Abstract
Epistemic two-dimensional semantics is a theory in the philosophy of language that provides an account of meaning which is sensitive to the distinction between necessity and apriority. While this theory is usually presented in an informal manner, I take some steps in formalizing it in this paper. To do so, I define a semantics for a propositional modal logic with operators for the modalities of necessity, actuality, and apriority that captures the relevant ideas of epistemic two-dimensional semantics. I also describe some properties of the logic that are interesting from a philosophical perspective, and apply it to the so-called nesting problem.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on my master’s thesis, written in 2011 at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam, and supervised by Paul Dekker and Yde Venema. I thank them, as well as David Chalmers, Jeremy Goodman, Emar Maier, Peter Pagin, Brian Rabern, Robert van Rooij, Wolfgang Schwarz, and Timothy Williamson for discussions on various stages and predecessors of this paper. I also thank audiences in Cologne, Amsterdam, Stockholm and London as well as two anonymous reviewers for comments. I especially thank Robert Michels for many helpful discussions and detailed written comments on several drafts of this paper. This article was written while I was supported by a doctoral studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
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Fritz, P. A logic for epistemic two-dimensional semantics. Synthese 190, 1753–1770 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0260-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0260-x