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Knowability
Edited by Joe Salerno (Saint Louis University)
About this topic
| Summary | Knowability is the concept that figures in epistemic theories true---for instance semantic anti-realism claims, necessarily, every truth is knowable in principle. Michael Dummett argues for the position along the following lines. Given that meaning is fully manifestable in use and that grasp of meaning involves knowing truth conditions, the fully competent user of the language is in principle able to recognize that a proposition is true when it is. The most important alleged consequence of the position is that classical logic is not unrestrictedly valid. For the unrestricted principle of excluded middle together with semantic anti-realism (and some modest auxiliary assumptions) entails strong decidability---i.e., that, unrestrictedly, every proposition or it’s negation is knowable in principle. And that conclusion is false, not known apriori, and unacceptably immodest. Therefore, exclusively classical principles are false, not known apriori and unacceptably immodest. Most recent discussion centers around Fitch’s paradox of knowability. The paradox threatens to collapse semantic anti-realism into an implausible idealism----the theory that, necessarily, every truth is (at some time) known. Since an important selling point of moderate anti-realism is that it distances itself from naïve idealism, the collapse is unwelcome to the anti-realist. But the paradox is not just a problem for anti-realists, because the result threatens to erase the very logical distinction between semantic anti-realism and naïve idealism. Even those of us who have not been seduced by anti-realism may still want to distinguish it from (and treat it as logically weaker than) idealism. |
| Key works | Influential variations on the thesis that truth is an epistemic notion are articulated in Berkeley & Turbayne 1957, Dummett 1978, Kant 1781/1998, Peirce 1940, Putnam 1981, and Tennant 1997, et. al. The connections between anti-realism and a rejection of classical logic are found in Dummett 1978, Wright 1992, Tennant 1997, and Salerno 2000. The first publication of Fitch's paradox is Fitch 1963. The result there was conveyed anonymously to Fitch in a pair of referee reports in 1945, which were later published in Church 2008. An overview of the key points of debate regarding Fitch’s paradox is found in Brogaard & Salerno 2010. Two volumes of essays, which center around the key points of contention in that debate are Salerno 2008 and Salerno 2010. The only monograph on the paradox is L. Kvanvig 2006. The last of chapter of Williamson 2000 also has exerted much influence on recent discussion. |
| Introductions | Brogaard & Salerno 2010 Salerno 2010 |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Closure of Knowledge (281)
- Infallibility (65)
- The KK Principle (86)
- Luminosity (93)
- Safety and Sensitivity (283)
- Principles of Knowledge, Misc (78)
Contents
255 found
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| 1 — 50 / 255 |
- Knowability and Singular Thought.Ezra J. Cook - manuscriptRemove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - A valid conjunction principle for fallible knowledge.Jude Arnout Durieux - manuscriptThe multi premise closure principle states that the logical conjunction of known facts yields again a known fact. For absolute knowledge this principle holds. We show that for fallible knowledge, assuming knowing requires a minimum level of statistical certainty (whatever else it requires), and that there is a sufficient number of known facts above a given level of uncertainty, it does not hold, for simple statistical reasons. We present a modified version, the dependent conjunctive closure principle, that does hold.
- The memory skepticism solution to the surprise exam paradox.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscriptWill a surprise exam happen in the next school week? The memory skepticism solution says, “The students should expect a rational student on the penultimate evening of that week to open themselves up to the possibility that the exam may have happened already, rather than predicting that the exam will happen tomorrow.”.
- The Paradox of Knowability and Epistemic Theories of Truth.Boris Rähme - manuscriptThe article suggests a reading of the term ‘epistemic account of truth’ which runs contrary to a widespread consensus with regard to what epistemic accounts are meant to provide, namely a definition of truth in epistemic terms. Section 1. introduces a variety of possible epistemic accounts that differ with regard to the strength of the epistemic constraints they impose on truth. Section 2. introduces the paradox of knowability and presents a slightly reconstructed version of a related argument brought forward by (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Modal Epistemology.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri & John Hawthorne - manuscriptSome central epistemological notions are expressed by sentential operators O that entail the possibility of knowledge in the sense that 'Op' entails 'It is possible to know that p'. We call these modal-epistemological notions. Using apriority and being in a position to know as case studies, we argue that the logics of modal epistemological notions are extremely weak. In particular, their logics are not normal and do not include any closure principles.
- Knowability and the capacity to know.Author unknown - manuscript(PDF of penultimate draft; please don’t quote from or cite this version.) Forthcoming in Synthese. Generalizations of Fitch’s paradox of knowability motivate the thesis that in saying that a truth is knowable, or that it could be known, we do not mean that it is possible that it is known. Instead, I argue, claims about knowability express capacities to know. The paper concludes by explaining the requisite sense of “capacity” at work here, and by showing how the paradox of knowability (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Self-Effacing Reasons and Epistemic Constraints: Some Lessons from the Knowability Paradox.Massimiliano Carrara & Davide Fassio - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.A minimal constraint on normative reasons seems to be that if some fact is a reason for an agent to φ (act, believe, or feel), the agent could come to know that fact. This constraint is threatened by a well-known type of counterexamples. Self-effacing reasons are facts that intuitively constitute reasons for an agent to φ, but that if they were to become known, they would cease to be reasons for that agent. The challenge posed by self-effacing reasons bears important (...)
- Transcendental Knowability, Closure, Luminosity and Factivity: Reply to Stephenson.Jan Heylen & Felipe Morales Carbonell - forthcoming - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis.Stephenson (2022) has argued that Kant’s thesis that all transcendental truths are transcendentally a priori knowable leads to omniscience of all transcendental truths. His arguments depend on luminosity principles and closure principles for transcendental knowability. We will argue that one pair of a luminosity and a closure principle should not be used, because the closure principle is too strong, while the other pair of a luminosity and a closure principle should not be used, because the luminosity principle is too strong. (...)
- Knowability Paradox, Decidability Solution?William Bondi Knowles - forthcoming - Ratio.Fitch's knowability paradox shows that for each unknown truth there is also an unknowable truth, a result which has been thought both odd in itself and at odds with views which impose epistemic constraints on truth and/or meaningfulness. Here a solution is considered which has received little attention in the debate but which carries prima facie plausibility. The decidability solution is to accept that Fitch sentences are unknowably true but deny the significance of this on the grounds that Fitch sentences (...)
- What can we know about unanswerable questions?Thomas Raleigh - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.I present two arguments that aim to establish logical limits on what we can know. More specifically, I argue for two results concerning what we can know about questions that we cannot answer. I also discuss a line of thought, found in the writings of Pierce and of Rescher, in support of the idea that we cannot identify specific scientific questions that will never be answered.
- “The Essential Differentiae of Things are Unknown to Us”: Thomas Aquinas on the Limits of the Knowability of Natural Substances.Fabrizio Amerini - 2023 - In Joshua P. Hochschild, Turner C. Nevitt, Adam Wood & Gábor Borbély (eds.), Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind / Essays in Honor of Gyula Klima. Springer Verlag. pp. 79-93.Thomas Aquinas is often presented as a philosopher with a realist and optimistic attitude toward human knowledge. This is essentially true. Nevertheless, there are texts where Aquinas underscores the limits of our knowledge of natural things. For example, he states that we arrive at knowing and naming the substance of a thing only through knowing its accidents. Aquinas makes three main claims about this process: first, the essential principles of natural things are unknown to us; second, the accidents of a (...)
- Conceptos de cognoscibilidad.Jan Heylen & Felipe Morales Carbonell - 2023 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 23:287-308.Many philosophical discussions hinge on the concept of knowability. For example, there is a blooming literature on the so-called paradox of knowability. How to understand this notion, however? In this paper, we examine several approaches to the notion: the naive approach to take knowability as the possibility to know, the counterfactual approach endorsed by Edgington (1985) and Schlöder (2019) , approaches based on the notion of a capacity or ability to know (Fara 2010, Humphreys 2011), and finally, approaches that make (...)
- Impossible Events and the Knowability Paradox.Bjørn Jespersen & Massimiliano Carrara - 2023 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 30 (1):53-65.
- KK, Knowledge, Knowability.Weng Kin San - 2023 - Mind 132 (527):605-630.kk states that knowing entails knowing that one knows, and K¬K states that not knowing entails knowing that one does not know. In light of the arguments against kk and K¬K, one might consider modally qualified variants of those principles. According to weak kk, knowing entails the possibility of knowing that one knows. And according to weakK¬K, not knowing entails the possibility of knowing that one does not know. This paper shows that weak kk and weakK¬K are much stronger than (...)
- Not every truth could have a truthmaker.John Stigall - 2023 - Theoria 89 (1):7-13.Mark Jago argues for truthmaker maximalism in some recent papers based on a key premise: that every truth could have a truthmaker. Jago contends that many would pretheoretically accept this principle and that counterexamples to it would be difficult to find. In this note, I show how truthmaker non-maximalists can use a modified version of Peter Milne's argument against maximalism to provide a counterexample to this key premise.
- Idealism, quietism, conceptual change: Sellars and McDowell on the knowability of the world.Michael R. Hicks - 2022 - Giornali di Metafisica 44 (1):51-71.Both Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell reject Kant’s conclusion that the world is fundamentally unknowable, and on similar grounds: each invokes conceptual change, what I call the diachronic instability of a conceptual scheme. The similarities end there, though. It is important to Sellars that the world is only knowable at “the end of inquiry” – he rejects a commonsense realism like McDowell’s for its inability to fully appreciate diachronic instability. To evaluate this disagreement, I consider Timothy Williamson’s argument that the (...)
- How Common Knowledge Is Possible.Daniel Immerman - 2022 - Mind 131 (523):935-948.The two of us commonly know a proposition just in case (i) we both know it, (ii) we both know that we both know it, (iii) we both know that we both know that we both know it, and so on. In a recent paper titled ‘Uncommon Knowledge’, Harvey Lederman (2018) argues against the possibility of common knowledge. His argument rests on the empirical claim that there are minor individual variations in how we perceive things. This motivates a principle about (...)
- Phenomenology, anti‐realism, and the knowability paradox.James Kinkaid - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):1010-1027.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 1010-1027, September 2022.
- Phenomenology, anti‐realism, and the knowability paradox.James Kinkaid - 2022 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):1010-1027.Husserl endorses ideal verificationism, the claim that there is a necessary correlation between truth and the ideal possibility of experience. This puts him in the company of semantic anti-realists like Dummett, Tennant, and Wright who endorse the knowability thesis that all truths are knowable. Unfortunately, there is a simple, seductive, and troubling argument due to Alonzo Church and Frederic Fitch that the knowability thesis collapses into the omniscience thesis that all truths are known. Phenomenologists should be worried. I assess the (...)
- The Knowability of God from the Perspective of Philosophical Epistemology.Ralf-Thomas Klein - 2022 - In Jacobus Kok, Martin Webber & Jeremy Otten (eds.), On knowing God: interdisciplinary theological perspectives. Piscataway, NJ, USA: Gorgias Press LLC.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Coherence and Knowability.Luis Rosa - 2022 - The Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):960-978.Why should we avoid incoherence? An influential view tells us that incoherent combinations of attitudes are such that it is impossible for all of those attitudes to be simultaneously vindicated by the evidence. But it is not clear whether this view successfully explains what is wrong with certain akratic doxastic states. In this paper I flesh out an alternative response to that question, one according to which the problem with incoherent combinations of attitudes is that it is impossible for all (...)
- Correction to: Coherence and Knowability.Luis Rosa - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):300-300.This is a correction to: Luis Rosa, Coherence and Knowability, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2022, pqab076, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqab076.
- Nature and Limits of Human Knowledge.David Cycleback - 2021 - London, UK: Bookboon.An introduction for students in the hard and social sciences, this brief book examines the nature and limits of human knowledge. Topics include how humans process information, how they cannot have certain knowledge, the limits to all human systems of definition including science, and the considerations of these limits. -/- .
- The Poss-Ability Principle, G-cases, and Fitch Propositions.Noah Gordon - 2021 - Logos and Episteme 12 (1):117-125.There is a very plausible principle linking abilities and possibilities: If S is able to Φ, then it is metaphysically possible that S Φ’s. Jack Spencer recently proposed a class of counterexamples to this principle involving the ability to know certain propositions. I renew an argument against these counterexamples based on the unknowability of Fitch propositions. In doing so, I provide a new argument for the unknowability of Fitch propositions and show that Spencer’s counterexamples are in tension with a principle (...)
- Knowability Relative to Information.Peter Hawke & Franz Berto - 2021 - Mind 130 (517):1-33.We present a formal semantics for epistemic logic, capturing the notion of knowability relative to information (KRI). Like Dretske, we move from the platitude that what an agent can know depends on her (empirical) information. We treat operators of the form K_AB (‘B is knowable on the basis of information A’) as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a topic- or aboutness- preservation constraint. Variable strictness models the non-monotonicity of knowledge acquisition while allowing knowledge to be intrinsically stable. Aboutness-preservation models (...)
- Anti-Realism and Modal-Epistemic Collapse: Reply to Marton.Jan Heylen - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (1):397-408.Marton ( 2019 ) argues that that it follows from the standard antirealist theory of truth, which states that truth and possible knowledge are equivalent, that knowing possibilities is equivalent to the possibility of knowing, whereas these notions should be distinct. Moreover, he argues that the usual strategies of dealing with the Church–Fitch paradox of knowability are either not able to deal with his modal-epistemic collapse result or they only do so at a high price. Against this, I argue that (...)
- The Bishop’s Church: Berkeley’s Master Argument and the Paradox of Knowability.Stephen Kearns - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (3):175-190.We can find in the passages that set out the Master Argument a precursor to the paradox of knowability. That paradox shows that if all truths are knowable, all truths are known. Similarly, Berkeley might be read as proposing that if all sensible objects are (distinctly) conceivable, then all sensible objects are conceived.
- Is ‘Knowing that P’ Identical with ‘Knowing that “P” Is True’?Changsheng Lai - 2021 - Philosophia 48 (3):1075-1092.It is epistemological orthodoxy that the object of propositional knowledge is the truth of propositions. This traditional view is based on what I call the ‘KT-schema’, viz, ‘S knows that p, iff, S knows that “p” is true’. The purpose of this paper is to reject the KT-schema. By showing the paradoxical upshot of the KT-schema and providing counterexamples to the KT-schema, this paper argues that ‘knowing that p’ is more than ‘knowing that “p” is true’. Consequently, we shall rethink (...)
- Joseph Raz’s Service Conception and the Limits of Knowability.Adriana Placani - 2021 - Ratio Juris 34 (3):207-223.This essay criticizes Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority on the basis of its knowability condition. The condition states that for agents to be justified in following authoritative directives, they must be able to know (i.e., form reliable beliefs) that the authority issuing the directives is in fact legitimate. Three grounds for concern are identified. The first is that the satisfaction of the normal justification thesis (NJT), which states that the legitimacy of authorities hinges on whether their directives enable subjects (...)
- Joseph Raz’s Service Conception and the Limits of Knowability.Adriana Placani - 2021 - Ratio Juris 34 (3):207-223.This essay criticizes Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority on the basis of its knowability condition. The condition states that for agents to be justified in following authoritative directives, they must be able to know (i.e., form reliable beliefs) that the authority issuing the directives is in fact legitimate. Three grounds for concern are identified. The first is that the satisfaction of the normal justification thesis (NJT), which states that the legitimacy of authorities hinges on whether their directives enable subjects (...)
- Transcendental Knowability and A Priori Luminosity.Andrew Stephenson - 2021 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 25 (1):134-162.This paper draws out and connects two neglected issues in Kant’s conception of a priori knowledge. Both concern topics that have been important to contemporary epistemology and to formal epistemology in particular: knowability and luminosity. Does Kant commit to some form of knowability principle according to which certain necessary truths are in principle knowable to beings like us? Does Kant commit to some form of luminosity principle according to which, if a subject knows a priori, then they can know that (...)
- Introduction to Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington.Lee Walters - 2021 - In Lee Walters & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington. Oxford, England: Oxford University press.Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.$94.99 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark
- Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington.Lee Walters & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2021 - Oxford, England: Oxford University press.A festschrift for Dorothy Edgington, containing contributions from Cleo Condoravdi, Dorothy Edgington, Kit Fine, Alan Hájek, John Hawthorne, Sabine Iatridou, Nick Jones, Rosanna Keefe, Angelika Kratzer, David Over, Daniel Rothschild, Robert Stalnaker, Scott Sturgeon, and Timothy Williamson.
- Neues System der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss. Band I: Erkenntnistheorie.Dirk Hartmann - 2020 - Paderborn, Deutschland: Mentis.The time of „philosophical systems“ seems to be definitively over since Kant and Hegel. On this background, the publication of the work „Neues System der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss“ (New System of Philosophical Sciences in Ground Plan) is a truly spectacular philosophical event: Dirk Hartmann deliberately follows Hegel‘s „Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse“ of 1817 in the title of his work, in order to make clear the intention and claim of his opus magnum: In contrast to the increased fragmentation (...)
- Counterfactual Knowledge, Factivity, and the Overgeneration of Knowledge.Jan Heylen - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (5):2243-2263.Antirealists who hold the knowability thesis, namely that all truths are knowable, have been put on the defensive by the Church-Fitch paradox of knowability. Rejecting the non-factivity of the concept of knowability used in that paradox, Edgington has adopted a factive notion of knowability, according to which only actual truths are knowable. She has used this new notion to reformulate the knowability thesis. The result has been argued to be immune against the Church-Fitch paradox, but it has encountered several other (...)
- Factive knowability and the problem of possible omniscience.Jan Heylen - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (1):65-87.Famously, the Church–Fitch paradox of knowability is a deductive argument from the thesis that all truths are knowable to the conclusion that all truths are known. In this argument, knowability is analyzed in terms of having the possibility to know. Several philosophers have objected to this analysis, because it turns knowability into a nonfactive notion. In addition, they claim that, if the knowability thesis is reformulated with the help of factive concepts of knowability, then omniscience can be avoided. In this (...)
- Fitch's Paradox and Level-Bridging Principles.Weng Kin San - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy 117 (1):5-29.Fitch’s Paradox shows that if every truth is knowable, then every truth is known. Standard diagnoses identify the factivity/negative infallibility of the knowledge operator and Moorean contradictions as the root source of the result. This paper generalises Fitch’s result to show that such diagnoses are mistaken. In place of factivity/negative infallibility, the weaker assumption of any ‘level-bridging principle’ suffices. A consequence is that the result holds for some logics in which the “Moorean contradiction” commonly thought to underlie the result is (...)
- Disappearing Diamonds: Fitch-Like Results in Bimodal Logic.Weng Kin San - 2019 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 48 (6):1003-1016.Augment the propositional language with two modal operators: □ and ■. Define ⧫ to be the dual of ■, i.e. ⧫=¬■¬. Whenever (X) is of the form φ → ψ, let (X⧫) be φ→⧫ψ . (X⧫) can be thought of as the modally qualified counterpart of (X)—for instance, under the metaphysical interpretation of ⧫, where (X) says φ implies ψ, (X⧫) says φ implies possibly ψ. This paper shows that for various interesting instances of (X), fairly weak assumptions suffice for (...)
- Counterfactual knowability revisited.Julian J. Schlöder - 2019 - Synthese (2):1-15.Anti-realism is plagued by Fitch’s paradox: the remarkable result that if one accepts that all truths are knowable, minimal assumptions about the nature of knowledge entail that every truth is known. Dorothy Edgington suggests to address this problem by understanding p is knowable to be a counterfactual claim, but her proposal must contend with a forceful objection by Timothy Williamson. I revisit Edgington’s basic idea and find that Williamson’s objection is obviated by a refined understanding of counterfactual knowability that is (...)
- Factivity, consistency and knowability.James Chase & Penelope Rush - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):899-918.One diagnosis of Fitch’s paradox of knowability is that it hinges on the factivity of knowledge: that which is known is true. Yet the apparent role of factivity and non-factive analogues in related paradoxes of justified belief can be shown to depend on familiar consistency and positive introspection principles. Rejecting arguments that the paradox hangs on an implausible consistency principle, this paper argues instead that the Fitch phenomenon is generated both in epistemic logic and logics of justification by the interaction (...)
- Knowledge, Time, and Paradox: Introducing Sequential Epistemic Logic.Wesley Holliday - 2018 - In Hans van Ditmarsch & Gabriel Sandu (eds.), Outstanding Contributions to Logic: Jaakko Hintikka. Springer.Epistemic logic in the tradition of Hintikka provides, as one of its many applications, a toolkit for the precise analysis of certain epistemological problems. In recent years, dynamic epistemic logic has expanded this toolkit. Dynamic epistemic logic has been used in analyses of well-known epistemic “paradoxes”, such as the Paradox of the Surprise Examination and Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability, and related epistemic phenomena, such as what Hintikka called the “anti-performatory effect” of Moorean announcements. In this paper, we explore a variation (...)
- Knowledge, Time, and Paradox: Introducing Sequential Epistemic Logic.Wesley Holliday - 2018 - In Hans van Ditmarsch & Gabriel Sandu (eds.), Jaakko Hintikka on Knowledge and Game Theoretical Semantics. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 363-394.Epistemic logic in the tradition of Hintikka provides, as one of its many applications, a toolkit for the precise analysis of certain epistemological problems. In recent years, dynamic epistemic logic has expanded this toolkit. Dynamic epistemic logic has been used in analyses of well-known epistemic “paradoxes”, such as the Paradox of the Surprise Examination and Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability, and related epistemic phenomena, such as what Hintikka called the “anti-performatory effect” of Moorean announcements. In this paper, we explore a variation (...)$135.08 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark 2 citations
- Epistemic Logic and Epistemology.Wesley H. Holliday - 2018 - In Sven Ove Hansson Vincent F. Hendricks (ed.), Handbook of Formal Philosophy. Springer. pp. 351-369.This chapter provides a brief introduction to propositional epistemic logic and its applications to epistemology. No previous exposure to epistemic logic is assumed. Epistemic-logical topics discussed include the language and semantics of basic epistemic logic, multi-agent epistemic logic, combined epistemic-doxastic logic, and a glimpse of dynamic epistemic logic. Epistemological topics discussed include Moore-paradoxical phenomena, the surprise exam paradox, logical omniscience and epistemic closure, formalized theories of knowledge, debates about higher-order knowledge, and issues of knowability raised by Fitch’s paradox. The references (...)
- The Typing Approach to Church-Fitch's Knowability Paradox and its Revenge Form.Jiri Raclavsky - 2018 - Prolegomena 17 (1):31-49.Williamson, Linsky, Paseau and others proposed a solution to Church- Fitch's knowability paradox that is based on typing knowledge; however, it received some criticism. Carrara and Fassio objected that the approach has no paradox-independent motivation, it is thus ad hoc. In the first part of the paper, I dismiss such criticism by carefully stating typing approach principles that are based on non-circular formation of propositions and intensional operators operating on them. In the second part of the paper, I demonstrate that (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Hope, knowledge, and blindspots.Jordan Dodd - 2017 - Synthese 194 (2):531-543.Roy Sorensen introduced the concept of an epistemic blindspot in the 1980s. A proposition is an epistemic blindspot for some individual at some time if and only if that proposition is consistent but unknowable by that individual at that time. In the first half of this paper, I extend Sorensen work on blindspots by arguing that there exist blindspots that essentially involve hopes. In the second half, I show how such blindspots can contribute to and impair different pursuits of self-understanding. (...)
- Russellian typing knowledge and Fitch's paradox of knowability.Jiri Raclavsky - 2017 - In Jean-Yves Beziau, Alexandre Costa-Leite & Itala M. Loffredo D’Ottaviano (eds.), Aftermath of the Logical Paradise. pp. 401-423.It is already known that Fitch's paradox of knowability can be solved by typing knowledge. I differentiate two kinds of such typing, Tarskian and Russellian, and focus on the latter which is framed within the ramified theory of types. My main aim is to other a defence of the approach against recently raised criticism. The key justification is provided by the Vicious Circle Principle which governs the very formation of propositions and thus also intensional operators, including the operator of knowledge.
- What Do Paraconsistent, Undecidable, Random, Computable and Incomplete mean? A Review of Godel's Way: Exploits into an undecidable world by Gregory Chaitin, Francisco A Doria , Newton C.A. da Costa 160p (2012).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 3rd Ed 686p(2017).In ‘Godel’s Way’ three eminent scientists discuss issues such as undecidability, incompleteness, randomness, computability and paraconsistency. I approach these issues from the Wittgensteinian viewpoint that there are two basic issues which have completely different solutions. There are the scientific or empirical issues, which are facts about the world that need to be investigated observationally and philosophical issues as to how language can be used intelligibly (which include certain questions in mathematics and logic), which need to be decided by looking at (...)
- On a New Tentative Solution to Fitch’s Paradox.Alessandro Giordani - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (3):597-611.In a recent paper, Alexander argues that relaxing the requirement that sound knowers know their own soundness might provide a solution to Fitch’s paradox and introduces a suitable axiomatic system where the paradox is avoided. In this paper an analysis of this solution is proposed according to which the effective move for solving the paradox depends on the axiomatic treatment of the ontic modality rather than the limitations imposed on the epistemic one. It is then shown that, once the ontic (...)
- Questions, topics and restricted closure.Peter Hawke - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (10):2759-2784.Single-premise epistemic closure is the principle that: if one is in an evidential position to know that P where P entails Q, then one is in an evidential position to know that Q. In this paper, I defend the viability of opposition to closure. A key task for such an opponent is to precisely formulate a restricted closure principle that remains true to the motivations for abandoning unrestricted closure but does not endorse particularly egregious instances of closure violation. I focus (...)
- A Proof‐Theoretic Account of the Miners Paradox.Ansten Klev - 2016 - Theoria 82 (4):351-369.By maintaining that a conditional sentence can be taken to express the validity of a rule of inference, we offer a solution to the Miners Paradox that leaves both modus ponens and disjunction elimination intact. The solution draws on Sundholm's recently proposed account of Fitch's Paradox.
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