Kristine Grigoryan

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the growing literature on historical approaches to knowability by examining how the concept of knowability can be developed in the context of Peirce’s philosophy. There has been some previous work on Peirce’s notion of knowability (Dabay 2016; Chiffi and Pietarinen 2020), but our analysis differs from these attempts. We argue that Peirce is committed to a version of the knowability thesis and thus liable to validate Fitch’s paradoxical argument, but that his overall epistemology offers a nuanced picture of the limits of knowledge.

Chiffi and Pietarinen (2020) argue that the knowability paradox disappears if we adopt the concept of conjecturability instead of knowability within the framework of Peirce’s theory of science. They make two main claims: first, conjecturability plays an all-important role in scientific inquiry and it explains better scientific progress than knowability; second, conjecturability does not produce aparadox akin to the knowability paradox. However, based on our reading of Peirce, we contend that knowability plays an important role in scientific inquiry and progress. Moreover, we show that there is a conjecturability paradox with an analogous conclusion as the knowability paradox, which is rooted in their modal analysis of conjecturability.