Tetralogue: I'm Right, You're Wrong

Timothy Williamson

Feb 2015 · OUP Oxford

About this ebook

Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right, but then doubts creep in. In a tradition going back to Plato, Timothy Williamson uses a fictional conversation to explore questions about truth and falsity, and knowledge and belief. Is truth always relative to a point of view? Is every opinion fallible? Such ideas have been used to combat dogmatism and intolerance, but are they compatible with taking each opposing point of view seriously? This book presupposes no prior acquaintance with philosophy, and introduces its concerns in an accessible and light-hearted way. Is one point of view really right and the other really wrong? That is for the reader to decide.

Ratings and reviews

The book never explicitly reveals itself to be an argument against relativism. Nevertheless it is. This is especially clear in ch. 4. In this chapter the traveler Sarah question her own initial conviction that there is no such thing as right and wrong (moral), but gets convinced to think otherwise. The starting point for this is when she doubts that she can know whether her own feelings on moral matters are correct (the actual word used is "warranted"). This is a trap, as she can be neither correct nor incorrect if there are no objective moral values (obviously a realist would deny this). At this point you already sense where this is going. The text then conflate moral values with evolved context sensitive decision making (actions are taken depending on the context in which an entity finds itself, its current chemical organization/state, etc.) in a biased and confounded "discussion" (the assumptions of which are never questioned) of how morals are needed for entities/systems to act.

The book is a fun, light look at different philosophical questions and the ways to look at them. It does not delve too deep, which may frustrate those with a more solid background in philosophy, but to people new to philosophy it's a great first read.

About the author

Timothy Williamson was born in Uppsala, Sweden. He has been the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University since 2000. Before that he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University, and also taught at Trinity College Dublin. He has held visiting positions in philosophy at MIT, Princeton, Michigan, Yale (from 2016), Australian National University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and elsewhere. His books include Identity and Discrimination, Vagueness, Knowledge and its Limits, The Philosophy of Philosophy, and Modal Logic as Metaphysics. 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.