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Logic, Language and Meaning pp 52–61Cite as

Inquisitive Knowledge Attribution and the Gettier Problem

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7218))

Abstract

A disjunctive belief cannot be described as knowledge if the subject does not justifiably believe a true disjunct, even if the whole disjunctive belief is true and justified (Gettier 1963). This phenomenon is problematic if the verb know semantically operates on a (classical) proposition, as standardly assumed. In this paper, I offer a solution to this problem using Inquisitive Semantics, arguing that know operates on the set of alternative possibilities expressed by its complement. It will also be shown that the proposed semantics for know provides a novel account of its compatibility with both declarative and interrogative complements.

I thank Maria Aloni, Danny Fox, Ben George, Irene Heim, Floris Roelofsen, Yasutada Sudo and an anonymous reviewer, as well as the audience at 18th Amsterdam Colloquium, for helpful discussion and criticism. Of course, they need not agree with the claims made in this paper, and all errors are my own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

    Wataru Uegaki

Authors
  1. Wataru Uegaki
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Maria Aloni , Floris Roelofsen , Galit W. Sassoon , Katrin Schulz  & Matthijs Westera , , ,  & 

  2. ACLC, University of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Vadim Kimmelman

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Uegaki, W. (2012). Inquisitive Knowledge Attribution and the Gettier Problem. In: Aloni, M., Kimmelman, V., Roelofsen, F., Sassoon, G.W., Schulz, K., Westera, M. (eds) Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31482-7_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31481-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31482-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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