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The knowability paradox threatens metaphysical or semantical antirealism, the view that truth is epistemic, by revealing an awful consequence of the claim [i] that all truths are knowable. Various attempts have been made to find a way out of the paradox. |
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An interesting recent reply to the Paradox of Knowability is Neil Tennant's proposal: to restrict the anti-realist's knowability thesis to truths the knowing of which is logically consistent. However, this proposal is egregiously ad hoc unless motivated by something other than the wish to save anti-realism from embarrassment. We examine Tennant's argument that his restriction is motivated by parallel considerations in cases that are neutral with respect to debates about realism. We conclude that the cases are not neutral, nor the (...) |
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Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental stage sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analyzing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts new light on such philosophical problems as scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The arguments are (...) |
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Perennial philosophers' hopes are unlikely victims of swift, natural deduction. Yet anti-realism has been thought one. Not hoping for anti-realism myself I here show it, lest it be underestimated, to survive the following argument, adapted from W. D.Hart pp. 156, 164-5; he credits first publication to Fitch). |
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"This is an important book, and no one interested in issues which touch on the free will will want to ignore it."--Ethics. In this stimulating and thought-provoking book, the author defends the thesis that free will is incompatible with determinism. He disputes the view that determinism is necessary for moral responsbility. Finding no good reason for accepting determinism, but believing moral responsiblity to be indubitable, he concludes that determinism should be rejected. |
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This paper addresses an objection raised by Timothy Williamson to the ‘restriction strategy’ that I proposed, in The Taming of The True, in order to deal with the Fitch paradox. Williamson provides a new version of a Fitch-style argument that purports to show that even the restricted principle of knowability suffers the same fate as the unrestricted one. I show here that the new argument is fallacious. The source of the fallacy is a misunderstanding of the condition used in stating (...) |
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Using a quantified propositional logic involving the operators it is known that and it is possible to know that, we formalize various interesting philosophical claims involved in the realism debate. We set out inferential rules for the epistemic modalities, ranging from ones that are obviously analytic, to ones that are epistemologically more substantive or even controversial. Then we investigate various aporias for the realism debate. These are constructively inconsistent triads of claims from our list: a claim expressing some sort of (...) |
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The well-known argument of Frederick Fitch, purporting to show that verificationism (= Truth implies knowability) entails the absurd conclusion that all the truths are known, has been disarmed by Dorothy Edgington''s suggestion that the proper formulation of verificationism presupposes that we make use of anactuality operator along with the standardly invoked epistemic and modal operators. According to her interpretation of verificationism, the actual truth of a proposition implies that it could be known in some possible situation that the proposition holds (...) |
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The paradox of knowability is a logical result suggesting that, necessarily, if all truths are knowable in principle then all truths are in fact known. The contrapositive of the result says, necessarily, if in fact there is an unknown truth, then there is a truth that couldn't possibly be known. More specifically, if p is a truth that is never known then it is unknowable that p is a truth that is never known. The proof has been used to argue (...) |
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Oxford Philosophical Texts Series Editor: John Cottingham The Oxford Philosophical Texts series consists of authoritative teaching editions of canonical texts in the history of philosophy from the ancient world down to modern times. Each volume provides a clear, well laid out text together with a comprehensive introduction by a leading specialist, giving the student detailed critical guidance on the intellectual context of the work and the structure and philosophical importance of the main arguments. Endnotes are supplied which provide further commentary (...) |
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The Taming of the True poses a broad challenge to realist views of meaning and truth that have been prominent in recent philosophy. Neil Tennant argues compellingly that every truth is knowable, and that an effective logical system can be based on this principle. He lays the foundations for global semantic anti-realism and extends its consequences from the philosophy of mathematics and logic to the theory of meaning, metaphysics, and epistemology. |
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According to the “knowability thesis,” every truth is knowable. Fitch’s paradox refutes the knowability thesis by showing that if we are not omniscient, then not only are some truths not known, but there are some truths that are not knowable. In this paper, I propose a weakening of the knowability thesis (which I call the “conjunctive knowability thesis”) to the e:ect that for every truth p there is a collection of truths such that (i) each of them is knowable and (...) |
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Does a factive conception of knowability figure in ordinary use? There is some reason to think so. ‘Knowable’ and related terms such as ‘discoverable’, ‘observable’, and ‘verifiable’ all seem to operate factively in ordinary discourse. Consider the following example, a dialog between colleagues A and B: A: We could be discovered. B: Discovered doing what? A: Someone might discover that we're having an affair. B: But we are not having an affair! A: I didn’t say that we were. A’s remarks (...) |
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According to the “knowability thesis,” every truth is knowable. Fitch’s paradox refutes the knowability thesis by showing that if we are not omniscient, then not only are some truths not known, but there are some truths that are not knowable. In this paper, I propose a weakening of the knowability thesis (which I call the “conjunctive knowability thesis”) to the e:ect that for every truth p there is a collection of truths such that (i) each of them is knowable and (...) |
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Consider a superagent, a being with extraordinary rational capactities. Not only are a superagent’s beliefs closed under entailment, but a superagent also has a wonderful kind of introspective awareness: whenever she believes that she doesn’t believe something, she is right—she doesn’t believe it. A superagent, then, is a being who satisfies the following two principles: (I) If p entails q, and if S believes p, then S believes q. (II) If S believes that she doesn’t believe p, then S doesn’t (...) |
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