Is every truth knowable? Reply to Williamson

Ratio 14 (3):263–280 (2001)
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Abstract

This paper addresses an objection raised by Timothy Williamson to the ‘restriction strategy’ that I proposed, in The Taming of The True, in order to deal with the Fitch paradox. Williamson provides a new version of a Fitch-style argument that purports to show that even the restricted principle of knowability suffers the same fate as the unrestricted one. I show here that the new argument is fallacious. The source of the fallacy is a misunderstanding of the condition used in stating the restricted knowability principle. I also rebut Williamson’s criticism of my argument for the claim that any proposition of the form ‘it is known that ϕ’ is decidable if ϕ is decidable.

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Neil Tennant
Ohio State University

Citations of this work

Knowability and the capacity to know.Michael Fara - 2010 - Synthese 173 (1):53 - 73.
Knowability and epistemic truth.M. Hand - 2003 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2):216 – 228.
Analogues of knowability.David DeVidi & Tim Kenyon - 2003 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (4):481 – 495.

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