TITLE:
The Plausibility and Limits of the Closure Principle
AUTHORS:
Yang Qu
KEYWORDS:
Closure Principle, A Priori Knowledge, Possible Worlds
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.11 No.6,
June
19,
2023
ABSTRACT: The
closure principle is a topic of great debate and much controversy for the last
four decades. The closure principle has many different forms and variations
depending on contexts, but the central problem is always the same: is knowledge
closed under entailment? In this paper I examine the plausibility and limits of
the closure principle on the basis of a detailed analysis of different
epistemic routes to knowledge and different ways the actual world could be. The
conclusion of this paper is that we can expand our knowledge deductively only
when the antecedent is knowledge by acquaintance or a priori knowledge.
Therefore the closure principle is plausible, but limited. This conclusion can
provide us an explanation for our intuition that we can expand our knowledge
base through deduction, while avoiding paradoxes and skeptical arguments
related to closure.