scholarly journals Transcendental Knowability and A Priori Luminosity

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Andrew Stephenson
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Formal Epistemology ◽  
Necessary Truths ◽  
Knowability Principle ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

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.

scholarly journals Contingent A Priori Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Standard View ◽  
Contingent A Priori ◽  
Necessary Truths ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology ◽  
Priori Knowledge

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

Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 6

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Theory ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Formal Epistemology ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Naturalized Epistemology ◽  
New Developments ◽  
The Status ◽  
Important Field ◽  
Belief Justification

Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publication offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading epistemologists in North America, Europe and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: (a) traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of skepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc.; (b) new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; (c) foundational questions in decision-theory; (d) confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; (e) topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; (f) topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; and (g) work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony, the ethics of belief, etc. Topics addressed in volume 6 include the nature of perceptual justification, intentionality, modal knowledge, credences, epistemic supererogation, epistemic and rational norms, expressivism, skepticism, and pragmatic encroachment. The various writers make use of a variety of different tools and insights, including those of formal epistemology and decision theory, as well as traditional philosophical analysis and argumentation.

The Functionalization of Essential (A Priori) Knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (9999) ◽  
pp. 137-150
Author(s):  
Aivaras Stepukonis ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Max Scheler ◽  
Special Mode ◽  
The Will ◽  
Essential Knowledge ◽  
Priori Knowledge

The article explores a special mode of the human mind outlined in the writings of Max Scheler under the notion of the functionalization of essential (a priori) knowledge. While the concept of a priori was given its profound elaboration in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Scheler applies it with a number of significant modifications. Along with the a priori of objective reality, which is the mind’s first step in grasping the autonomous world, Scheler comes to posit a species of a priori that is subjective. A person’s exposure to an objective essence exercises a special kind of influence on that person’s mind: what was once an objective a priori is appropriated as a subjective a priori, the thing thought becomes a “form” or pattern of thinking, the thing liked becomes a “form” or manner of liking. “Functionalization” characterizes precisely the mind’s ability to transmute the essential knowledge of autonomous reality into subjective a priori forms of knowing and anticipating that reality. This transmutation unfolds on three intuitive planes: that of meaning which is known, that of value which is perceived or apprehended, and that of existence which is encountered in the resistance of objects to the will of the percipient.

Nativism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Samet
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Young Age ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
Necessary Truths ◽  
Fruitful Research ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Native Tongue

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.

Doxa Is of What Seems

2021 ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
Jessica Moss
Keyword(s):  
Special Kind ◽  
Substantive Theory ◽  
Neutral Term ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology

What kind of thing is Plato’s doxa? This is a question nowadays rarely asked. It is widely assumed that Plato had in mind something perfectly familiar to us from commonsense contemporary epistemology: belief. I will argue that Plato’s doxa is instead essentially to be understood as the cognition of a special kind of object, what seems. Plato chooses ‘doxa’ rather than some more general or neutral term to name the inferior cognitive condition because of the etymological link with seeming (to dokein), which we find actively exploited in the Presocratics. Plato inflates this link into a substantive theory: what seems is something ontologically distinct from what Is, and when we attend to what seems we have doxa rather than epistêmê. This is particularly evident in Plato’s discussions of rhetoric. Thus the defining object of doxa is what seems.

Attraction on TV: rules of communication game

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-128
Author(s):  
Irina N. Kemarskaya
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Simultaneous Presence ◽  
Tv Viewing ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
The Right ◽  
Key Aspects

The essay analyzes the game nature of screen attraction - one of the most important tools of television dramaturgy. Attraction is examined, in the tradition established by Sergei Eisenstein and developed by Russian and foreign researchers, not just as entertainment but as a way of influencing audience perception. TV viewing is regarded as a special kind of game developing in accordance with the rules established by a programs format and repeated in this programs each new release. The key aspects relating classic TV communication to game are: voluntary selection and viewing of the programs; clearly marked place and time of occupation; a set of rules mandatory for a particular game; the feelings of joy and fun generated by the participation in TV viewing; immersion of the viewer in the "otherness" of the game and simultaneous presence in everyday life. The rules of communication game are accepted by all participants in the process: the makers of a TV product, the partakers and the audience. Voluntary way of program viewing is an indispensable condition for TV communication, and the attractions are its most active moments: they are designed to capture and keep the viewer's attention, and to evoke emotions associated with the pleasure produced by game. The essay explores the attraction-like nature of TV shows both as a content and as a set of the signs, as a way of the functioning of the audiovisual language. The variability of the TV spectacle is investigated as the phenomenon of postmodern aesthetics, as an aesthetic merit rather than an immanent disadvantage a priori depriving TV products of the right to uniqueness.

Plantinga's Necessary A Posteriori Truths

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-327
Author(s):  
Gregory W. Fitch
Keyword(s):  
Actual World ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Other ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Necessary A Posteriori ◽  
Necessary Truths

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.

Philosophy as a Private Language

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-73
Author(s):  
Ben Gibran ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Epistemic Circularity ◽  
Program Of Study ◽  
Self Study ◽  
Extensive Program ◽  
Necessary Truths

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.

Necessary truth and convention

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Sidelle
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
Necessary Truths ◽  
Priori Knowledge

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.

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 ◽  
Necessary Truths
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document