Speaker: Alexandru Baltag (ILLC, Amsterdam)
Date and Time: Friday, December 16th 2016, 15:30-17:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107.
Title: Knowing the Answer.
Abstract: What does it mean to “know the answer” to a question? What is the relationship between this form of knowledge and the usual propositional “knowledge that” operator? Can we know the answer without knowing the question? Can we know the answer without knowing that it is the answer to this question?
I investigate logics(s) for knowing/learning answers to questions, and argue that all knowledge can in fact be reduced to this kind: at a first approximation, to know is know how to answer a question. Moreover, if questions (and answers) are properly construed, then knowledge, from an abstract point of view, is just a correlation between two questions (where the answer to the first carries information about the answer to the second). By reflection, agents can themselves come to know such correlations.
In this sense, to know is to know how to use questions to answer other questions.