Abstract
David Lewis developed one of the most prominent versions of epistemic contextualism (EC) in Elusive Knowledge [2], which is also known as a version of relevant alternatives theory (RAT). In this work, I propose a simple formalization of Lewis account, which results in our basic Lewisian epistemic logic (LEL). Trivial as it may seem, my formalization focuses directly on Lewis’s theory, and thus provides a firm basis to discuss his theses on anti-skepticism, infallible knowledge, rules of relevance, and especially “knowledge without belief”. Moreover, my formalization not only avoids problems of two former existed formalizations [1],[3], but also partly answers Holliday’s question how a relevant alternatives theorist should handle higher-order knowledge [1].
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References
Holliday, W.: Epistemic logic and relevant alternatives. In: Slavkovik, M. (ed.) Proceedings of the 15th Student Session of the European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information, pp. 4–16 (2010)
Lewis, D.: Elusive knowledge. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74(4), 549–567 (1996)
Rebuschi, M., Lihoreau, F.: Contextual epistemic logic. In: Degrmont, C., Keiff, L., Rckert, H. (eds.) Dialogues, Logics and Other Strange Things – Essays in Honour of Shahid Rahman, pp. 305–335 (2008)
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Xu, Z. (2011). Capturing Lewis’s “Elusive Knowledge”. In: van Ditmarsch, H., Lang, J., Ju, S. (eds) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6953. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24130-7_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24130-7_37
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