Abstract
Having defined the notion of ‘awareness’ as realizing one’s own information, this chapter aims to explore the applications of this concept to both Epistemology and Epistemic Logic. Distinguishing between awareness of and awareness that will result in two types of awareness, that classify the types of information the agent bears in mind. Based on this distinction a new interpretation of the concept of awareness will be provided and a different understanding of the notion of ‘explicit knowledge’ will be defined, given rise to the concept of Explicit Aware Knowledge, core component of this research.
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Notes
- 1.
This sense of ‘awareness of things’ could be related to Quine’s ‘observation sentences’, which he considers opposed to ‘propositions’ (see Quine 1970 for further details).
- 2.
The adjective “complex” has to be understood here in its logical meaning, i.e. the logical complexity of formulas. As such, awareness of things will be formed exclusively by atomic propositions, while awareness of facts will deal with more ‘complex’ formulas.
- 3.
See, for example, the following quote, where the author is defining his internalist view: “Epistemic internalism, as I am construing it, holds that conscious awareness of one’s justificatory grounds and awareness that those grounds contribute to the justification of one’s belief (or the possibility of such awareness upon reflection), is a necessary condition of epistemic justification obtaining” (Madison 2009, p. 175, my italics.).
- 4.
In Chap. 4, devoted to the concept of justification, this problem will be analysed and ‘solved’ due to a dynamic understanding of the concept.
- 5.
For an updated bibliographic review on Awareness Logic see Fernández-Fernández (2019).
- 6.
Both properties stem from a longer list of properties that can be found in the seminal work (Fagin and Halpern 1988, pp. 53–57).
- 7.
Which includes the work from a previous paper: Grossi and Velázquez-Quesada (2009).
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Fernández-Fernández, C. (2021). Epistemic Awareness as the Main Concept. In: Awareness in Logic and Epistemology. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69606-1_2
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