Philosophical Results I: A Protocol-Theoretic Logic of Epistemic Deontics, Procedural Knowledge, and Norm Application

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter presents a penultimate layer of elaborations of PLEN. First, a protocol-theoretic logic of epistemic deontics is built into the Revised PLEN framework of Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7. The deontic logic is defended from several different directions. First, a number of immediate philosophical arguments, drawing on ideas from the inception of deontic logic, show the greater plausibility of protocol-theoretic deontics as compared to the intensional operators of standard deontic logic or even the merely dynamic operators of dynamic deontic logic. Second, the chapter observes, drawing on Chap. 6, that protocols are hyperintensional objects; indeed, protocol graph isomorphism equivalence is a form of hyperintensional equivalence. This draws a broad and formally important consonance between the protocol-theoretic analysis of epistemic norms and arguments for the hyperintensionality of normative concepts in general. Third, the chapter shows that the protocol-theoretic logic solves a wide array of paradoxes of deontic logic. The second system added by this chapter is a logic of procedural knowledge and norm application. Procedural knowledge is knowledge of the procedural requirements of a system of norms or rules, and this notion is built into the logic of norm application, per the analysis of the regulative role of norms in prior chapters. The latter additions are given a much less extensive defense, as their primary notions are derived from prior considerations raised about the regulative role of epistemic norms. Both systems are only minimally explored from a technical perspective, as they serve primarily to extend the expressive power of PLEN in order to capture some of the principles of epistemic proceduralism.