ALEF Seminar: Elia Zardini, „Unsafe knowledge”

‘I start by arguing that the Knower paradox offers underappreciated resistance to standard nonclassical approaches to the paradoxes of self-reference, because of the divergence they require between rejecting a sentence and accepting its negation. I move on to address a problem which the Knower paradox raises for my own favoured noncontractive, instability-based approach, and which consists in the apparent lack of a suitable principle of “epistemic ascent”. Shifting from logic and metaphysics to pragmatics, I defend the coherence and reasonableness of accepting sentences that express unstable states-of-affairs. Consequently, appealing to unusual conceptual resources, I close by revealing whether paradoxical sentences are true or not.’