Must Do “Must Do Better” Better

June 18, 2025

Abstract: Starting with the his much-discussed 2006 paper “Must Do Better,’ Timothy Williamson has offered a series of methodological reflections and recommendations for philosophers. Good philosophy, for Williamson, (1) prefers precision and rigour to depth and profundity, (2) where possible, it avails itself of formal modelling, so as to not only prescribe definitions or analyses of concepts, but make a range of predictions that can be tested, (3) embraces the constraints of connections to other disciplines and to a range of scientific norms.

While there is much to appreciate in Williamson’s methodology—at least as an example of one fruitful way to pursue philosophical questions—I will argue that Williamson’s idiosyncratic understanding of logic and of semantics helps explain how he has come to such surprising conclusions in epistemology (e.g. that we know all logical and necessary truths) and metaphysics (e.g. that everything that exists exists necessarily), and once we adopt a more well-rounded—and, dare I say, orthodox—view of logic and semantics, the argument to these more surprising conclusions are undercut, and a quite different picture emerges concerning the place for logic, and formal tools more generally, in philosophy.

I will end with some short, speculative suggestions about what this means for analytic philosophy, more generally.

• The is the keynote presentation at the 50th Annual Meeeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, at the Universiy of California in Davis.

• The slides for the talk can be downloaded here.