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A Puzzle About Modal Ignorance| old_uid | 8904 |
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| title | A Puzzle About Modal Ignorance |
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| start_date | 2010/06/14 |
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| schedule | 09h30-12h30 |
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| online | no |
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| details | conférence 2/6 |
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| summary | By "modal ignorance," I mean ignorance of epistemic or deontic modal facts, such as one might express by saying "I don't know whether it is possible that I have cancer" or "I don't know whether I ought to pick up this hitchhiker." The semantic account of epistemic and deontic modals I favor seems to require that modal ignorance be traced back to one of three sources: *epistemic ignorance* (ignorance of what one knows, or more generally of the body of information relevant for the evaluation of epistemic modals), *logical ignorance* (ignorance of what is entailed by this information), or *normative ignorance* (ignorance of the norms relevant to the evaluation of a deontic modal). However, intuitively there seem to be cases of modal ignorance that are not attributable to any of these sources. In this talk, I will consider the merits of three alternative ways of dealing with these recalcitrant intuitions. First, one might take them to be reasons to adopt a different semantic account. Second, one might explain them in terms of a general "informational stability" requirement on knowledge (acquiring more information cannot destroy knowledge). Third, one might reject them, and explain why we have these "illusions of modal ignorance." |
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| responsibles | Tessier Cardon |
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