Abstract

This study continues the anti-realist’s quest for a principled way to avoid Fitch’s paradox. It is proposed that the Cartesian restriction on the anti-realist’s knowability principle ‘ϕ, therefore ✸Kϕ ’ should be formulated as a consistency requirement not on the premise ϕ of an application of the rule, but rather on the set of assumptions on which the relevant occurrence of ϕ depends. It is stressed, by reference to illustrative proofs, how important it is to have proofs in normal form before applying the proposed restriction. A similar restriction is proposed for the converse inference, the so-called Rule of Factiveness ‘✸Kϕ therefore ϕ’. The proposed restriction appears to block another Fitch-style derivation that uses the KK-thesis in order to get around the Cartesian restriction on applications of the knowability principle. ∗ To appear in Joseph Salerno, ed., All Truths are Known: New Essays on the Knowability Paradox, Oxford University Press. This paper would not have been written without the stimulation, encouragement and criticism that I have enjoyed from Joseph Salerno, Salvatore Florio, Christina Moisa, Nicholaos Jones, and Patrick Reeder.

Citations