Non‐Classical Knowledge

The Knower paradox purports to place surprising a priori limitations on what we can know. According to orthodoxy, it shows that we need to abandon one of three plausible and widely‐held ideas: that knowledge is factive, that we can know that knowledge is factive, and that we can use logical/mathematical reasoning to extend our knowledge via very weak single‐premise closure principles. I argue that classical logic, not any of these epistemic principles, is the culprit. I develop a consistent theory validating all these principles by combining Hartry Field's theory of truth with a modal enrichment developed for a different purpose by Michael Caie. The only casualty is classical logic: the theory avoids paradox by using a weaker‐than‐classical K₃ logic. I then assess the philosophical merits of this approach. I argue that, unlike the traditional semantic paradoxes involving extensional notions like truth, its plausibility depends on the way in which sentences are referred to—whether in natural languages via direct sentential reference, or in mathematical theories via indirect sentential reference by Gödel coding. In particular, I argue that from the perspective of natural language, my non‐classical treatment of knowledge as a predicate is plausible, while from the perspective of mathematical theories, its plausibility depends on unresolved questions about the limits of our idealized deductive capacities.     

Counterlogicals as Counterconventionals

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as...     

ATTITUDES TOWARD WOMEN IN TAIWAN AND CHINA

The goals of this article are to review published data from both English and Chinese sources on current attitudes toward women in Taiwan and China and to discuss issues in cross-cultural research that may affect the discovery and reporting of effects. Chinese women in both countries, when compared to men, had more liberal attitudes toward women, but women in China had more traditionally oriented attitudes than women in Taiwan. Yang's (1986) modernization theory was used to explain these results. There was also some overlap of gender roles in both cultures, with some traditional masculine (or feminine) roles played by the other gender. We propose that modernization may lead not only to greater gender equality but also to changes in the nature of gender roles, leading to greater gender-role overlap, in which it is advantageous for both men and women to have less distinctive gender-role characteristics. Finally, issues of construct validation, response sets, and alternative approaches to scale development are addressed, and suggestions for future research are offered.