New Draft: Naturalistic Challenges to the A Priori
I’m working on a paper commissioned for a collection on the a priori, edited by Albert Casullo and Joshua Thurow. Here’s the current draft, and comments are very welcome as always.
The paper’s aim is to show that various of the views that get labelled ‘naturalism’ are perfectly compatible with the existence of a priori knowledge/justification, and various ‘naturalistic’ challenges to the a priori can therefore be resisted (at least, by a priorists of the Jenkins 2008 stripe). I look particularly at the work of Quine, Maddy and Papineau.
A by-product of the paper is an attempt at a more nuanced approach to the classification of philosophical naturalisms than is given by the standard ontological/methodological distinction.
I’ve scanned the sections on Quine, Maddy and Papineau. Some quick comments:
1. Quine would presumably deny that the notion of CONFIRMATION can be meaningfully applied to sub-propositional elements… and I would agree. To confirm something is to provide evidence that it is true or that increases its probability. So it seems to me at best you have located a source of disagreement between your view and Quine’s.
2. I think the whole section on Maddy is a bit odd. I take it what she means by ‘the time-honoured version of the a priori’ is the idea of a priori providing a ground or foundation for science. This does not mean there could not be in some sense a priori knowledge of some kind. In fact if you know her book Second Philosophy she has a very interesting discussion of the origins of Logic (Section 3) which concludes by allowing in some sense (but perhaps not in others) logic is a priori. (She also allows I think that what she calls a thin realist can claim we have a priori conceptual knowledge of maths.) So your sweeping reading of her claims can’t be right.
Some of your other remarks are off beam too, I think. Her sincere doubting with regard to claims about space and sets, etc is backed up by detailed description here and elsewhere about how these notions are used by physicists and mathematicians.
I haven’t read your 2008 (Sorry) and so I can’t really comment, given what you say here, about the viability of the claims argued for there. (Talk about empirical but a priori knowledge sounds very odd to me.) But from what I can glean, where you, Quine, Papineau and Maddy disagree is in matters of philosophy of language/ mind regarding the concept CONCEPT. That’s where I’d bet the interesting philosophical issues are. Whether you wish to call some of those disagreements about the possibility of the existence of empirical a priori knowledge would seem to me more than likely mere terminological.
Incidentally, I hope the previous comment didn’t sound rude. Remarks about Maddy aside, the main point I’m making is it would be useful to say more about the position argued for in your 2008, so people like me, who haven’t read it, can see how your view contrasts with Quine, etc.
Hi, I would love to read this draft but the link is broken. If you can would you fix it?
Sorry Robert: I only just saw your comment! The paper is now available at http://www.carriejenkins.co.uk/research/work-in-progress