NDPR Timothy Williamson Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.10.5 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Timothy Williamson, Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2024, 280pp., $29.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780197779217.

Reviewed by Daniel Greco, Yale University

Timothy Williamson’s Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy is both a work of philosophical methodology and a series of case studies in which that methodology is applied to various debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. Williamson is a paradigmatic bullet biter—he’s known for defending the views that there is a single hair that marks the boundary between being bald and not (1994) and that he (along with the rest of us and everything else) could not have failed to exist (2013). While other philosophers might bend over backwards to avoid commitment to such consequences, Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy borrows...