognitive psychologists are likely to become increasingly fruitful, and trying to separate philosophy from psychology in the results may often be fruitless. Whether any of that should be described as “experimental philosophy” is another matter. Anti-exceptionalism about philosophy suggests that the psychology of human philosophical thinking is best understood as just a special case of the psychology of human thinking in general. Schematically: philosophers will have most to bring to their collaboration with psychologists by cultivating their distinctively philosophical skills, not by aping the psychologists, just as psychologists will have most to bring to the collaboration by cultivating their distinctively psychological skills, not by aping the philosophers – though, in a successful collaboration, the philosophers will surely learn lots of psychology and the psychologists lots of philosophy. One reason for the qualifier “schematically” is that there is already a continuum between “pure philosophy” and “pure psychology,” with different people at home on different points of the continuum. That is as it should be, and as it is on the continua between “pure philosophy” and “pure mathematics,” “pure physics,” “pure biology,” “pure computer science,” “pure linguistics,” “pure economics,” “pure history,” and so on. Philosophy has deep natural connections with many other disciplines; to give exclusive privileges to any one of them is to misunderstand the nature of philosophy.¹⁰

3. Naturalism

Of philosophers who self-identify as “naturalists,” the more extreme tend to dismiss The Philosophy of Philosophy as an anti-naturalist tract, while the more moderate tend to wonder why it does not make its implicit naturalism explicit. The first edition defends armchair philosophy against extreme naturalistic attacks, while also defending anti-exceptionalism about philosophy as much less different from other sciences in nature and methods than many philosophers like to think. It presents philosophy as an investigation of the same world which other sciences investigate too, and philosophical knowledge as the product of ordinary human cognitive capacities.

As best I can tell, there is an asymmetry between those who regard the book as implicitly naturalist and those who regard it as anti-naturalist: the former are more likely than the latter to have read it. After all, reading a book is an armchair method of learning what it says.

For the front cover of the first edition, I chose Picasso’s “Portrait of Olga in an Armchair,” because the sitter is a young woman, not the stereotypical philosopher in an armchair – an old man with a long beard and a pipe. The subliminal message was that armchair philosophy is not what you might think it is.

In a very loose sense of the term “naturalist,” I probably count as one. The trouble is that the term is also often used much more narrowly, for one who takes the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, …) to provide the model which all other attempts at systematic inquiry should emulate in method. By that standard, even mathematics falls short, since it does not use observation or experiment in the intended sense, even though all the natural sciences rely on mathematics. It is the most obvious example of a science which is not a natural science in any distinctive sense. Another example, I suggest, is philosophy. The reliance on armchair methods is one of the most salient features of both mathematics and philosophy. That is not to deny the relevance of natural science to philosophy, or even to mathematics. It is just to insist that armchair methods have a central role to play in philosophy, and even more obviously in mathematics.

The second edition contains six short additional sections on naturalism, 11.1–11.6. Their main concerns are to separate extremist versions of naturalism from moderate ones, to emphasize the implausibility of the extremist versions, and to show that the moderate versions are fully compatible with armchair methods.

4. Concepts, understanding, analyticity

Some reactions to the book made me wish that I had been more explicit about my terminology. For example, I often used the words “concept” and “conceptual,” but did little to define or clarify them. The reason was that I borrowed those words from my opponents, primarily to articulate their views and arguments – to the effect that philosophy is in some distinctive sense a “conceptual” activity. I wanted to be fair to my opponents by not defining or clarifying the terms in ways which they might reject. Moreover, such views of philosophy come in numerous sub-varieties, which gloss the words in different ways, as I acknowledged (17, this volume). Since the same forms of argument often worked against different sub-varieties, I used the words “concept” and “conceptual” in a somewhat schematic way, to avoid unnecessary repetition.

The upshot of Chapter 4 is that there are no “conceptual” truths or connections in any sense helpful to my opponents. If one likes, one can define a “concept” to be the actual or potential meaning of a linguistic expression, which it shares with all synonymous expressions, appealing to whatever standard of sameness in meaning is made available by a well-developed semantic theory. However, I argued that such a standard will be too coarse-grained to serve my opponents’ purposes. For example, it will not make even the most elementary logical truths “conceptual” in any distinctive sense. Such conclusions should have made it clear that “concept” and “conceptual” were not load-bearing terms in my statements of my own positive views.

A little unwisely, I sometimes also wrote of applying “concepts” and of “conceptual” practices in stating my own views, not only in going along with my opponents’ ways of talking for the sake of argument. I could just as well have written instead of applying words and of linguistic practices. In those cases, the step of abstraction from linguistic expressions to concepts was idle. For instance, all the work can be done by the word “vixen” and the property of being a vixen, cutting out the useless middle man, the concept vixen.¹¹ In retrospect, I wish I had stuck to the more perspicuous metalinguistic formulations in stating my own views, and not muddied the waters by sentimentally continuing to employ the term “concept.”

For similar reasons, it would be more open to replace currently fashionable talk of “conceptual engineering” by talk of “linguistic engineering.” After all, our direct conscious and social control is of linguistic practices rather than ways of thinking, and our indirect influence on the latter is typically through the former.¹²

For some readers, my use of the word “analytic” was also misleading, since they adhered to its older, historically and etymologically justified sense in which analytic truths are corollaries of conceptual analyses. On that view, “Vixens are female foxes” is both analytic and a conceptual truth, whereas “Red shades are not green” is not analytic but may still be a conceptual truth. I followed much current philosophical usage, which treats “analytic truth” and “conceptual truth” as interchangeable.

With these health warnings, I have left the terminology of the chapters from the first edition unchanged, since readers may wish to see how I originally put things, for purposes of comparison.

The six short additional sections, 12.1–12.6, are all replies to philosophers who took issue with the book on these topics.

5. Other topics

As a student at Oxford in the 1970s, my exposure to Wittgenstein’s influence helped me build up enough antibodies to resist it for a lifetime (see Section 9.1). Although his influence had greatly declined by the time I wrote the first edition (and has since declined further), he was still too salient a landmark to be ignored in a discussion of philosophical methodology, especially since in some respects my viewpoint stood directly opposite his. Responses to the first edition showed that his ideas were still widespread in the international community of philosophers. The six short additional sections, 13.1–13.6, all reply to philosophers whose approach to the philosophy of philosophy is strongly marked by Wittgenstein’s influence.

In the book, I did not intend to cast Wittgenstein, or anyone else, as the villain of the piece. Obviously, I am no Wittgenstein scholar; I am happy to leave detailed engagement with his texts to those with more interest in them. My primary interest has been in combating mistaken assumptions about philosophy widely held by living philosophers, without worrying too much about their historical origins. But philosophers with Wittgensteinian sympathies were strongly represented amongst the authors whom I was invited to respond to or review, perhaps because editors hoped for a lively debate.

The final group of additional sections, 14.1–14.6, contains six short pieces which did not fit neatly into any of the previous sections. Two discuss popular philosophy; two reply to critical responses to the first edition; two review books about the nature and value of philosophy.

6. Work published elsewhere

It may be useful to sketch other work in which I have developed themes from the first edition, which has not been included here because it took a more general approach, in either epistemology or the philosophy of language.

Chapter 6 of the first edition analyzed the arguments underlying thought experiments in terms of counterfactual conditionals. The latter were parsed in the traditional way, as the result of applying a two-place sentential operator to a pair of input sentences, the antecedent and the consequent. The envisaged semantics was of the kind proposed by David Lewis in his classic treatment. This approach involved some awkwardness in formalizing the natural language arguments, specifically in handling the anaphoric dependence of pronouns in the consequent (the judgment about the scenario) on quantified terms in the antecedent (the original description of the scenario). A technical appendix is devoted to that issue (307–10, this volume). Another technical appendix concerns the derivation of the logic of metaphysical modality within the complex logic of the counterfactual conditional, given definitions of the former in terms of the latter (295–306, this volume). That appendix furthers the book’s anti-exceptionalism: as argued in Chapter 5 of the first edition, philosophers’ metaphysical modality is just a limiting case of counterfactual constructions integral to ordinary, practical thought.

Much more recently, I have come to a quite different view of the semantics of the counterfactual conditional. It is best understood as a contextually restricted strict conditional, the result of composing the contextually restricted local necessity operator “would” with the ordinary “if,” read as a material conditional (2020a: 103–58, 166–88). In place of A◽ →B one has ◽(A ⊃ B), but with ◽ restricted to contextually relevant possible worlds. As a welcome side-effect, this drastically simplifies the treatment of anaphoric relations between antecedent and consequent, since they are no longer separated by a modal operator. It also provides greater flexibility in selecting the contextually relevant worlds to verify the scenario to suit the needs of the thought experiment. Metaphysical necessity becomes a straightforward limiting case of “would.” The overall effect is to preserve the anti-exceptionalist spirit of the original, but in a streamlined and more flexible framework (2020a: 229–41).¹³

The epistemology of counterfactual conditionals is correspondingly central to the epistemology of philosophers’ thought experiments and modal judgments, in the first edition. It emphasizes the key cognitive role of the imagination in determining what would hold on a counterfactual supposition. On my account of conditionals, our primary heuristic for cognitively assessing conditionals involves suppositional thinking, in a reinterpreted Ramsey test (2020a: 15–88). We apply a derivative form of the heuristic to assess counterfactual conditionals (2020a: 189–213). I have also explored the general cognitive function of the imagination more extensively (2016c, 2020c). This work on the cognitive role of supposing and imagining has not been at all specific to philosophical thinking, but subsumes allegedly puzzling aspects of it under much more general forms of human cognition, vindicating the anti-exceptionalist approach.

The first edition uses the role of the imagination in ordinary counterfactual and modal thinking to cast doubt on the idea that the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge cuts at the cognitive or epistemological joints (167–171, this volume). In later work, I have sharpened and deepened that critique of the distinction, and replied to objections to it (2013b, 2021b, 2021c; Boghossian and Williamson 2020). Again, those arguments are not at all specific to philosophical cognition, but also tend to vindicate anti-exceptionalism about its nature, insofar as it is taken to be a priori.

Chapter 4 of the first edition, on epistemological conceptions of analyticity, originated in a symposium with Paul Boghossian at the 2003 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association, chaired by Crispin Wright – Paul and I talked at such length that no time was left for Crispin to present his comments; I still feel bad about that. Since then, Paul and I have had a series of further exchanges on understanding, the a priori, and intuition, culminating in our book (Boghossian and Williamson 2020). Section 12.2 is my half of one of those exchanges, in a book symposium on the first edition. The later rounds are also relevant to the epistemological arguments of this book, although they are not specific to the epistemology of philosophy.

Chapter 7 of the first edition, on evidence in philosophy, in effect applies the general account of evidence defended in Knowledge and its Limits to the special case of philosophy. I have continued to uphold that account of evidence, though usually without special reference to philosophy (2021e).

I have also written for a much wider readership on what philosophy does and how (2018a, 2018d).¹⁴

The Preface to the first edition ends with an expression of my enjoyment in doing philosophy. I am happy to report that, fourteen years later, it continues to provide just as much pleasure.