The Knowability Argument and the Syntactic Type-Theoretic Approach

Abstract

Some attempts have been made to block the Knowability Paradox and other modal paradoxes by adopting a type-theoretic framework in which knowledge and necessity are regarded as typed predicates. The main problem with this approach is that when these notions are simultaneously treated as predicates, a new kind of paradox appears. I claim that avoiding this paradox either by weakening the Knowability Principle or by introducing types for both predicates is rather messy and unattractive. I also consider the prospect of using the truth predicate to emulate other modal notions. It turns out that this idea works quite well.

Keywords

• Knowability Argument – Type-theoretic approach – Self-reference – Multi-modal paradoxes – Truth