scholarly journals Abductive two-dimensionalism: a new route to the a priori identification of necessary truths

Synthese ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 197 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Biggs ◽  
Jessica Wilson
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Samet

Traditional empiricism claims that the mind is initially equipped only with the capacity for experience and the mechanisms that make it possible for us to learn from experience. Nativists have argued that this is not enough, and that our innate endowment must be far richer, including information, ideas, beliefs, perhaps even knowledge. Empiricism held the advantage until recently, partly because of a misidentification of nativism with rationalism. Rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz thought nativism would explain how a priori knowledge of necessary truths is possible. However, the fact that something is innate does not establish that it is true, let alone that it is necessary or a priori. More recently, nativism has been reanimated by Chomsky’s claims that children must have innate language-specific information that mediates acquisition of their native tongue. He argues that, given standard empiricist learning procedures, the linguistic data available to a child underdetermines the grammar on which they converge at a very young age, with relatively little effort or instruction. The successes in linguistics have led to fruitful research on nativism in other domains of human knowledge: for example, arithmetic, the nature of physical objects, features of persons, and possession of concepts generally.


1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-327
Author(s):  
Gregory W. Fitch

Alvin Plantinga has recently argued that there are certain propositions which are necessary but known only a posteriori. If Plantinga is correct then he has shown that the traditional view that all necessary truths are knowable a priori is false. Plantinga's examples deserve special attention because they differ in important respects from other proposed examples of necessary a posteriori truths. His examples depend on a certain conception of possible worlds and in particular on his conception of the actual world. It will be argued that these examples of necessary a posteriori propositions can be understood in two different ways. According to one way of understanding Plantinga, the propositions turn out to be contingent a posteriori truths, and according to the other way they turn out to be necessary a priori truths. The plausibility of Plantinga's position is due to a confusion between the two possible interpretations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-73
Author(s):  
Ben Gibran ◽  

Philosophy (and its corollaries in the human sciences such as literary, social and political theory) is distinguished from other disciplines by a more thoroughgoing emphasis on the a priori. Philosophy makes no claims to predictive power; nor does it aim to conform to popular opinion (beyond ordinary intuitions as recorded by ‘thought experiments’). Many philosophers view the discipline’s self-exemption from ‘real world’ empirical testing as a non-issue or even an advantage, in allowing philosophy to focus on universal and necessary truths. This article argues otherwise. The non-instrumentality of philosophical discourse renders it into a collective private language, impairing the discipline’s ability to judge the quality of its own output. The natural sciences and other technical disciplines offer the non-expert ‘windows of scrutiny’ into their respective methodologies, through numerous findings that can be easily and independently tested by amateurs. Such outside scrutiny provides a mechanism of external quality control, mitigating the internal effects of cognitive bias and institutionalised conformity upon the discourses of technical disciplines. In contrast, the conclusions of philosophy are not testable without in-depth knowledge of the methods by which they are arrived at; knowledge which can apparently only be gained through an extensive program of study, in philosophy. This epistemic circularity renders the program (even one of self-study) into a ‘black box’ in which the internal influence of cognitive biases and conformity effects cannot be independently assessed. The black box of philosophy is, in all relevant respects, analogous to the black box of the Cartesian mind that is the subject of Wittgenstein’s private language argument.


Author(s):  
Alan Sidelle

Necessary truths have always seemed problematic, particularly to empiricists and other naturalistically-minded philosophers. Our knowledge here is a priori - grounded in appeals to what we can imagine or conceive (or can prove on that basis) - which seems hard to reconcile with such truths being factual, short of appealing to some peculiar faculty of a priori intuition. And what mysterious extra feature do necessary truths possess which makes their falsity impossible? Conventionalism about necessity claims that necessary truths obtain by virtue of rules of language, such as that ‘vixen’ means the same as ‘female fox’. Because such rules govern our descriptions of all cases - including counterfactual or imagined ones - they generate necessary truths (‘All vixens are foxes’), and our a priori knowledge is just knowledge of word meaning. Opponents of conventionalism argue that conventions cannot ground necessary truths, particularly in logic, and have also challenged the notion of analyticity (truth by virtue of meaning). More recent claims that some necessary truths are a posteriori have also fuelled opposition to conventionalism.


Author(s):  
Andrew Stephenson

Abstract This paper draws out and connects two neglected issues in Kant’s conception of a priori knowledge. Both concern topics that have been central to contemporary epistemology and to formal epistemology in particular: knowability and luminosity. Does Kant commit to some form of knowability principle according to which certain necessary truths are in principle knowable to beings like us? Does Kant commit to some form of luminosity principle according to which, if a subject knows a priori, then they can know that they know a priori? I defend affirmative answers to both of these questions, and by considering the special kind of modality involved in Kant’s conceptions of possible experience and the essential completability of metaphysics, I argue that his combination of knowability and luminosity principles leads Kant into difficulty.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri

I argue that you can have a priori knowledge of propositions that neither are nor appear necessarily true. You can know a priori contingent propositions that you recognize as such. This overturns a standard view in contemporary epistemology and the traditional view of the a priori, which restrict a priori knowledge to necessary truths, or at least to truths that appear necessary


1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-181
Author(s):  
David J. Bromell

This article supplements Wolfhart Pannenberg's Metaphysics and the Idea of God by offering a systematic introduction to the tasks and criteria of metaphysics through an exposition of various statements of Charles Hartshome on the subject, chiefly his Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. The article is focused around Hartshorne's understanding of the precise roles of empirical verification and falsification in relation to metaphysical statements, and his challenge to the empiricist dogmas that “necessary truths = a priori = analytic,” and that a statement is rendered contingent by the mere fact that it asserts existence. Some elaboration follows of the implications of Hartshorne's neoclassical metaphysics for theism, and for modal logic.


1992 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 215-252
Author(s):  
J. A. Brook

In the second edition, Kant summarized the question behind the Critique of Pure Reason this way: ‘How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?’ (B19) We can easily understand his interest in synthetic judgments; he thought that analytic ones could not tell us anything new (A5-6=B9). There are only two ways to get judgments that are analytic: by drawing out what is contained in our concepts and by combining the resulting propositions inferentially into arguments. Neither could ever tell us anything not already ‘thought in [the concepts we have used], though confusedly’ (A7=B10-ll), and even if either could, it could not give us anything against which to test it for truth or falsity. ‘In the mere concept of a thing no mark of its existence is to be found’ (A225=B272; cf. Bxvii-xviii). In the search for knowledge, analytic judgments get us nowhere.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-326
Author(s):  
James R. Beebe

In a previous article, I argued against the widespread reluctance of philosophers to treat skeptical challenges to our a priori knowledge of necessary truths with the same seriousness as skeptical challenges to our a posteriori knowledge of contingent truths. Hamid Vahid has recently offered several reasons for thinking the unequal treatment of these two kinds of skepticism is justified, one of which is a priori skepticism’s seeming dependence upon the widely scorned kk thesis. In the present article, I defend a priori skepticism against Vahid’s criticisms.


1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Casullo

Edward Erwin has recently argued against the thesis that the concepts a priori truth’ and ‘necessary truth’ are extensionally equivalent. (Following Erwin, I shall refer to this thesis as the ‘Extensional Equivalence Hypothesis’ or, for short, E. E. H.) This thesis consists of two logically independent claims: (1) all a priori truths are necessary; and (2) all necessary truths are a priori. Erwin leaves the first claim unchallenged and elects to devote his efforts exclusively to undermining the second. The brunt of his attack on the second claim rests on alleged unclarities in the concept of an a priori truth. He attempts to show that the E.E.H. cannot be defended upon any plausible interpretation of this concept. Although I agree that the E.E.H., as stated above, is open to Erwin's objections, I shall argue that a slightly revised version of it can be defended against these objections.


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