Automating philosophy if Timothy Williamson is correct

Cleo Nardo
Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:34:18 GMT

Timothy Williamson thinks philosophy is unexceptional.

Timothy Williamson[1] thinks that philosophy[2] is far less distinct as a science as many people believe, including philosophers themselves.

I've read a bunch of his stuff, and here are the claims I think constitute his view:

1. Philosophy is a science. Of course, it's not a natural science (like particle physics, organic chemistry, nephrology). But neither are mathematics and computer science — they are formal sciences. Philosophy is likewise a non-natural science.

2. No greater divergence. Although philosophy differs from other sciences, it doesn't differ more than the sciences differ from each other, in neither kind nor degree. For instance, theoretical physics might be closer to analytic philosophy than to experimental physics.

3. Philosophy pursues knowledge. Just as mathematics pursues mathematical knowledge, and nephrology pursues nephrological knowledge, philosophy pursues philosophical knowledge.

4. No fundamental methodological gap. Different sciences vary in their methods and practices, i.e. the way they achieve their aim, which is knowledge. Philosophy has its own methods and practices, but they aren't starkly different from other sciences.

5. Not parasitic on other sciences. Philosophy isn't a science because it uses scientific evidence or has applications for the sciences. Williamson says, "philosophy is neither queen nor handmaid of the sciences, just one more science with a distinctive character, just as other sciences have a distinctive character."

6. Not about words or concepts. Philosophy is not, exceptionally among sciences, concerned with words or concepts.[3] For example, an epistemologist is chiefly concerned with knowledge itself, not with the word 'knowledge' or our concept of knowledge; a mereologist is chiefly concerned with parthood itself, not with the word 'part' or our concept of parthood; etc. This is analogous to how an ornithologist is chiefly concerned with birds themselves, not with the word ''bird" or our concept of birds.

7. Incremental, not visionary. Philosophy doesn't consist in a series of disconnected visionary leaps. Instead, it consists in the incremental contribution of thousands of researchers — some great, some mediocre — much like any other scientific inquiry.

Williamson typically argues by negation: he enumerates alleged differences between philosophy and other sciences, and argues that either (1) the allegation mischaracterises philosophy, (2) the allegation mischaracterises the other sciences, or (3) the alleged difference is insubstantial.

Implications for automating philosophy

I think that, on Williamson's view, if we can build AIs which can automate the natural and formal sciences, then we can also build AIs which automate philosophy as well. Otherwise, philosophy would be exceptional.

More straightforwardly, it follows from:

1. No fundamental methodological gap. If an AI can execute the methods of science, then it should be capable of the executing the methods of philosophy. This is because there is a big overlap in the methodologies.

2. Incremental, not visionary. If philosophical progress is incremental rather than dependent on rare genius visionaries, then it should be just as amenable as the sciences to massive parallelisation — many AI instances grinding away at subproblems simultaneously.

This in contrast to Wei Dai.[4]

We seem to understand the philosophy/epistemology of science much better than that of philosophy (i.e. metaphilosophy), and at least superficially the methods humans use to make progress in them don't look very similar, so it seems suspicious that the same AI-based methods happen to work equally well for science and for philosophy.
— Wei Dai (June 2023)

Overall, I think Wei Dai is more likely to be correct than Williamson, though I'm not confident. I want to get the opposing view into circulation regardless, and I might write up how Williamson's metaphilosophical anti-exceptionalism implies we should automate philosophy.

1. ^

I'm referring to the former Wykeham Professor of Logic, not to be confused with Timothy Luke Williamson, formerly at the Global Priorities Institute.

2. ^

Throughout, "philosophy" refers to analytic philosophy unless otherwise stated.

3. ^

Many 20th-century philosophers thought philosophy was chiefly concerned with linguistic analysis (Wittgenstein) or conceptual analysis (Carnap). Williamson disagrees.

4. ^

AI doing philosophy = AI generating hands? (Jan 2024)

Meta Questions about Metaphilosophy (Sep 2023)

Morality is Scary (Dec 2021)

Problems in AI Alignment that philosophers could potentially contribute to (Aug 2019)

On the purposes of decision theory research (Jul 2019)

Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy (Feb 2019)
The Argument from Philosophical Difficulty (Feb 2019)

Two Neglected Problems in Human-AI Safety (Dec 2018)

Metaphilosophical Mysteries (2010)

Discuss