Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

If Andrea knows that Biden won the last presidential election, they also know that either Biden won the last presidential election, or Biden is a reptilian. This is the response that epistemic logics based on standard Kripke relational semantics provide, which is consistent with the fact that minimally rational agents can perform disjunction introduction. This is not the case in topic-sensitive semantics though. Andrea might not grasp the concept of 'reptilian', and therefore not be able to know any proposition dealing with reptilians. I argue that this requirement is too strong. I keep the idea that topic-grasping is crucial for knowledge, but I weaken the requirement: only the grasping of some 'minimal topics' of a proposition is required. I use a theory of logical grounding (Correia, 2014) in order to define what the minimal grounds of a proposition are and define a minimal topic as the topic of a minimal ground. Once this is done, I propose a semantic clause for knowledge that maintains the good features of topic-sensitive semantics while improving its treatment of disjunction. By doing so, I exploit the concept of logical grounding to define the minimal parts of a proposition which are relevant truth-wise and topic-wise in order to know such a proposition.