Abstract
Moore’s Paradox is a test case for any formal theory of belief. In Knowledge and Belief, Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief. His account purports to offer an explanation of the paradox. In this paper I argue that Hintikka’s interpretation of one of the doxastic operators is philosophically problematic and leads to an unnecessarily strong logical system. I offer a weaker alternative that captures in a more accurate way our logical intuitions about the notion of belief without sacrificing the possibility of providing an explanation for problematic cases such as Moore’s Paradox.
Highlights
Among the problems that any logical analysis of the notion of belief has to address, Moore’s Paradox occupies a preeminent position
Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief
Most of his analysis is made in terms of sentences, including his explanation of Moore’s Paradox, but he describes the way in which the system can be expanded to handle sentences whose meaning varies according to the context of utterance and the identity of the speaker
Summary
Among the problems that any logical analysis of the notion of belief has to address, Moore’s Paradox occupies a preeminent position. These characteristics of (1), which are not mirrored in the case of typical contradictions, seem to indicate that the problem is not a function of the truth conditions of the sentence, but rather of the performance conditions of the speech act that expresses it and, perhaps, of the mental analogue of these performance conditions for the corresponding propositional attitudes For this reason, it has been argued that an adequate analysis of the notion of belief must be made in terms of statements, as opposed to sentences. Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief Most of his analysis is made in terms of sentences, including his explanation of Moore’s Paradox, but he describes the way in which the system can be expanded to handle sentences whose meaning varies according to the context of utterance and the identity of the speaker. I will try to show that the axioms of H* capture in a more accurate way our logical intuitions about the notion of belief without sacrificing the possibility of providing an explanation for problematic cases such as Moore’s Paradox
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