LIRa session: Adam Bjorndhal

Speaker: Adam Bjorndhal

Date and Time: Thursday, October 20th 2022, 16:30-18:00

Venue: KdVI seminar room F3.20 in Science Park 107 and online.

Please note the unusual location. This is the Mathematics seminar room, not the ILLC seminar room.

Title: Knowledge Second

Abstract. Classical philosophical analyses seek to explain knowledge as deriving from more basic notions. The influential “knowledge first” program in epistemology reverses this tradition, taking knowledge as its starting point. From the perspective of epistemic logic, however, this is not so much a reversal as it is the default—the field arguably begins with the specialization of “necessity” to “epistemic necessity”; that is, it begins with knowledge.
In this context, putting knowledge *second* would be the reversal. This work motivates, develops, and explores such a “knowledge second” approach in epistemic logic, founded on distinguishing what a body of evidence actually entails from what it is (merely) believed to entail. I import a logical framework that captures exactly this distinction (based on previous, joint work with Aybüke Özgün), use it to define formal notions of “internal” and “external” justification, and investigate applications to the KK principle, the regress problem, and the definition of knowledge