A Pragmatistic Approach to Propositional Knowledge Based on the Successful Behavior of Belief - Logic and Its Applications - page 146

A Pragmatistic Approach to Propositional Knowledge
Based on the Successful Behavior of Belief

Aránzazu San Ginés 1 and Rohit Parikh 2

1 IFS-CSIC and Granada University, Spain
2 City University of New York, New York, USA
[e-mail]

Abstract. Every belief has a life that goes from the agent having the belief now,
the transmission of the belief to other agents, and the persistence of the belief
through time. In this article we propose the idea that the belief can be said to be
successful in relation to any of these respects. We will call them, respectively,
the first, second, and third person perspective on knowledge and investigate the
requisite properties of these three perspectives.
We do not base our approach on the notion of truth as is common, or on the
notion of justification, which is another basis. Our concern is not with
knowledge as corresponding to truth but knowledge as corresponding to stable
belief.

Keywords: Propositional Knowledge, Successful belief, Pragmatism.

1 Introduction

Imagine the following situation. A man and his daughter are at home with their dog
Tim. The mother left early in the morning with her bike to buy some fruit. The father
is cooking in the kitchen whose window faces the street. The girl is with Tim in the
living room where the windows face the courtyard.
Then just as a car is parking in front of the house, the mother arrives with her bike,
and waves to her husband through the window. She heads to the garage (a room
separated from the house) to leave the bike there. From the car alights Mike, a friend
of the family who is going to have lunch with them.
The daughter comes to the kitchen. - Look dad , she says, Tim is excited! He doesn't
stop wagging his tail! - Ha ha ha , the dad answers, he knows that your mother has
arrived. - Oh, is that right? Where is she? - In the garage, setting the bike. Then,
someone knocks. - Open the door , says the father, it's Mike . The girl opens the door
with Tim at her side, and Mike walks in. The dog at once stops wagging his tail, and
goes to lie down in the living room apparently disappointed. - What is it dad? What is
it with Tim now? - Mmmm, it seems that he actually didn't know before , that your
mother had arrived.
In the previous example we can appreciate two interesting and revealing uses of the
verb 'to know'. In the first one, the father says that the dog "knows ..." because he
observes that Tim acts in the way he would expect the dog to do if Tim were