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.

This will be my first experience of officially supervising a postdoc.   I gather that my formal duties are minimal, but I want to do a good job in general.   Any advice from those with recent experience of supervising and/or being postdocs?

It’s going to pull together two strands in my thinking about epistemology, which I hadn’t until now attempted to amalgamate but which (I’m relieved to find) will hopefully mesh neatly.

The first is that I suspect that epistemically normative claims are made true by natural facts.   (I wrote a bit about this idea a few years ago, in Epistemic Norms and Natural Facts.)  The second is newer: I suspect that there’s an interesting story to be told about the epistemology of basic norms of inference, according to which it is reliance on our empirically grounded concepts (in the sense of Grounding Concepts) that guides us to trust in and apply the right inferential rules.

This story is in some respects different from the one I outlined in Grounding Concepts about how reliance on empirically grounded concepts could guide us to true and knowledgeable beliefs: trust in, and use of, inferential norms is (plausibly) not best thought of as a matter of believing certain propositions.  However, I’m going to try and suggest that concepts could do the same kind of work in making trust in an inference rational as they can do in making belief in a proposition rational.

If that’s right, things align tidily.  Empirically grounded concepts are sensitive to empirical input.  Empirical input, presumably, is sensitive to the natural world.  And it is aspects of the natural world it is that make true epistemically normative claims.  So the right concepts can serve as reliable guides to which inferential rules we ought to trust and use.

This paper is to appear in Analytic Philosophy (formerly Philosophical Books).

Tennant says:

We adverted above to an appearance of slight strain between two assertions in the work. The first of these is confidently sweeping:

. . . arithmetical truths are conceptual truths; or, at least, enough arithmetical truths are conceptual truths to enable us to account for all of our a priori arithmetical knowledge once we add in knowledge secured by inference from other truths known in this way.  (p. 123; emphasis added)

But, thirty pages later the author retracts:

To account for all of our knowledge of arithmetic is a tough call, even when we allow that much can be achieved by deduction from previously known arithmetical facts.  Godel’s incompleteness results are a measure of how tough a call this is.  (p. 153)

There are two problems with what Neil says here about my asserting then retracting some claim.  (1) The first quoted passage is not an assertion.  (2) The second quoted passage is not a retraction.

(1) The passage from p. 123 appears within the scope of an ‘On the view that I’m interested in’ operator, which Tennant carefully omits to reproduce.   I never claim to have established that the view in question is true.  Indeed, I repeatedly stress that this is not an aim of the book.

(2) The two passages are nonetheless obviously consistent.  To make things even clearer, the discussion on the very next page (p. 154) explains why I would like to maintain my optimism that the proposal on offer can account for all our a priori arithmetical knowledge even given that this is a tough call in the way just described.

I am genuinely puzzled as to why Tennant presented these passages in the way he did.  (This is just one example; I had similar thoughts about  many of Tennant’s other criticisms.)

The foregoing notwithstanding, I’m feeling fortunate compared to Chris Peacocke, to date the only other recipient of a review by Neil.

UPDATE: Neil tells me he has, in fact, written other reviews. I had been assuming the list on his OSU ‘publications’ page, which mentions only the Peacocke review, was complete.

Comments welcome, as ever.

I wrote this song as an entry for the Nottingham philosophy department’s 2010 contest for the Matheson-Smart Cup for Total Bull. To compete for the cup, you pick as implausible a thesis as you can think of and mount such defence of it as you can muster. Most people do not sing. I came third, securing a respectable number of votes purely by threatening to sing again (louder) in the event of my not winning. This totally unplugged live performance is intended to enable viewers to experience something as close as possible to the actual event, with respect to sound quality among other things. I have blurred the image as I was the last entrant to perform and beer and wine had been available for three hours by that time.

A referee for this paper found it remiss of me to have ‘not even considered’ arguments in a ‘forthcoming’ paper by Jonathan Schaffer.  On investigation, this turns out to be an abandoned paper, not available online or elsewhere, that Jonathan does not want people to cite. I offer this cautionary tale as a reminder for referees that requiring citation of unpublished manuscripts not only encourages in-crowdism, it can force people to cite inaccurately and inappropriately.