Moore's Paradox and the logic of belief
This work addresses a foundational issue in formal epistemology, offering an incremental improvement to existing logical frameworks for belief.
The paper critiques Hintikka's multimodal logic for belief, arguing that his interpretation of a doxastic operator is problematic and leads to an overly strong system, and proposes a weaker alternative that better captures logical intuitions about belief while still explaining Moore's Paradox.
Moores Paradox is a test case for any formal theory of belief. In Knowledge and Belief, Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief. His account purports to offer an explanation of the paradox. In this paper I argue that Hintikkas interpretation of one of the doxastic operators is philosophically problematic and leads to an unnecessarily strong logical system. I offer a weaker alternative that captures in a more accurate way our logical intuitions about the notion of belief without sacrificing the possibility of providing an explanation for problematic cases such as Moores Paradox.