Michael Hand, Knowability and Epistemic Truth
Another paper on the knowability paradox. Hand’s theory is that the anti-realist shouldn’t be committed to the knowability of p & ~Kp because all anti-realism requires is that "for each truth there must be a procedure, determined by the proposition’s structure and properly composed of verificatory steps each of which we can perform." It doesn’t require that we can perform each of the steps, and performability doesn’t distribute across conjunctions. This seems to avoid the paradox, but the version of anti-realism we are left with is quite weak. It seems impossible, on Hand’s view, that All numbers are F could be undecidable even though every instance of Fn is decidable. After all, if Fn is decidable for all n, then there is a procedure, an infinite procedure but a procedure, properly composed (whatever that means) of verificatory steps each of which we can perform. But maybe Hand isn’t worried about this kind of anti-realism.