Intellectual virtue owes its origin and its development mainly to teaching, for which reason it requires experience and time...
Aristotle, EN, II.1, 1103a 14-16.
Abstract
Williamson and others have recently argued against the significance of the a priori/a posteriori distinction. My aim in this paper is to explain, defend, and expand upon one of these arguments. In the first section, I develop in some detail a line of argument sketched in Williamson (The philosophy of philosophy, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007). In the second section, I consider two replies to Williamson and show that they miss the structure of the challenge, as I understand it. The problem for defenders of the distinction is to find a way to draw it without leaving out some paradigmatic a priori knowledge or including some paradigmatic a posteriori knowledge. Interestingly, the two replies fail in opposite directions. I then consider the view that, in cases of a priori knowledge, one needs only understanding and some reasoning to gain justified belief. Such reasoning, I argue, should itself not be dependent on experience. Next, I consider, and reject, the attempt to spell out independence of experience for reasoning based on a link between the modal and epistemic status of the proposition involved. Finally, I provide some general grounds to think that the role of experience in forming a reasoning competence, while not evidential, is not devoid of normative value. The main reason is that the normative status of intellectual competences depends on the experiences that constitute their acquisition and development.
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Notes
Therefore, views about this matter are “ideological” for philosophers precisely in the sense of Stanley (2015): “One’s ideology involves beliefs that are tightly connected to one’s self-conception” (p. 78). Stanley argues that for this reason ideological beliefs are often recalcitrant to rational discussion. I find this is sometimes true of beliefs about the a priori/a posteriori distinction. Friends of the distinction typically conceive of themselves as practitioners of an a priori discipline, and pride in the independence of the discipline. Enemies of the distinction typically conceive of themselves as philosophers who are open to the contributions of natural sciences and in general of experience, and also take pride in this. Luckily, I believe this does not prevent rational discussion altogether.
See also Hawthorne (2007).
I am alluding here to the distinction between episodic and semantic memory; see for example Tulving (2002) for an overview.
For a challenge to this view, see for example Bernecker (2008, ch. 7).
See pp. 165–169.
Williamson (2007, p. 167).
This crucial point is sometimes missed by critics. See for example Chalmers (2012, p. 196). Chalmers’ otherwise interesting discussion is not considered here because I take his epistemic two-dimensionalist framework to be incompatible with the rejection of epistemic analyticity which, as it will be made clear, I am assuming.
Kitcher is engaged in defending the view that a notion of a priori warrant that gives up a certain sort of infallibility cannot play the same role of the traditional notion.
In roughly the sense of Boghossian (1996).
A similar point was made by Grice and Strawson about the analytic–synthetic distinction in their classic (1956). The considerations I am going to offer apply to their case as well, but of course the strategy could work, in principle, for one distinction and not the other.
If the idea is that conditions for concept possession might include knowledge of truths like (3)–(5), then Williamson has arguments against that view (Williamson 2007, ch. 4), and in the present context I am assuming that the view is wrong (as is implied by my assumption that there is no epistemic analyticity). I believe Casullo also shares this assumption.
See also Williamson (2016) on the epistemic role of imagination more generally.
Compare this definition of a priori from Burge: “For a claim or belief to be warranted a priori is for the warrant not to depend for its force on sense perception, or other sensory material, or on perceptual belief. The force of the warrant normally rests instead on understanding or reason. The explanation of the warranting support does not appeal even partly to sense perception, sensory material, or perceptual belief. It appeals to understanding or reason.” (Burge 2010, p. 534.) Burge goes back and forth between a negative and a positive characterization. His positive characterization shares my assumptions, in that it does not refer to analyticity or intuitions. However, it is far from clear that the positive and the negative characterizations will be equivalent.
Jenkins (2014) develops some interesting ideas about the epistemic evaluation of inferences in general. She does not, however, address independence of experience.
Assuming beliefs are individuated by their content. For a way to treat the problem discussed here that gives up this assumption, see Weatherson (2004).
Not every change in intentional mental states constitutes reasoning. If I am thinking about the weather, and then I hear a loud noise, my thoughts will change, but not as an effect of reasoning. However, it turns out to be extremely hard to say what exactly it takes for the process of moving from one thought to another to count as reasoning. Wedgewood (2006) proposes that such a process must be causally influenced by the normative relations between the thoughts. If a strong version of this proposal is correct, then perhaps one need not distinguish, as I am doing, between a capacity for reasoning and a reasoning competence. I would then reformulate the arguments that follow to directly address the capacity for reasoning.
I am trying to be as neutral as possible on what constitutes a competence, but I am assuming that competence entails some sort of reliability. Attention to the notion of competence, and more broadly to intellectual virtues, has been growing in epistemology over the last 30 years. I cannot, of course, review this work here; a good starting point is Sosa (2007).
Strengthening 1 and 2 would require deciding whether a Davidsonian Swampman has (putatively a priori) knowledge. This seems very implausible to me, but if one answers positively, that is definitely an untypical sort of a priori knowledge.
Perhaps the claim needs to be restricted somehow; there might be an innate basis to most reasoning competences, but even then, they go far beyond that basis. Consider, for example, competence in mathematical reasoning; there probably is an innate basis, but getting beyond the first steps of mathematical reasoning requires the acquisition of mathematical language and the development of a specific skill in using it.
As first noted by Aristotle: “Virtues, however, we acquire by first exercising them. The same is true with skills, since what we need to learn before doing, we learn by doing; for example, we become builders by building, and lyre-players by playing the lyre.” EN, II.1, 1103a 30–32, transl. Roger Crisp. Aristotle goes on to dissolve the apparent contradiction in EN, II, 4.
See Graham (2014) for a development and defence of the idea that epistemic normativity is tied to functions.
For comments on various previous—rather different—versions of this paper, I would like to thank Andrea Bianchi, Jessica Brown, Ernest Sosa, and Brian Weatherson. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for Synthese for their useful and constructive comments.
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Sgaravatti, D. Experience and reasoning: challenging the a priori/a posteriori distinction. Synthese 197, 1127–1148 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1718-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1718-7