I note that is how English functions today. — Philosophim

What do you mean here? Seems that you are simply re-asserting, yet again, the primacy of one meaning for "woman" over the others.

So when you say something like "I have not considered personal identity important to the conversation", I don't see that you are saying any more than "I will only consider the idea of a women as being an adult human female".

Again, that's a stipulation on your part. That's fine, so far as it goes. It provides no reason for the rest of us not to understand "A trans woman is a woman" as being true.

Please take your time to digest the larger post. — Philosophim

I think I have, and covered it.

The molecules are public. Good. So is the language and other behaviour. Is the difference the result of different qualia, or of differences in physiology, learning, associations, preference, classification...? None of that requires a private mental item.

Is your point that there is a difference between the physics and the smell? But the aroma is not the qualia.

So this doesn't help you.

Each of us has identified our internal, private sensation as coffee. — hypericin

Have we? Or have we co-ordinated our behaviour? What more, exactly, is there to "identifying my internal, private sensation as coffee" than is found in "I smell coffee"?

These sensations may or may not be the same for us. That they may be entirely different is ultimately only of philosophical significance, the discourse functions the same either way. — hypericin

Well, yes. But play close attention to your conclusion: "without these sensations, the discourse wouldn't happen at all". How could you possible know that? Discourse functions even if our sensations differ... so what is the place of the sensation?

That everyday discourse functions without the philosophical notion of qualia is not under dispute. But what relevance is that to us purported philosophers? — hypericin

It raises the question just asked: What more, exactly, is there to "identifying my internal, private sensation as coffee" than is found in "I smell coffee"? What is it that qual do? Your “identifying an internal, private sensation as coffee” is doing no explanatory work. It’s simply re-describing the public behaviour from the inside, then insisting that this interior décor must be metaphysically indispensable.

The discourse functions regardless of any supposed private qualitative sameness.

I don't think preference or aroma are about anything but qualia. — Patterner

Well hang on - the aroma of coffee is not private - anything but! And a preference is not a sensation, is it? that seems odd. If anything, a preference is a pattern of behaviours.

And if it's not pulverised it will not make a good Turkish coffee. And it will stick between your teeth.

What can we say about coffee that doesn't involve qualia? — Patterner

:worry:

"can I please have some coffee? I prefer Turkish. The coffee needs to be pulverised. That one has a nutty aroma. $5 for a flat white is outrageous!"

None of these directly involve qual. The presence of qual is quite specifically something inferred by a subgroup of philosophers. And I'm saying that there is no evidence here of qual. None of this requires positing private mental items.

I cannot say how Banno would respond. — Philosophim

Well, he'd probably say that you are again prioritising the physical definition of "woman", and that this goes against the discussion we had concerning how language actually functions. He'd point out again that "A trans woman is a woman" has a sense in which it is quite true.


Oh, and being hired as a waiter is part of the social role of being a waiter, not seperate from it. There is a difference between someone pretending to be a waiter, and not being paid, and an unpaid waiter. The social role can be shown in the practices displayed, not in meeting some specific criteria. So an actor might pretend to be a waiter, mimic the behaviour, but only temporarily and for a purpose external to the role of being a waiter; then they stop and return to being something else.

The model is a product, imaginary. — Metaphysician Undercover

A model is not an “imaginary world” we’re claiming to be real; it’s a mathematical structure used to interpret a language. The whole point of model-theoretic semantics is precisely not to replace the actual world, but to give us a rigorous way to talk about it.

How do you assume to make modal logic consistent with realism? — Metaphysician Undercover

Odd. Can you explain how you think it isn't?

You do understand that the model theoretical account is extensional...? I guess not.

My apologies if this is a bit long. — Philosophim

It is a bit.

Do you think you might reflect for a bit on how Banno might answer your post? What's the most central issue in your post, how do you think I would respond to it?

Do we just except their word for it? — Sir2u

Why not? And that's not a rhetorical question, but a request for context and behaviour.

If being a waiter involves the social behaviours around waiting on tables, if the context and behaviour around which someone claims to be a waiter matches their claim, why not accept their claim? So we should ask, why not call them a waiter? What reasons are there for this exception?

And if the context and behaviour around which someone claims to be a woman matches their claim, why not accept their claim? So we should ask, why not call them a woman? What reasons are there for this exception?

You've ased them to prove they are a waiter. But they might equally ask you to prove they are not.

Cool answer. But I'm not seeing how a discreet internal event isn't as problematic as a "thing"; it remains that no one else can check that you are correct. It's still a only understood in terms of public performance. The point is indeed that privacy has no significance in linguistic application.

The aroma of coffee is hardly private. The discourse functions without qualia, on the basis that what we smell is the smell of coffee, regardless of whether it is the very same for each of us or not.

So yes, the discourse can function without the metaphysical introduction of qual. That only confirms the Dennettian/Wittgensteinian insight.

That is the reason why I asked you to provide some principles or definitions, so that we have something concrete to go by. — Metaphysician Undercover

Here you go: Boxes and Diamonds: An Open Introduction To Modal Logic. Sections 1.5 and 1.6 cover truth at a world and truth as a model. There's a couple of sections on accessibility relations, but you might find 15.5, "Accessibility Relations and Epistemic Principles", most useful.

I am not trying to show inconsistency in modal logic, I am trying to show incorrectness in your presentation of it. — Metaphysician Undercover

I've over-simplified much of the logic, and I'm sure that Tones or one of the other mathematicians hereabouts could have a field day with some of my phrasing. But I do not think that anything I have said here is at odds with standard, accepted modal logic. What you have said, on the other hand, is.

But you are welcome to try and show otherwise.

How someone identifies themselves is irrelevant. — Philosophim

Well, not to them.

That's kinda where Witt comes in, in pointing out the place of identity in these proceedings. Her point is that identity is not a private whim but a socially operative category. In societies where gender structures our possibilities, expectations, rights, and obligations, one’s gender identity is not unimportant, but central to functioning as a social agent. In a gender-structured social world, identity is one of the primary determinants of how a person can live, act, and be recognised.

"Woman as gender" has it's origin in the middle of the last century, with such authors as John Money and Catharine MacKinnon. But it's seen clearly in Simone de Beauvoir's "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman". It's not that new. At the very least, I hope we can agree that there is a sense in which "trans women are women" is true.

I don't think you've necessarily disagreed with my logic if 'woman' by default is seen in the larger culture as adult human female. — Philosophim

I am indeed disagreeing with that, in so far as you take it to be fundamental. “Adult human female” is one salient use of woman in many contexts. But I’m rejecting the claim that this use is somehow the foundational, default, or conceptually governing one in English. And this along the lines of the discussion we have had over the last few pages. This is not how language functions. Words don’t come with a single privileged core meaning; they have families of uses, and which one is operative depends on what we’re doing.

My question for you Banno would be how to make the intent of the phrase, "Trans men are men" more clear in its intent if we intend 'men' in this instance to be the expected actions of an adult human male? — Philosophim

Well, what is " the intent of the phrase"? It's whatever you intend to do with that phrase. Yes, you can use it divisively, by insisting that it "means" only "adult human male"; but that's your choice. If you meant that trans men ought be treated as men, the choice is clear here, too.

Perhaps it comes down to why some folk are unwilling to treat trans men as men.

In the way that "true" is used in your definition of "possibly", how does "truths we don't know" say anything meaningful? Since truth is relative to the specified world, and "true" means what is consistent with that world, and we can imagine any type of world, than anything, and everything is true. How does "truths we don't know" say anything meaningful, when everything and anything is a truth? — Metaphysician Undercover

You are here confusing "true in a model" with "true in reality".

Again, a bit sad.

There's that old adage about not wrestling with a pig.

The definition provided is not mine; it is the standard definition in modal logic. It has nothing to do with correspondence, since truth in such systems is model-theoretical.

In modal logic:
“◊p” means “p is true in at least one accessible world”
This does not claim that there are multiple concrete universes out there and that truth “corresponds” to each. It is a semantic model, a mathematical structure used to evaluate formulas. Model-theoretic “worlds” are not metaphysical worlds. They are semantic devices, exactly like the points on a truth table are not little universes.

You simply have a very poor understanding of the topic at hand, Meta.

It does not provide the principles to cross from one world to another. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, it does. That's exactly what the accessibility relation is for.

Frankly, your attempts to show that modal logic, and possible world semantics, which are accepted fields of study in mathematical logic, are somehow inconsistent, is just a bit sad.

"adult human female" — Philosophim

Well, we went over how words usually do not have a single default meaning. In the case of "woman" there's the biological use, of course. There's a social-gender sense. There's the sense of personal identity that includes trans people. There's the various legal definitions. and so on. Polysemous patterns, well-documented in the literature.

It won't do to just assert the hegemony of "adult human female". Affixing "Most rationally read" is a slight of hand evaluation.

"trans" or "cis" woman are adjectives specifically to modify woman to mean, "Gender of a an adult human female". — Philosophim

Adjectives do not always leave the meaning unchanged. Consider "car" and "toy car", or "lion" and "sea lion". With "trans woman", the adjective modifies the gendered sense, not the biological-sex sense. it is now an established compound term for a woman whose gender identity is female and who is socially recognised as a woman, but whose sex assigned at birth was male. What you are suggesting runs against the apparent linguistic facts.

"Trans women are adult human males who take on the gendered role of women". — Philosophim

This works only provided we adopt the stipulation that "woman" means "adult human female"; but since there is accepted usage that does not adopt this stipulation, we are not obligated to adopt it here. It's a choice, not a conclusion.

That is, it appears you assume that woman has one fixed “default” meaning, that of "adult human female". You also assume that adjectives like trans or cis merely attach to that biologically sexed core.
But this is not how English works. "Woman" is polysemous: it has multiple senses. In phrases like “trans woman,” the gendered sense is the operative one. English regularly uses adjectival modification to shift a noun’s meaning.

Importantly, “trans woman” is a standard compound meaning “a woman who is transgender.”

The phrase “trans women are women” uses the gendered sense of “woman,” not the biological-sex sense, and is perfectly coherent in that established usage.

So "Trans women are women" is true.

Working backwards, we got to arguing about modality after I introduced Fitch's paradox. That was introduced because it deals with the logic of unknown truths. And that relates directly to the question in the title: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?

I'll go back to my original answer:

"Beyond reality" is not a region; it is a grammatical error. — Banno

to which was added:

The set of true sentences is never complete — Banno

And then to

...the way the issue is phrased. As "there is stuff beyond our reality" when it should be "there is stuff that is true but unknown" — Banno

Hence to Fitch, in which it is shown:

Anti-realism says: every truth must be knowable.
But you also say: there are truths we don’t and maybe can’t know.
Fitch shows you can’t have both.
If there are unknown truths, then not every truth is knowable, which just is the denial of anti-realism. — Banno

The way that antirealism usually avoids omniscience is by rejecting classical logic. That for instance is the approach in Kripke's theory of truth, which has some merit.

In effect, in talking about the medium-size goods around us, we have a choice between using classical logic and accepting that there are truths we don't know on the one hand; and supposing that there are no such unknown truths and rejecting classical logic on the other.

Ether will do, but the former seems more intuitive, less sophistic and simpler.

...most rationally read as... — Philosophim

Looks essentialist to me. I might come back to it, though, again rather than rattle off another brief rejection.

I hope you're not implying that I am holding a conservative Aristotelian view here. — Philosophim

No, indeed I mentioned Witt as someone that might spike your interest. I had in mind other players who have been around the traps. There’s a familiar group in these discussions who read Aristotle through a heavily conservative lens, reducing him to biological determinism and hierarchical natural kinds. Not having studied Aristotle as closely as some, I'd taken them at their word; but I now find that they are not at all representative of the Man, nor of the present state of classical studies.

You have not yet defined "possible" to support this, as I asked. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, I did, you missed it. It's the standard Kripkeian definition:

In Kripke semantics, “possibly p” means that p is true in at least one world about which we can talk. — Banno

All the stuff I've said here is straight forward possible world semantics and standard modal logic. Folk can check it by feeding it in to the AI of their choice. It'll also point out the errors in your posts.

"we know X" means that it could not be the case that we do not know X. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nuh, it doesn't. We know that Branson's missus has died. But it could be the case that we did not know she'd passed on. They might not have made it public, if they had wanted. Or we might have missed the news that day.

What? How does that make sense? If it is true that I read this post, how is it possible that I did not read it? — Metaphysician Undercover

Here's the problem, then - your incapacity to understand a simple situation; or is this the doubling-down I spoke of earlier? We can happily consider what might have been the case had you not read that post. I would not be writing this, for starters. That does make sense.

You keep bringing up "modal logic" but you have done nothing to show how this is relevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

:lol: What to make of that. Modal logic not relevant to possibility and necessity.

Again, I'm here for the post count. So far as I can see, you have not added anything new for a day or two. But keep going.

The question is whether at the same time, "We know shit", and "It is possible that we know shit", could both be judge to be true. — Metaphysician Undercover

And the answer, overwhelmingly, is "yes". If we know something then by that very fact it is possible for us to know that thing.

This is because "p is true" means that it is not possible that p is false — Metaphysician Undercover

No — that conflates truth with necessity. “p is true” does not mean “p cannot be false.” It means only that p is not false in the actual world. Something can be true without being necessary, and false without being impossible.

It is true that you read this post. It is also possible that you might not have read it.

'Did' marks what happened, not what had to happen. Saying 'Jill did push Jack' tells us what actually happened, not that her pushing him was necessary, inevitable, or impossible to be otherwise. Confusing tense with modality is exactly the same mistake as treating 'true' as meaning 'cannot be false.'

"My eccentricity"? Is that meant as a joke? — Metaphysician Undercover

Unfortunately, no. Your ignorance of modal logic stands alongside your denial of instantaneous velocity and insistence that 0.9... ≠ 1.

Good questions. And thereby hangs many a PhD.
So:

Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position...

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/#NewGenRea

And so it goes. Charlotte Witt is also interesting here, taking an Aristotelian Essentialist view, but one at odds perhaps with the more conservative views expressed hereabouts. For Wit, we each have one social essence that structures our possibilities for social functioning. This is not a biological essence, not an eternal metaphysical form, but a social essence that determines how one enters and is positioned within institutions, roles, and norms. Very different to the conservative authoritarian pronouncements concerning Aristotle that dominate the limited conversations here. Witt breaks the She the false equation “Aristotelian = Essentialist = Conservative = Biological Sex = Immutable Categories.”

Witt is a classicist and philosopher.

So are transwomen women? Are transwomen men? No. The terms man and woman indicate a person's age and sex, not gender. Are transwomen men who act with a female gender? Yes. Are transmen women who act with a male gender? Yes. — Philosophim

I think the answer to the OP has been made. Language use is determined by a community. Look at how people use the words. — frank

Yep. Usage isn't fixed, it's chosen. And we perhaps ought seek consistency. So if "woman" is used to pick out someone who adopts the relevant social conventions, then a trans woman is a woman. And this even if we also choose to maintain that they are male.

What I'm not sure of, is whether this was actually @Philosophim's view as well, if somewhat ill-parsed.

That makes it context dependent, and thus an indexical — noAxioms

It's not just being context-dependent that makes an indexical. The truth value of an indexical changes with who is doing the uttering.

"I am Australian" is true in my mouth, perhaps not in yours. But the truth value of "The universe is not composed of true statements" does not depend directly on who says it in this way.

It honestly seems to me that you missed the point. So for example your "Most language is pragmatic, and if a Doctor asks me if I'm in pain, nobody suggests he's asking if I'm experiencing his pain, or pain the way he would" seems to me to be making the same point as Dennett.

Yes, indeed, there need be nothing "the same" between your pain and the doctor's pain, apart from the game of assessing pain level and location and prescribing solutions. We need not have a shared referent. You reaffirming the idea that meaning and successful communication do not require private referential identity.

So if we agree to talk of a qual of coffee - even if here, now - what is it that is being agreed on? The term "the aroma of coffee" perhaps picks out a pattern of behaviour and report, coordinates shared expectations, and is indexical but public. But it does not pick out a thing. We may avoid the hypostatisation.

What we have is not a qual, but the aroma of coffee.

A long response. thanks for giving my posts such enthusiastic consideration - it pleases me.

But I might not respond point by point, if you don't mind. Our chat has been quite civil, but I suspect a call-and-answer reply might be a bit too confrontational. Instead I might let the ideas here settle a bit.

Also give me a moment to respond, you spammed like 3 posts. :D — Philosophim

Yep.

It might be better to go back to the core of the thread. I'll leave that for you.

:wink: BUT WE CAN"T DO THAT...!!! :lol:

Do you want me to delete it? — frank

I don't. It's relevant. And it's now a part of the discussion.

And it humanises the too-cerebral discourse here to have a transgender person visible.

Here's another video to consider, from the most famous children's program Dow Nunder.



Is there a problem? If so, where is that problem located - with the performance, or with the audience?

Yep.

More than a few blokes are pissed at the absence of sanitary disposal containers in male toilets.

Segregating toilets on the basis of gender is an odd fetish.

They say they "feel 100% like a transgender woman".

Can you argue that they are wrong here? Can you show that they are mistaken?

IF you can't present an argument showing that they are wrong, then is it reasonable to insist that they present an argument that they are right?

All this by way of showing that "This is not a rational argument" is irrelevant to "I feel 100% like a transgender woman".

A hermaphrodite would not be male or female, but contain the gametes of both. — Philosophim

Notice that you could equally well say that a hermaphrodite would be both male and female.

We might say they are male and female, or neither male nor female. There is no fact of the matter; there is a choice in how we talk about these real, actual people. Yes, "Words are the capturing of concepts, and concepts can vary between individuals", but what a community choose to say tells us about that community. Will we be inclusive or exclusive? Will we "other" some people in an arbitrary way?

Why do you need to put your gender on your driver's licence? It was presumably for purposes of identification. If it no longer works to that end, then why continue the practice?

Why do we divide runners based on their genitals? What other division might we use - weight, muscle mass? What is it that we consider to be fair?


My use of the term "incomplete" is borrowed from logic. The categories do not exhaust all possibilities. Just as in formal logic a system can be incomplete if there are true statements it cannot express, our categories do not cover every possible biological or social configuration. This is why intersex humans, hermaphroditic organisms, and potentially novel or future ways of being can exist without breaking the logic of our classifications.

But that is not the case with essentialist classification systems. They stipulate a classification and then reject the individuals who do not fit that classification. They are exclusive, and authoritarian.

That we are having this discussion shows that the usage of the terms at issue is not settled.

It is not prejudiced to note that a trans gendered man is an adult human female. — Philosophim

I'd not be so quick to affirm this. As we agreed, I think, applying "adult human female" is to an end, and not immutable. Taking it as immutable seems reassuring to those of a conservative leaning, but it leads to its own set of issues. There are, as an extreme example, genetically female people with male sex organs.

A better approach might be to treat the reality as much more flexible, and classification as mutable.

All of which brings with it issues around who and what gets to decide how we use the language hereabouts.

The philosophical point is that, as we have seen, appeals to essentialism fail.

And so we might go back to the common courtesy of addressing someone in the way in which they prefer to be addressed.

This is not to say there are no difficulties here. The issue of sports is obvious. Dividing people on the basis of gender was convenient, but is no longer a simple task. What alternatives there are will have to be worked through. It's tempting to grasp simple responses such as essentialism, but we've seen that it is unfair.

We can fix many issues around toilets by getting rid of the urinal. It is the item in the toilet that precludes certain genitalia.

The discussion continues.

Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving Banno! — Philosophim

Thanks, you too - but that American holiday is one of the few not to make it big Dow Nunder. We don't celebrate it.

I'm pleased we have so much to agree on. But as always, the stuff about which we disagree is the more interesting bit. I said "neither the classifications male/female nor man/woman are exclusive nor complete", to which you replied:

Male and female are not defined apart from one another, but by the comparison of one to the other. If there was only one 'sex', then that would be 'the being'. Sex is indicated by biological differences in potential reproductive capability and roles that are exclusionary of one another. In this they are complete. — Philosophim

We agree, it seems, that male and female are understood in relation to each other, that the one makes no sense without the other. When I said that they are not exclusive, I had in mind such things as the existence of hermaphrodites, and intersex organisms, both human and otherwise. These are physical characteristics.

And with incomplete, I was allowing for the unknown, allowing that we might change our usage of "male' and "female" for some reason, or use these words in novel ways in novel situations.

The use of "male", "female, "man", and "woman" is not fixed immutably by nature, but chosen by people in order to do certain things. Now this is not to say that there are no males and females, and no men and women. It's just to note that what is salient is chosen by us, and for our purposes. So e should ask where and to what end we might say something such as "Trans women are women", or otherwise.

And it is often about the acceptance or rejection of people who's behaviour differs from our own, or from our expectations.

So I'm trying to figure out how P1 would not automatically imply P3 at time t. — EricH

Yep. That we know p implies that it is possible to know p.



The technicalities are to a large extent unavoidable. In plain language, we might replace "accessibility" with "the worlds about which we can talk" and call the possible world we are in, the actaul world. Then:

The inference p → possibly p is valid only in modal systems where each world counts itself as possible, that is, where we can talk about the actual world. In Kripke semantics, “possibly p” means that p is true in at least one world about which we can talk. If you drop reflexivity, then we can't talk about the actual world, and so p may be true in the actual world but not in any world about which we can talk. So the inference fails. Since Meta denies p → ◇p, his view amounts to saying that the actual world is not among the worlds about which we can talk. But in p → ◇p, the world where p is true is simply this world.

The tense is not usually considered in modal logic. So we can for example talk about the possibility that you did not write the post to which I am replying, by talking about a possible world in which that was so. That's not the actual world, of course, but it's still a possible world.

Meta's confusion might be the result of thinking of accessible worlds as “counterfactual” only, never including the actual world. This seems likely. But for the rest of us, the actual world is considered to be one of the possible worlds.

Look at the temporality of your statements; "it might have been that we did not know stuff", refers to past time. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it doesn't. It might have been the case now that we didn't know stuff. In some other posibel world we might not have known stuff. Tensed logic, if needed, is constructed separately to modal logic. But your not seeing this is yet another example of your eccentricity.

That was an attack? :rofl:

Good night.

:grin:

A dreadful reply. Pile on the dead cats. It doesn't help your case.

"Wittgenstein was a social conservative… therefore his philosophy supports conservative conclusions." - an instance of the genetic fallacy.

Wittgenstein does not ground meaning in blind traditionalism. A form of life is not a tradition; it is the pattern of activities within which language-games have sense.

“Deeply rooted traditions never disappear.”
Nuh:

• The divine right of kings
• Women as legal non-persons
• Racial segregation as a legal norm
• Capital punishment for homosexuality
• The theological–political identity of the medieval state
• Aristotelian medieval physics

"Wittgenstein is an advocate of master-slave rule forming dialectic"
Nuh. Wittgenstein's approach to rule following says nothing about domination; it says you cannot follow a rule privately. The point is public criteria, not authority or obedience.

Claiming that "Progressivism is a secular myth" is mere assertion. And even if granted, says nothing about contemporary linguistic and social practices around gender; certainly not that they are illegitimate.

To exclude trans women from “woman,” the conservative must say: “The real meaning of ‘woman’ is fixed by biology alone.” But a Wittgensteinian asks: “Where is this real meaning? In what practice? Which rule? Which criteria?” If the linguistic community already has multiple criteria for “woman”... biological, social, legal, phenomenological - then there is no single essence to be preserved.

Not impressed. You post reads as a Dead Cat rather than a critique. Something thrown on the table to distract us from the topic from Wittgenstein’s arguments—language as use, rule-following, forms of life—to Wittgenstein’s private political views, which have no bearing on the logical point at issue.

I agree it's a non-issue, and I can't imagine a level of interest sufficient to have motivated the OP. — Janus

The philosophically interesting part is the use of erroneous accounts of language, especially flawed accounts of definition, in order to push particular attitudes and prejudices.

"...it is possible to know shit" implies that shit may not be known. — Metaphysician Undercover

...the bit where if you know stuff, then it thereby is possible to know stuff. Yes, it might have been that we did not know stuff, but as things turned out, we do know stuff. Either way, it is possible - that is, not impossible - to know the stuff that we do indeed know.

Note that it's "shit may not be known", which is quite valid, and not your "shit is not known", which implies that you only know shit that it is not possible to now.

This is the standard view, from Aristotle onward.


This is tedious, Meta. But good for my post count.


For anyone watching on, (well, there may be some...) Meta's argument relies on treating “◊Kp” as if it meant “we do not know p, but could.” But that is not what the modal operator means — not in Aristotle, not in modern modal logic, not anywhere.

◊Kp just means “Kp is not impossible.”

This is because logically, if we know that p is possible, then it is the case that we do not know that p. "We know that p" is not consistent with "we know that p is possible". — Metaphysician Undercover

Curiously, Aristotle was at pains to disagree.

Metaphysics Θ 3,
“Everything that is in actuality is capable of being so; for what is impossible cannot be actual.”

Metaphysics Θ 1,
“That which exists in actuality exists because there is a capacity for it; for nothing impossible is actual.”

De Interpretatione 9
“If a thing is or has been, then it is necessary that it was possible for it to be.”

Physics III.1,
“For what is not possible does not occur.”



You gallantly attempt to make a coherent account in which knowing that p is possible is logically incompatible with knowing that p. But this requires a reversal of modal logic and the standard view of the last 2300 years - that what is actual must be possible.



As for your use of Excluded Middle, "It is possible that we know that P" is not a third state between "We know that P" and "We don't know that P". It is a different proposition about the modal status of Kp. It is ◊Kp. You mistakenly claims that a modal statement about a proposition (◊Kp) violates the binary truth-value of the proposition itself (Kp). This is a category error. LEM governs the truth of propositions, not the content of those propositions. Both Kp and ◊Kp are individual propositions that are each subject to LEM on their own.