Williamson On the Margins of Knowledge: A Criticism

In this paper, we argue that Williamson’s arguments against luminosity and the KK principle do not work, at least in a scientifc context. Both of these arguments are based on the presence of a so-called “bufer zone” between situations in which one is in a position to know p and situations in which one is in a position to know ¬p. In those positions belonging to the bufer zone ¬p holds, but one is not in a position to know ¬p. The presence of this bufer zone triggers two types of sorites arguments. We show that this kind of argument does not hold in a scientifc context, where the bufer zone is controlled by a quantitative measurement of the experimental error.