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

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.

The Necessity of Analytic Truths

Philosophy ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 44 (167) ◽  
pp. 12-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Locke
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Innate Knowledge ◽  
Necessary Truths ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Priori Knowledge

The problem of necessity is fundamentally a problem of knowledge: how can we know not just that something is so but that it must be so, not just that a statement is true but that it must be true? The problem arises the moment we make two fairly familiar assumptions: that all knowledge comes, in the end, from experience; and that experience can tell us only that something is so and not that it must be so. From these it follows immediately that there can be no knowledge of necessary truths. Yet obviously we do have such knowledge: we know that bachelors must be unmarried and that the angles of a Euclidean triangle must total 180°. It seems equally obvious that we do not learn such facts from experience, from observing bachelors and triangles, so it seems clear which of the assumptions is mistaken. Whatever may be the success of Locke's attack on innate knowledge, it seems undeniable that we do have knowledge which does not come from experience. We do possess some a priori knowledge, viz. knowledge of necessary truths.

Seeing, Knowing, and Doing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Human Action ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Rational Action ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Discriminative Response ◽  
Rich Information ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This book provides an overall theory of perception and an account of knowledge and justification concerning the physical, the abstract, and the normative. It has the rigor appropriate for professionals but explains its main points using concrete examples. It accounts for two important aspects of perception on which philosophers have said too little: its relevance to a priori knowledge—traditionally conceived as independent of perception—and its role in human action. Overall, the book provides a full-scale account of perception, presents a theory of the a priori, and explains how perception guides action. It also clarifies the relation between action and practical reasoning; the notion of rational action; and the relation between propositional and practical knowledge. Part One develops a theory of perception as experiential, representational, and causally connected with its objects: as a discriminative response to those objects, embodying phenomenally distinctive elements; and as yielding rich information that underlies human knowledge. Part Two presents a theory of self-evidence and the a priori. The theory is perceptualist in explicating the apprehension of a priori truths by articulating its parallels to perception. The theory unifies empirical and a priori knowledge by clarifying their reliable connections with their objects—connections many have thought impossible for a priori knowledge as about the abstract. Part Three explores how perception guides action; the relation between knowing how and knowing that; the nature of reasons for action; the role of inference in determining action; and the overall conditions for rational action.

How Reality is Reasonable

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Williams
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Dimensional Manifold ◽  
The World ◽  
Being There ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Fundamental Entity ◽  
Spatiotemporal Relations ◽  
Priori Knowledge

This chapter begins with a systematic presentation of the doctrine of actualism. According to actualism, all that exists is actual, determinate, and of one way of being. There are no possible objects, nor is there any indeterminacy in the world. In addition, there are no ways of being. It is proposed that actual entities stand in three fundamental relations: mereological, spatiotemporal, and resemblance relations. These relations govern the fundamental entities. Each fundamental entity stands in parthood relations, spatiotemporal relations, and resemblance relations to other entities. The resulting picture is one that represents the world as a four-dimensional manifold of actual ‘qualitied contents’—upon which all else supervenes. It is then explained how actualism accounts for classes, quantity, number, causation, laws, a priori knowledge, necessity, and induction.

How Do We Know that We’re Not Brains in Vats?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith DeRose
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
A Priori ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Contingent Fact ◽  
Brains In Vats ◽  
Priori Knowledge

In this chapter the contextualist Moorean account of how we know by ordinary standards that we are not brains in vats (BIVs) utilized in Chapter 1 is developed and defended, and the picture of knowledge and justification that emerges is explained. The account (a) is based on a double-safety picture of knowledge; (b) has it that our knowledge that we’re not BIVs is in an important way a priori; and (c) is knowledge that is easily obtained, without any need for fancy philosophical arguments to the effect that we’re not BIVs; and the account is one that (d) utilizes a conservative approach to epistemic justification. Special attention is devoted to defending the claim that we have a priori knowledge of the deeply contingent fact that we’re not BIVs, and to distinguishing this a prioritist account of this knowledge from the kind of “dogmatist” account prominently championed by James Pryor.

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