Heinrich Wansing Dresden University of Technology The knowability paradox is an instance of a remarkable reasoning pattern (actually, a pair of such patterns), in the course of which an occurrence of the possibility operator, the diamond, disappears. In the present paper, it is pointed out how the unwanted disappearance of the diamond may be escaped. The emphasis is not laid on a discussion of the contentious premise of the knowability paradox, namely that all truths are possibly known, but on how from this assumption the conclusion is derived that all truths are, in fact, known. Nevertheless, the solution o#ered is in the spirit of the constructivist attitude usually maintained by defenders of the anti-realist premise. In order to avoid the paradoxical reasoning, a paraconsistent constructive relevant modal epistemic logic with strong negation is defined semantically. The system is axiomatized and shown to be complete.

ABSTRACT: Here is a crude list, possibly summarizing the role of paradoxes within the framework of mathematical logic: 1. directly motivating important theories (e.g. type theory, axiomatic set theory, combinatory logic); 2. suggesting methods of proving fundamental metamathematical results (fixed point theorems, incompleteness, undecidability, undefinability); 3. applying inductive definability and generalized recursion; 4. introducing new semantical methods (e. g. revision theory, semi-inductive definitions, which require non-trivial set theoretic results); 5. (partly) enhancing new axioms in set theory: the case of anti-foundation AFA and the mathematics of circular phenomena; 6. suggesting the investigation of non-classical logical systems, from contraction-free and many-valued logics to systems with generalized quantifiers; 7. suggesting frameworks with flexible typing for the foundations of Mathematics and Computer Science; 8. applying forms of self-referential truth and in Artificial Intelligence, Theoretical Linguistics, etc. Below we attempt to shed some light on the genesis of the issues 1–8 through the history of the paradoxes in the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on semantical aspects.