Or, You Can't Know What You Don't Know You Can't Know.

This is an interesting result from modal logic that I will try to sketch here. The upshot of the result, depending on which side of a divide you fall into, is either that there are some truths that are logically impossible to know, or that every truth is already known by someone.

The dividing line in this case is whether you are a realist or anti-realist. The realists posit that there is an external reality that has certain definite properties. The anti-realist deny that such an external reality exists (or, in some cases, that we can have access to it). I'll get more into this distinction after I sketch the proof. If you find logic boring, feel free to skip the proof and scroll to the end for a brief discussion on the implications of this result.

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You’ll have to forgive me, as the first part of this is reconstructed from memory, from a paper I read several months ago.

Lets do a little thought experiment.

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