I'll give a joint talk with Sabina Domínguez-Parrado on heuristics-based arguments in philosophy. First joint talk ever for me, and also on a topic other than epistemology. We'll see how it goes...

Thanks Dani, enjoy the BCN heavy metal extravaganza and see you next week :)

Anyhow, best of luck! You'll do great :)

More concretely, it may be useful to try to summarise structure and contributions of the dissertation in a two-page handout, and go over it before the day of the viva. During the discussion, not being defensive and being open to criticisms may also be a good idea.

I found it helpful to approach the whole thing by seeing it as an opportunity to discuss topics I've been thinking about with people I could learn a lot from rather than as an examination. Having this perspective calmed me, and also helped me to enjoy it.

I think this difference is relevant to assess both different versions of the heuristics methods and his recent arguments, but I still haven't managed to pin point exactly why.

The method is not new: psychological invariantists made similar moves to explain contextualist data (Vogel 1990, Hawthorne 2004,, Nagel 2010, Gerken 2013...). A striking difference, though, is that Williamson posits heuristics instead of drawing on independently documented psychological phenomena

Thanks for your interest, Matt! Just coincidentally, next week I'll give a co-authored presentation on the heuristics method, so I've been thinking a bit about it recently...

But overall I really enjoyed thinking and writing about this topic, and I hope I'll get the chance to do it again in the future! :)

It hasn't been easy to work on this paper. The norm of assertion literature is unwieldy, and it's tricky to evaluate the (in)felicity of some sentences when English is not your native language. Thankfully, I got help from referees, and also from friends and colleagues.

Thanks, this helps! I'm aware that K5 and K6 serve a different dialectical purpose in the McK&T paper, but I wanted to bring them up to consider more possible cases 'I know' parentheticals as strength modifiers. The aside is very much on point, those clauses are a cliché in philosophical writing :)

This is a great paper and I think that your examples are relevant. Quick (and maybe naive) question related to the mini-lit you mention: couldn't we also appeal to McKinnon and Turri's examples to show that 'I know' parentheticals can actually modify strength? Do you hear K5 and K6 as stronger?