Abstract
Anti-realism is plagued by Fitch’s paradox: the remarkable result that if one accepts that all truths are knowable, minimal assumptions about the nature of knowledge entail that every truth is known. Dorothy Edgington suggests to address this problem by understanding p is knowable to be a counterfactual claim, but her proposal must contend with a forceful objection by Timothy Williamson. I revisit Edgington’s basic idea and find that Williamson’s objection is obviated by a refined understanding of counterfactual knowability that is grounded in possible courses of inquiry. I arrive at a precise definition of knowability that is not just a technical avoidance of paradox, but is metaphysically sound and does justice to the anti-realist idea.
Highlights
Anti-realists endorse the thesis that all truths are knowable (Dummett 1991; Tennant 1997)
(ART) trivialises the knowability of all actual truths that logically follow from not having performed some course of inquiry
As is known since Edgington’s landmark 1985 paper, Fitch’s paradox does not arise when the anti-realist principle is taken to be about counterfactual knowledge of actual truth
Summary
Anti-realists endorse the thesis that all truths are knowable (Dummett 1991; Tennant 1997). It is a factive account of knowability, i.e. all knowable propositions are true (as they should; cf Fuhrmann 2014), and it unrestrictedly makes all actual truths knowable. Characterising knowability as counterfactual knowledge of actuality requires no more than the usual vocabulary of counterfactual semantics, whereas some other proposals must introduce new modalities or new takes on metaphysical possibility (e.g. Rückert 2004; Tennant 2009; Fara 2010; Fischer 2013; Fuhrmann 2014).. The proposal developed here is not merely a formal avoidance of paradox, but a metaphysically and philosophically appreciable explication of what is meant by knowable that allows one to coherently claim that truth is what is knowable
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