[updated on 2014.03.29]
Instructor: Wesley Holliday (UC Berkeley)
Area: Formal Philosophy
More precise title: Beyond Worlds and Accessibility
The starting point of this course is standard possible-world semantics for epistemic, doxastic, and other modal logics, based on models with “possible worlds” and “accessibility relations.” We will explore a number of ways of enriching or departing from these models, motivated by philosophical considerations. Topics will include: models that add more structure to capture substantive theories of knowledge (in the style of Dretske, Nozick, and others); models that replace total possible worlds with partial “situations” (in the style of Barwise and Perry); and models that replace total possible worlds with partial “possibilities” (in the style of Humberstone). In each case, we will study the logical properties of these classes of models, illuminating the philosophical issues at stake.