knowable

Knowable is an adjective used in philosophy and epistemology to describe propositions, facts, or states of affairs that could be known by an agent under suitable conditions. The term emphasizes potential knowledge rather than actual knowledge. What is knowable can depend on the agent, the available methods, and the constraints of the inquiry; a proposition may be knowable in principle but not knowable in practice due to cognitive limits, resource constraints, or current evidence.

In debates, philosophers distinguish between knowability in principle and knowability in practice, and between epistemic possibility and epistemic certainty. Some positions claim that everything true is knowable in principle (the Knowability Principle), while others argue that there are true propositions that are unknowable, due to limits of methods, time, or value-laden disagreements.

A well-known puzzle associated with knowability is the Fitch paradox of knowability, often discussed in relation to the claim that all truths are knowable. Through formal reasoning, this paradox can yield counterintuitive results about the status of unknowable truths, leading to debates about the proper formulations of omniscience and the semantics of truth and knowledge.

In practice, the concept informs discussions of scientific inquiry, falsifiability, and the limits of inquiry. Proposals about what can be known clearly influence methodological assumptions, including the search for testable hypotheses and the interpretation of evidence. In logic, 'knowable' is modeled by epistemic operators in modal logic, where Kp denotes 'it is known that p'.