Abstract
Three classic distinctions specify that truths can be necessary versus contingent,analytic versus synthetic, and a priori versus a posteriori. The philosopher reading this article knows very well both how useful and ordinary such distinctions are in our conceptual work and that they have been subject to many and detailed debates, especially the last two. In the following pages, I do not wish to discuss how far they may be tenable. I shall assume that, if they are reasonable and non problematic in some ordinary cases, then they can be used in order to understand what kind of knowledge the maker’s knowledge is. By this I mean the sort of knowledge that Alice enjoys when she holds the information (true content) that Bob’s coffee is sweetened because she just put two spoons of sugar in it herself. The maker’s knowledge tradition is quite important but it is not mainstream in modern and analytic epistemology and lacks grounding in terms of exactly what sort of knowledge one is talking about. My suggestion is that this grounding can be provided by a minimalist approach, based on an information-theoretical analysis. In the article, I argue that (a) we need to decouple a fourth distinction, namely informative versus uninformative, from the previous three and, in particular, from its implicit association with analytic versus synthetic and a priori versus a posteriori; (b) such a decoupling facilitates, and is facilitated by, moving from a monoagent to a multiagent approach: the distinctions qualify a proposition, a message, or some information not just in themselves but relationally, with respect to an informational agent; (c) the decoupling and the multiagent approach enable a re-mapping of currently available positions in epistemology (Classic, Innatist, Kant’s and Kripke’s) on these four dichotomies; (d) within such a re-mapping, two positions, capturing the nature of a witness’ knowledge and of a maker’s knowledge, can best be described as contingent, synthetic, a posteriori, and uninformative and as contingent, synthetic, weakly a priori (ab anteriori), and uninformative respectively. In the conclusion, I indicate why the analysis of the maker’s knowledge has important consequences in all those cases in which the poietic (constructive) intervention on a system determines the truth of the model of that system.
Highlights
Synthese (2018) 195:465–481 can best be described as contingent, synthetic, a posteriori, and uninformative and as contingent, synthetic, weakly a priori, and uninformative respectively
To understand how Alice’s account that p may differ from Bob’s it is useful to rely on the three classic distinctions that can be used to qualify a truth: (a) necessary versus contingent (b) analytic versus synthetic (c) a priori versus a posteriori
(1) It seems clear that references to experience in terms of dependence-independence or before-after, from Kant onwards, are too-coarsely grained when it comes to understanding the “riority” of a truth
Summary
Let us assume that Alice knows that p. An agent who does not bring about nor observes s, but receives the information p This is Carol the receiver, to whom Bob communicates p through m. These six elements look like a game and an example from chess provides all we need to build a simple example: 1. Alice has made the move, Bob has seen her making the move and communicates the move to Carol, who is in another room, by sending her m, the message that conveys the information p. 7 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for the following specification, which I quote verbatim: “It should be noted that ‘states’ in both digital and analogue system are artificially imposed, and so are, arguably, already part of maker’s knowledge. I shall argue in section three that (b) is the correct answer: it is the logical nature of the maker’s account that differs, not the maker’s information
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