Claudia Fernández-Fernández on “Epistemic Awareness: a central concept for understanding changes in information”

Thinking about the changes in information means analysing the different epistemic actions the agents perform during the communicative process. From a logical point of view, these changes are well represented in the framework of Dynamic Epistemic Logics and its extensions including the notion of “awareness”. From an epistemological point of view, the traditional dichotomy between internalism and externalism has been overcome due to different approaches that, for example, include external information in internalist proposals with the addition of the agent’s awareness as a requirement. These approaches are in line with the recent developments of epistemic logics, though there is a huge disconnection between both fields.

In this talk I will present the main outcomes of my book “Awareness in Logic and Epistemology” (Springer Verlag, 2021), where I develop a conceptual schema (diagram) for representing these changes in information and tend bridges between Epistemic Logics and Epistemology. With the notion of “epistemic awareness” as its base, the diagram includes the different types of information an agent may entertain, being the “Explicit Aware Knowledge” (EAK) its core concept. The main notions are those of awareness (differentiating awareness-of from awareness-that), knowledge (implicit and explicit) and justification (internal and external).

The background of this research is mainly logical, but the epistemological component is a key factor for the different bridges it builds. The formal model for Explicit Aware Knowledge (Chapter 6) is developed based on the epistemological ideas of Awareness Justification Internalism and intends to reflect a more human and reality-like scenario of the communicative process.

Claudia Fernández-Fernández (University of Malaga, Spain)

To join the session on Teams, please get in touch with Alberto Oya at albertooya@fcsh.unl.pt.

This event is part of the ArgLab Research Colloquium organised by Maria Grazia Rossi, Giulia Terzian and Alberto Oya at the Laboratory of Argumentation, Cognition and Language of the NOVA Institute of Philosophy. For any inquiries, please contact Maria Grazia, Giulia or Alberto.