The Knowability Argument and the syntactic type-theoretic approach

Recently, there have been some attempts to block the Knowability Paradox and other modal paradoxes by adopting a type-theoretic framework in which knowledge and necessity are regarded as typed predicates. The main problem with this approach is that when these notions are simultaneously treated as pr...

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Bibliographic Details
Author: Rosenblatt, Lucas Daniel
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2013
Country:Argentina
Institution:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repository:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/9158
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/9158
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Knowability Argument
Type-theoretic approach
Self-reference
Multimodal Paradoxes
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/6.3
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/6
Description
Summary:Recently, there have been some attempts to block the Knowability Paradox and other modal paradoxes by adopting a type-theoretic framework in which knowledge and necessity are regarded as typed predicates. The main problem with this approach is that when these notions are simultaneously treated as predicates, a new kind of paradox appears. I claim that avoiding this paradox either by weakening the Knowability Principle or by introducing types for both predicates is rather messy and unattractive. I also consider the prospect of using the truth predicate to emulate necessity, knowledge and other modal notions. It turns out that this idea works much better.