Knowledge and awareness. Bringing together epistemology and logic
- Autores: Claudia Fernández Fernández
- Directores de la Tesis: Alfredo Burrieza Muñiz (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad de Málaga ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Ángel Nepomuceno Fernández (presid.), Diana Esteba Ramos (secret.), Cristina Barés Gómez (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Avanzados en Humanidades. Especialidades en: Historia, Arte, Filosofía y Ciencias de la Antigüedad por la Universidad de Málaga
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: RIUMA
- Resumen
The present dissertation has as its main goal the creation of a conceptual schema that acts as a correlation between Epistemology and Epistemic Logic. The existing disconnection between both fields and the lack of a proper theoretical foundation for the contemporary developments of Epistemic Logic, regarding the dynamics of information (encompassed in the notion of ‘Dynamic Epistemic Logic’), support the main task this research develops. Specifically, I will construe a ‘bridge’ between the view of Awareness Justification Internalism and a dynamic approach to Awareness Logic.
Along the central chapters of this research, I analyse three core notions: “awareness”, “knowledge” and “justification”. These notions represent the basic structure of the conceptual schema. In Chapter 3, I review the concept of Awareness, distinguishing between awareneess-of and awareness-that. The awareness-of represents the attention of the agent. The awareness-that stands for the acknowledgement of the truth of some information, being thus, a type of ‘knowledge’. Then, in Chapter 4, I consider the notion of “knowledge”. I distinguish here between an implicit knowledge, representing an ‘ideal’ conception of knowledge and the ‘real’ knowledge, which Epistemology is about and which I name Explicit Aware Knowledge (EAK). The EAK is formed due to a combination of both types of awareness, such that for an agent to explicitly know some given information she needs to be aware-that it is the case and aware-of this information at a given moment. Finally, in Chapter 5, I review the different interpretations of the concept of ‘justification’ and argue that justification will be defined as the process through which the agent obtains her EAK.
Finally, in Chapter 6, I present the EAK-Schema with the visual help of a diagram formed by three ellipses. The diagram starts out with a small ellipse representing the awareness-that, those pieces of information the agent has acknowledged as true at any moment. From there, the implicit awareness-that can be deductively inferred, representing thus a bigger ellipse, containing the first one. As a third step, I incorporate the concept of awareness-of as another ellipse, of the same size as the implicit information, overlapping the previous two ellipses, but not completely. All these parts included in the awareness-of represent information the agent is actually considering at a given moment: pure awareness-of, implicit knowledge and explicit aware knowledge (EAK). EAK is located at the centre of the diagram, representing the kernel of it and corresponding to the only type of knowledge that Epistemology will consider. With the visual help of the diagram and some arrows, I then present the epistemic actions that this schema includes. Acts of becoming aware-of or becoming unaware-of will change the information of the Awareness-of, while the actions of performing a deductive inference or forgetting will either increase or decrease the information the agent has acknowledged. Lastly, the action of observation allows any piece of information to be directly EAK.
In Chapter 7, I incorporate a formal model, based on a neighbourhood-model structure, that shows a concrete application of the EAK-Schema into a logical structure. To conclude the dissertation, Chapter 8 is devoted to the conclusions and final remarks about the EAK-Schema, its uses and applications.
