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Williams, Donald Cary was born in 1899.
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Donald Cary Williams
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Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, and then Harvard University.
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Donald C. Williams has been described as a member of the second generation of the American new realists. It was in the spirit of that school that he produced a connected series of articles in the mid-1930s, collectively called 'Realism as an inductive hypothesis’. This aimed at the refutation of all forms of epistemological subjectivism, whether phenomenalist, pragmatist or positivist. A priori arguments for subjectivism were accused of committing a fallacy of misplacing modifiers, for example, confusing the defensible proposition that everything we know is an object of consciousness with the indefensible thesis that we know that everything is an object of consciousness. Inductive arguments for scepticism are argued to entail solipsism if they are consistent, which their opponents then seek to evade by various shifts. Williams believes that we have direct knowledge of material things, and not merely of mental representations of them, and that the mind is part of the nature of which it is aware. Two important articles about time and our awareness of it have been much admired. What particularly brought him to notice was his wellargued defence of induction. Since most of the reasonably large samples of a population closely resemble the population from which they are drawn in their composition, we can validly infer, without certainty but often with quite high probability, from the character of the sample to that of the population. Variants of this argument were elaborated by R. F. Harrod and J. L. Mackie. It has been widely criticized for the allegedly illegitimate assumption that all the formally distinct samples from a population have an equal probability of being selected. An interesting later development was Williams’s theory of tropes, in pursuit of maximum ontological economy. A trope is an instantiation of a property at a specific place and time, which may be extended in both domains: this instance of redness here, now, for example. A concrete particular is a set of spatiotemporally coincident tropes: a universal is a set of tropes that are similar to one another. Williams always tackles the large problems he addresses in a colourfully entertaining style. William’s justification of induction is still very much alive, notably in the work of D. C. Stove, for all the criticism to which it has been subjected. His theory of tropes or abstract particulars has been worked out in detail by Keith Campbell in such a way as to make clear its explanatory power.
