Abstract
Agustín Rayo’s The Construction of Logical Space offers an exciting and ambitious defense of a broadly Carnapian approach to metaphysics. This essay will focus on one of the main differences between Rayo’s and Carnap’s approaches. Carnap distinguished between analytic, a priori “meaning postulates”, and empirical claims, which were both synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. Like meaning postulates, they determine the boundaries of logical space. But Rayo is skeptical that the a priori/a posteriori or analytic/synthetic distinctions can do the work Carnap wanted them to, so unlike meaning postulates, ‘just is’-statements aren’t assumed to be analytic or knowable a priori. This essay will concern the epistemology of ‘just is’-statements in Rayo’s picture. If not by a priori reflection, how can we determine which ones to accept? I’ll distinguish two competing strands in Rayo’s work. The less radical, Lewisian strand holds that the question of whether to accept a ‘just is’-statement can be addressed in a neutral, non-question-begging way, by a kind of cost-benefit analysis. The more radical, Kuhnian strand holds that there can be no ‘just is’-statement-independent, rational choice of which ‘just is’-statements to accept. I argue that Rayo faces strong internal pressure to adopt the Kuhnian picture. While it is possible for Rayo to resist these Kuhnian pressures, natural strategies for doing so leave his view more similar to Carnap’s than the above gloss suggested.
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Notes
See, e.g., Carnap (1967, p. 176).
See Kuhn (1962).
Or at least, that this problem arises. Of course, there may well be other problems for such arguments that have nothing to do with the issues discussed in this essay.
Of course, this inability to represent a posteriori learning of previously unintelligible hypotheses might be taken as a limitation of conceiving of learning along inference to the best explanation or Bayesian lines. See, e.g., Chihara (1987), who takes it to be a problem for Bayesianism that it cannot represent the rational credence changes that are driven by imagining new hypotheses. Still, in the absence of some alternative picture that can make sense of purely a posteriori learning of previously unintelligible hypotheses, it seems me that Rayo would be on shaky ground to insist that this is how learning ‘just is’-statements works.
While the focus is quite different, there are some nice examples of learning events that don’t seem happily classified as either straightforwardly a priori or a posteriori in Williamson (2013).
See, e.g., Kuhn (1962, p. 150).
I have in mind especially the preface to Lewis (1986).
See Rayo (2013, §2.2.4).
See, e.g., Kuhn (1962, pp. 109–110).
Plausibly, accepting a new ‘just is’-statement will typically involve losing the ability to explain, as well as being relieved of the burden to answer, infinitely many questions (at least in principle).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Agustín Rayo, Jason Turner, and an audience at the 2014 Pacific APA.
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Greco, D. The epistemology of ‘just is’-statements. Philos Stud 172, 2599–2607 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0424-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0424-7