Moore's Paradox and the logic of belief

TL;DR

This paper critiques Hintikka's multimodal logic of belief, proposing a weaker alternative that better captures our intuitive understanding of belief and addresses Moore's Paradox.

Contribution

It introduces a more philosophically sound and less restrictive logical framework for belief, improving upon Hintikka's original system.

Findings

Hintikka's interpretation of doxastic operators is problematic

A weaker logical system better captures belief intuitions

The new framework explains Moore's Paradox more effectively

Abstract

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.