Speaker: Francisca Silva (University of St Andrews)
Date and Time: Thursday, May 16th 2024, 16:30-18:00
Venue: online only
Title: Epistemic Logic with Partial Grasp
Abstract. In this talk I’ll argue that we have to gain in recognizing in our epistemic logics with subject matters a relation between agents and the parts of subject matters that play a role in agents’ cognitive lives. I call this relation “grasping”. I zone in on one notion of having a partial grasp of a subject matter — that of agents grasping part of the subject matter that they are attending to — and characterize it. I propose that giving up the idealization that we fully grasp the subject matters we attend to allows one to more realistically characterize the epistemic life of agents. To show this, I propose an epistemic logic with partial grasp that has in mind considerations from extensions of subject matter theory to the first-order case with the aim of avoiding certain forms of logical omniscience, and which provides an alternative to immanent closure (Yablo, 2014).