English

Truth and Subjunctive Theories of Knowledge: No Luck?

Artificial Intelligence 2021-04-02 v3 Logic

Abstract

The paper explores applications of Kripke's theory of truth to semantics for anti-luck epistemology, that is, to subjunctive theories of knowledge. Subjunctive theories put forward modal or subjunctive conditions to rule out knowledge by mere luck as to be found in Gettier-style counterexamples to the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. Because of the subjunctive nature of these conditions the resulting semantics turns out to be non-monotone, even if it is based on non-classical evaluation schemes such as strong Kleene or FDE. This blocks the usual road to fixed-point results for Kripke's theory of truth within these semantics and consequently the paper is predominantly an exploration of fixed point results for Kripke's theory of truth within non-monotone semantics. Using the theory of quasi-inductive definitions we show that in case of the subjunctive theories of knowledge the so-called Kripke jump will have fixed points despite the non-monotonicity of the semantics: Kripke's theory of truth can be successfully applied in the framework of subjunctive theories of knowledge.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.13332,
  title  = {Truth and Subjunctive Theories of Knowledge: No Luck?},
  author = {Johannes Stern},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.13332},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

The notion of stabilizing ordinal is not well-defined, i.e., Definition 14 is flawed. As a consequence the results presented in the paper are either incorrect or remain unproved