THE FITCH'S PARADOX OF KNOWABILITY

FITCH, FREDERIC.

A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts.

[No place], The Association for Symbolic Logic, 1963. 8vo. In the original printed wrappers. In "Journal of Symbolic Logic", Vol. 28, Number 2. June, 1963. A very fine and clean copy. Pp. 135-142. [Entire issue: Pp. 113-175.].

First printing of Fitch's famous paper which laid the foundation for "The Fitch's Paradox of Knowability".

"The literature on the knowability paradox emerges in response to a proof first published by Frederic Fitch in his now famous 1963 paper, "A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts." Theorem 5, as it was there called, threatens to collapse a number of modal and epistemic differences. Let ignorance be the failure to know some truth. Then Theorem 5 collapses a commitment to contingent ignorance into a commitment to necessary ignorance. For it shows that the existence of truths in fact unknown entails the existence of truths necessarily unknown.
Fitch published the proof in 1963 to avert a kind of "conditional fallacy" that threatened his informed-desire analysis of value. The analysis roughly says: x is valuable to s just in case there is a truth p such that were s to known p then she would desire x. The existence of unknowable truths ultimately explains why he restricts the propositional variables to knowable propositions. For an unknowable truth provides for an impossible antecedent in Fitch's counterfactual, and ultimately trivializes the analysis. Since Fitch's theory of value is not the context in which the paradox is widely discussed, we will say no more about it here." (SEP).

Order-nr.: 47085