Elia Zardini made a presentation entitled "Black Boxes: The Semantics and Logic of Obliterative Modalities."

On April 11, a seminar "Formal Philosophy" took place, at which Elia Zardini gave a presentation titled "Black Boxes: The Semantics and Logic of Obliterative Modalities."

Abstract

If we wish to analyse knowability (and similar notions) in terms of some kind of possibility of knowledge, troubles quickly arise if the possibility in question is supposed to obey some very basic modal principles (like law 4 or the law of distribution). In this paper, I first provide an informal explanation of the notion of possibility in question. I then proceed to show how this informal explanation can be turned into a natural formal possible-world semantics with a multiplicity of accessibility relations, which gives rise to a nonregular modal logic that avoids the above-mentioned troubles. After introducing a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic, I close by mentioning some philosophically interesting directions in which the basic system can be extended or modified.