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120Knowledge, Time, and Paradox: Introducing Sequential Epistemic LogicIn Hans van Ditmarsch & Gabriel Sandu (eds.), Outstanding Contributions to Logic: Jaakko Hintikka, Springer. 2018.Epistemic logic in the tradition of Hintikka provides, as one of its many applications, a toolkit for the precise analysis of certain epistemological problems. In recent years, dynamic epistemic logic has expanded this toolkit. Dynamic epistemic logic has been used in analyses of well-known epistemic “paradoxes”, such as the Paradox of the Surprise Examination and Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability, and related epistemic phenomena, such as what Hintikka called the “anti-performatory effect” of Moore…Read more
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88Partiality and Adjointness in Modal LogicIn Rajeev Goré, Barteld Kooi & Agi Kurucz (eds.), Advances in Modal Logic, Vol. 10, College Publications. pp. 313-332. 2014.Following a proposal of Humberstone, this paper studies a semantics for modal logic based on partial “possibilities” rather than total “worlds.” There are a number of reasons, philosophical and mathematical, to find this alternative semantics attractive. Here we focus on the construction of possibility models with a finitary flavor. Our main completeness result shows that for a number of standard modal logics, we can build a canonical possibility model, wherein every logically consistent formula…Read more
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174Roles, Rigidity and Quantification in Epistemic LogicIn Alexandru Baltag & Sonja Smets (eds.), Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics, Springer. pp. 591-629. 2014.Epistemic modal predicate logic raises conceptual problems not faced in the case of alethic modal predicate logic : Frege’s “Hesperus-Phosphorus” problem—how to make sense of ascribing to agents ignorance of necessarily true identity statements—and the related “Hintikka-Kripke” problem—how to set up a logical system combining epistemic and alethic modalities, as well as others problems, such as Quine’s “Double Vision” problem and problems of self-knowledge. In this paper, we lay out a philosophi…Read more
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192Epistemic Logic, Relevant Alternatives, and the Dynamics of ContextLecture Notes in Computer Science 7415 109-129. 2012.According to the Relevant Alternatives (RA) Theory of knowledge, knowing that something is the case involves ruling out (only) the relevant alternatives. The conception of knowledge in epistemic logic also involves the elimination of possibilities, but without an explicit distinction, among the possibilities consistent with an agent’s information, between those relevant possibilities that an agent must rule out in order to know and those remote, far-fetched or otherwise irrelevant possibilities.…Read more
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187Freedom and the Fixity of the PastPhilosophical Review 121 (2): 179-207. 2012.According to the Principle of the Fixity of the Past (FP), no one can now do anything that would require the past to have unfolded differently than it actually did, for the past is fixed, over and done with. Why might doing something in the future require the past to be different? Because if determinism is true—if the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the Big Bang determined a unique future for our universe—then doing anything other than what you are determined to do would require one…Read more
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University of California, BerkeleyDepartment of Philosophy
Group in Logic and the Methodology of ScienceProfessor
Berkeley, California, United States of America