Abstract

After introducing Fitch’s paradox of knowability and the knower paradox, the paper critically discusses the dialetheist unified solution to both problems that Beall and Priest have proposed. It is first argued that the dialetheist approach to the knower paradox can withstand the main objections against it, these being that the approach entails an understanding of negation that is intolerably weak and that it commits dialetheists to jointly accept and reject the same thing. The lesson of the knower paradox, according to dialetheism, is that human knowledge is inconsistent. The paper also argues that this inconsistency has not been shown by dialetheists to be wide enough in its scope to justify their approach to Fitch’s problem. The connection between the two problems is superficial and therefore the proposed unified solution fails.