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The paradox of the knower revisited
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Dean, Walter and Kurokawa, Hidenori (2014) The paradox of the knower revisited. Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, Volume 165 (Number 1). pp. 199-224. doi:10.1016/j.apal.2013.07.010 ISSN 0168-0072.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apal.2013.07.010
Abstract
The Paradox of the Knower was originally presented by Kaplan and Montague (1960) [26] as a puzzle about the everyday notion of knowledge in the face of self-reference. The paradox shows that any theory extending Robinson arithmetic with a predicate K(x) satisfying the factivity axiom View the MathML source as well as a few other epistemically plausible principles is inconsistent. After surveying the background of the paradox, we will focus on a recent debate about the role of epistemic closure principles in the Knower. We will suggest this debate sheds new light on the concept of knowledge which is at issue in the paradox – i.e. is it a “thin” notion divorced from concepts such as evidence or justification, or is it a “thick” notion more closely resembling mathematical provability? We will argue that a number of features of the paradox suggest that the latter option is more plausible. Along the way, we will provide a reconstruction of the paradox using a quantified extension of Artemovʼs (2001) [2] Logic of Proofs, as well as a series of results linking the original formulation of the paradox to reflection principles for formal arithmetic. On this basis, we will argue that while the Knower can be understood to motivate a distinction between levels of knowledge, it does not provide a rationale for recognizing a uniform hierarchy of knowledge predicates in the manner suggested by Anderson (1984) [1].
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Philosophy | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Annals of Pure and Applied Logic | ||||||
Publisher: | Elsevier BV | ||||||
ISSN: | 0168-0072 | ||||||
Official Date: | January 2014 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | Volume 165 | ||||||
Number: | Number 1 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 199-224 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1016/j.apal.2013.07.010 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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