Murzi Julien, Eichhorn Leonie, Mayr Philipp
Philosophy Department KGW University of Salzburg Salzburg Austria.
Thought (Hoboken). 2021 Mar;10(1):4-18. doi: 10.1002/tht3.473. Epub 2021 Feb 16.
The Surprise Exam Paradox is well-known: a teacher announces that there will be a surprise exam the following week; the students argue by an intuitively sound reasoning that this is impossible; and yet they be surprised by the teacher. We suggest that a solution can be found scattered in the literature, in part anticipated by Wright and Sudbury, informally developed by Sorensen, and more recently discussed, and dismissed, by Williamson. In a nutshell, the solution consists in realising that the teacher's announcement is a that can only be known if the week is at least 2 days long. Along the way, we criticise Williamson's own treatment of the paradox. In Williamson's view, the Surprise is similar to the Paradox of the Glimpse and, because of their similarities, both these paradoxes ought to receive a uniform treatment-one that involves locating an illicit application of the KK Principle. We argue that there's no deep analogy between the Surprise and the Glimpse and that, even if there were, the Surprise reasoning reaches a paradoxical conclusion the KK Principle is used. Rather, in both the Surprise and the Glimpse, the blame should be put on other epistemic principles-respectively, a knowledge retention and a margin for error principle.
一位老师宣布下周将有一场意外考试;学生们通过直观合理的推理认为这是不可能的;然而老师却让他们感到意外。我们认为可以在文献中找到一种解决方案,部分内容由赖特和萨德伯里预先提出,由索伦森非正式地发展,最近威廉姆森也进行了讨论但予以驳回。简而言之,解决方案在于意识到老师的宣布是一个只有在这一周至少有两天长时才可能被知道的陈述。在此过程中,我们批评了威廉姆森对该悖论的处理方式。在威廉姆森看来,意外考试悖论与瞥视悖论相似,并且由于它们的相似性,这两个悖论都应该得到统一的处理——这种处理方式涉及找出对 KK 原则的非法应用。我们认为意外考试悖论和瞥视悖论之间没有深刻的类比,而且即使存在类比,意外考试悖论的推理在使用 KK 原则之前就得出了一个矛盾的结论。相反,在意外考试悖论和瞥视悖论中,责任都应该归咎于其他认知原则——分别是知识保留原则和容错原则。