The intoxicating effects of conciliatory omniscience
- PDF / 303,509 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 27 Downloads / 145 Views
The intoxicating effects of conciliatory omniscience David McElhoes1
Accepted: 30 August 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The coherence of omniscience is sometimes challenged using self-referential sentences like, ‘‘No omniscient entity knows that which this very sentence expresses,’’ which suggest that there are truths which no omniscient entity knows. In this paper, I consider two strategies for addressing these challenges: The Common Strategy, which dismisses such self-referential sentences as meaningless, and The Conciliatory Strategy, which discounts them as quirky outliers with no impact on one’s status as being omniscient. I argue that neither strategy succeeds. The Common Strategy fails because it is both unmotivated and impotent. The Conciliatory Strategy fails because it leads to embarrassing situations in which omniscient entities are epistemically inferior to non-omniscient entities: we can, for example, devise trivia-based drinking games that force omniscient entities into an intoxicated state; and, given plausible closure principles for belief, such entities are unable to have the sorts of beliefs that give them reason to refuse to play (e.g., they are unable to believe that they can lose the game). Keywords Omniscience Paradox Self-reference Liar Truth Epistemology Philosophy of religion
1 The problem The classical notion of omniscience—viz. knowing all truths—is sometimes accused of being incoherent on the grounds that there are self-referential sentences which express truths that no omniscient entity knows. Patrick Grim (1983, 2000), & David McElhoes [email protected] 1
School for Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA
123
D. McElhoes
for example, suggests that the sentence, ‘The Omniscient does not believe that this very sentence expresses a truth’ must be true, since if it were false, The Omniscient would believe something false, contrary to what it knows. Similarly, Milne (2007) suggests that ‘No omniscient entity knows that which this very sentence expresses’ must be true,1 since if it were false, then some omniscient entity would know something false, contrary to the factivity of knowledge. In both cases, there is evidently a truth that omniscient entities fail to know. Friends of omniscience address these accusations of incoherence by claiming that the appeal to self-referential sentences is ineffective. This paper evaluates two strategies for motivating this claim without abandoning either the classical conception of omniscience or classical logic. I call them, The Common Strategy, and The Conciliatory Strategy. I argue that neither strategy succeeds.
2 The common strategy The most common strategy for motivating the ineffectiveness of Grim’s and Milne’s sentences is to use an argument by analogy: to argue that, like the pathological Liar sentence, ‘this sentence is not true’, Grim’s and Milne’s sentences are meaningless in an important sense—they fail to express a proposition.2 If they are meaningless in this s
Data Loading...
