Course Overview

Ever since G. H. von Wright proposed the original idea of treating epistemic concepts, such as knowing and believing, as a kind of modal concepts in the 1950s, epistemic logic has flourished into a large family of logical systems. In particular, with the application of Kripke's possible-worlds semantics, thanks to Jaakko Hinttikka (especially his seminal work Knowledge and Belief (1962)), numerous logical properties of related epistemic concepts can be characterized and clarified in epistemic logics. And sometimes, a well-established epistemic logic may provide a certain way of developing new philosophical views. Yet, at the moment we have already had a family of epistemic logics but the trouble is we are in no position to decide which is the correct, or the most appropriate, one insofar as a philosophical conception of knowledge/belief is concerned. Apart from this, some other misgivings remain, such as the problem of logical omniscience: The agent should know all logical consequences and all tautologies. It is thus somewhat interesting to examine the recent development of epistemic logic and to search for some treatment to deal with the problems epistemic logic may face. In this introductory course of epistemic logic, the construction of epistemic logic in general will be specified, including the language in use, the semantics and axiomatizations. Related topics are briefly mentioned, discussed, and dealt with. of course, no such a course could exhaust all topics involved, let alone the depth of such an enquiry. In this course we shall only examine a variety of logical system concerning knowledge and belief and some related concepts, as shown in the contents, which are involved in the construction of logic at the elementary level, and their philosophical implications.

Learning Achievement

The main objectives of this course are: 1. To study the construction of epistemic logic in general, including the language in use, Kripke's models and the semantics based on Kripke's model, and some well-known axiomatizations of epistemic logic, including S5, S4, S4.2, S4.3, KB. 2. A historical survey of the development of epistemic logic and investigation into some main problems with the standard epistemic logic. 3. To study some variants of epistemic logic and their impact on related philosophical issues, such as doxastic logic, dynamic epistemic logic, information and belief revision, common knowledge and public knowledge, temporal logic, and justification logic,etc. 4. To clarify the relationship and the interaction between epistemic logic and epistemology. 5. Some recent results.

Competence

Course prerequisites

Every week, a chapter in the text book, or an essay will be assigned. Students should hand in by email a summary (about 2-4 pages) of the weekly assigned essay. By the end of semester, a long essay (about 3000 words, i.e., 10-12 pages double space in A4 size) is required.

Grading Philosophy

Course schedule

Course type

Online Course Requirement

Instructor

Chin Mu Yang

Other information

(College of Liberal Arts) Graduate Institute of Philosophy

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