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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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
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