this paper was presented at the Second National Meeting of the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy, Vercelli (Italy), September 1996. We are thankful to the audience for stimulating comments and discussion.

It is often suggested that truth-preservation is insufficient for logical consequence, and that consequence needs to satisfy a further condition of relevance. Premises and conclusion in a valid consequence must be relevant to one another, and truth-preservation is too coarse-grained a notion to guarantee that. Thus logical consequence is the intersection of truth-preservation and relevance.

Formal epistemology is a discipline with various branches and sub-branches dealing with precise representations of attitudes and their flux. The formal tools utilized for this purpose go from standard probability theory to non-standard (or infinitesimal) probability, to decision theoretical tools to logical tools.

Sidney Shoemaker (1995) has given an influential explanation of the absurdity of Mooreparadoxical belief in terms of conscious belief. Here I offer a novel account of the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical assertion in terms of an interlocutor’s fully conscious beliefs. This account starts with an original argument for the principle that fully conscious belief collects over conjunction. The argument is premised on the synchronic unity of consciousness and the transparency of belief. 1. Fully conscious belief and transparency: fully conscious belief collects as well as distributes over conjunction It is plausible that your fully conscious beliefs—beliefs that you are fully aware of having— distribute over conjunction: (D) If you are fully conscious at t of believing that p and q, then you are fully conscious at t of believing that p and fully conscious at t of believing that q. For illustration, suppose that in bad weather, you are fully conscious that you believe both that it is wet and that it is cold. At the same time you are fully conscious that you believe that it is wet. And at the same time you are fully conscious that you believe that it is cold.

THE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS & SOCIAL SCIENCES, SMUSuperman, Wittgenstein and the disappearance of Moorean absurdity JOHN N. WILLIAMS (UNDER THE GUISE OF LOIS LANE) ‘You have known me for years, Lois ’ explains Superman, as I lay aside my copy of Crimmins’s example (1992). ‘But there is something you have not yet discovered. You also know me under a disguise. You have not yet realized that this person is I in disguise. On that way of thinking about me, you have different opinions of me. In fact you think me an idiot.’ I’ve just informed Superman that I accept his testimony on the strength of his intelligence. But I confess I don’t quite know how to acknowledge my acceptance of his final remark. Had he let me know the identity of the person with whom I’m acquainted and who I think idiotic, then I wouldn’t have this problem. For example, had he informed me that his alter ego is Clark then (since I know that Superman would lose his sex appeal but not his intelligence if disguised as Clark) I would have to stop believing that Clark is an idiot. For otherwise I would have to start believing that Superman is an idiot, but we

Krista Lawlor and John Perry recently proposed a solution to Moore’s paradox in this journal [2008]. After an overview of it in §1, we show in §2 that they have mischaracterized its status. We then argue in §3 that once it has been properly characterized, the proposed solution faces three objections: (i) it fails to predict the absurdity of utterances its authors do not consider, but where it nevertheless occurs, (ii) it incorrectly predicts that the third-person form of Moorean assertions remains absurd, in a special case in which contrary to her belief, the assertor is the person named in the utterance, and (iii) it fails to account for what is absurd about ‘Moorean belief’, namely belief in a proposition the expression of which in a speech act would generate Moorean absurdity. In the course of arguing this, we give an explanation of the absurdity of Moorean belief. In §4 we give two superior explanations of the absurdity of Moorean assertion. In §5 we show that whichever of these is employed, our complete account avoids our three objections to Lawlor and Perry. 1. Lawlor and Perry’s Account of Moorean Utterance Lawlor and Perry wish to explain why saying something of the form (1) ‘p but I don’t believe that p’

Abstract: Fitch showed that not every true proposition can be known in due time; in other words, that not every proposition is knowable. Moore showed that certain propositions cannot be consistently believed. A more recent dynamic phrasing of Moore-sentences is that not all propositions are known after their announcement, i.e., not every proposition is successful. Fitch’s and Moore’s results are related, as they equally apply to standard notions of knowledge and belief (S 5 and KD45, respectively). If we interpret ‘successful ’ as ‘known after its announcement ’ and ‘knowable ’ as ‘known after some announcement’, successful implies knowable. Knowable does not imply successful: there is a proposition j that is not known after its announcement but there is another announcement after which j is known. We show that all propositions are knowable in the more general sense that for each proposition, it can become known or its negation can become known. We can get to know whether it is true: �(Kj ⁄ K¬j). This result comes at a price. We cannot get to know whether the proposition was true. This restricts the philosophical relevance of interpreting ‘knowable ’ as ‘known after an announcement’. Keywords: modal logic, knowability, Fitch’s paradox, dynamic epistemics, public announcements 1. Successful – the Historical Record