Abstract
John Bengson holds that an intellectual seeming is sufficient for a priori justification, whereas Elijah Chudnoff disagrees and holds that a priori justification also requires an intuitive awareness of the abstract entities that are the subject matter of the proposition to be justified. I distinguish between substantive and non-substantive a priori claims about the world, and argue that Chudnoff is correct about the justification required for the former kind of claim, and Bengson is correct about the justification required for the latter. In brief, substantive a priori claims about the world require for justification a process of reflection that takes as input states of awareness of the abstract entities in the world that are the subject matter of the claim, and yields as output an intellectual seeming that the claim is true. Whereas non-substantive a priori claims about the world (merely conceptual claims) can be justified merely by an intellectual seeming that the claim is true, so long as the seeming is a manifestation of conceptual competence.
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Notes
Chudnoff contrasts “sui generist views of intuition” with “doxastic views of intuition,” which are “views according to which intuitions are, or are acquisitions of, doxastic attitudes [such as beliefs] or doxastic dispositions” (2013, p. 26). Similarly, Bengson characterizes his approach to intuitions as a “non-minimalist approach” in that it takes intuitions to be “distinct from mere guesses, hunches, hypotheses, common sense, imaginings, beliefs, and dispositions or inclinations” (2015a, p. 714). In this paper, I assume the correctness of sui generist views; for arguments for such views, see Chudnoff (2011, Chudnoff (2013); Bengson (2015a).
Bengson refers to his view as a “quasi-perceptualist view of intuition” (2015a, p. 708).
For the view that intuitions are intellectual seemings, see Huemer (2001, pp. 99–100). Bengson (2015a) prefers to characterize intuitions as “presentations” rather than seemings, but it is not clear to me that there is any difference between a proposition seeming to be true and a proposition “presented … as being true” Bengson 2015a, p. 724). Bengson claims that a seeming is “explicit in the sense that its content is available … as the content of a conscious thought fully articulable by its subject”, whereas “presentations are sometimes inexplicit” (2015a, p. 730). But as it is not clear to me that an inexplicit presentation that p can justify the belief that p, and since talk of seemings is better suited for characterizing the nature of the debate between Chudnoff and Bengson as to the nature of intuitions, I will talk of seemings rather than presentations.
Strictly speaking, Chudnoff holds that an intuition is not a combination of two distinct states, but a single state that “both make[s] it intuitively seem to you that p and make[s] it seem to you as if the experience makes you intuitively aware of a truth-maker for p” (2013, p. 48). But for our purposes in this paper, we need not concern ourselves with the metaphysical question of whether an intuition is one mental state with two different aspects or a combination of two mental states. In order to highlight the epistemological disagreements between Chudnoff and Bengson, I will continue to speak somewhat loosely of the intellectual seeming and the seeming intuitive awareness as being two distinct states.
Bengson claims that Chudnoff’s “intentional notion of objectual presentation” is “epistemically irrelevant” (Bengson 2015a, p. 724, fn. 17).
Fumerton (2008, p. 79) gives a similar argument against what he calls “epistemic conservative” views of justification. Note that my argument relies on the internalist idea that the justification for a belief is an accessible reason for thinking the belief to be true; see, for example, BonJour 1999, p. 229, and BonJour 2003, p. 174.
See more generally Boghossian’s development and defense of the idea of epistemic analyticity in his 1996 and 2003. Williamson criticizes the idea of epistemic analyticity in his 2007 (ch. 4) and 2011; Boghossian responds in his 2011. Peacocke does not employ the term “epistemic analyticity,” but his idea that a priori knowledge can be explained on the basis of “the nature of understanding certain expressions, or grasping certain concepts” (Peaocke, 2000, p. 256) seems equivalent to Boghossian’s idea that a priori knowledge can be explained on the basis of epistemic analyticity; see also Peacocke 2005. Finally, it is worth noting in this context that although Boghossian’s development of the idea of epistemic analyticity was originally motivated, in part, by “its promise to explain a priori justification without invoking the potentially obscure and problematic notion of intuition,” Boghossian has now acknowledged that “one cannot escape appealing to intuitions in the theory of the a priori” (Boghossian, 2020, p. 186).
Johnston himself does not endorse Revelation in this form, although he recognizes a modified version of it.
See also Bengson (2015a, p. 740), who argues that there “is reason to be sceptical that intuition’s justificatory status can be fully explained solely by appeal to the intuiters’ understanding of what is intuited.”
Johnston argues that in perceptual experience we are not aware of facts, but of objects such as events and tropes (2014, pp. 130–132).
According to Johnston, a “truthmaker for a judgment could thus be thought of as the worldly item that mimics the propositional structure of the judgment in this way: where the judgment unites its elements by predication, the truthmaker unites those elements by exemplification” (2006, p. 279, fn. 13).
In claiming that we can know by introspection that we are not aware of abstract entities instantiating properties, I am appealing to an inductive argument. In the main text I am showing that in particular cases we introspect that we are not aware of abstract entities instantiating properties, and we can then inductively infer to the general conclusion that we are never aware of abstract entities instantiating properties. Of course inductive arguments are fallible, and for all I know there is or will be a case of a subject who is aware of abstract entities instantiating properties. But even if my general claim turns out to be false, what I have shown here has epistemological interest: there are a good number of cases in which we are not aware of abstract entities instantiating properties (those described by BonJour and Chudnoff), and in these cases reflection is required to justify the relevant a priori claims.
Bengson claims that “through intuition, we seem to directly grasp facts about the intellectual realm—for instance, that identity is transitive” (2015b, p. 26). But if Bengson is claiming here that we can be aware of the fact of the relation of identity instantiating the property of transitivity, then he is just mistaken. I suspect that Bengson is conflating awareness of a proposition seeming to be true with awareness of the fact that makes the proposition true. One can be aware of the proposition that predicates the property of transitivity to the abstract entity that is the relation of identity, but one cannot be aware of the relation of identity instantiating the property of transitivity.
Peacocke seems to be referring to the kinds of cases I address in this section when he refers to “cases in which we are, intuitively, inclined to say that it is because we see the nature of some kind of entity—a set, a colour, a number, a shape—that we appreciate a priori that certain principles about that entity are correct” (Peacocke, 2005, p. 757). For Peacocke’s account of such cases, see also his 2000, pp. 266–271. I will not at the present time address in detail Peacocke’s account of these cases, but will only say that I think his account supplements, rather than supplants, my own, and that I do not think that his theory can in fact account for all cases of the kind I address in this section.
Of course there can be a priori claims that involve both concepts of invention and concepts of discovery. If part of what makes the claim true is a substantive fact relating to the property that is the content of the concept of discovery, then the claim will be a substantive one. Consider the logical truth that bachelors are bachelors. This claim is thought by means of both a concept of invention (the concept of bachelors) and a concept of discovery (the concept of identity). The claim is made true by the substantive fact that the relation of identity is reflexive. So although this claim is thought (in part) be means of a concept of invention, the claim is nevertheless a substantive one.
See Ayer (1946, p. 80): “If one had to set forth all the information one possessed, with regard to matters of fact, one would not write down any analytic propositions.”
See also Alexander and Weinberg (2007, p. 63).
Of course some philosophers hold that our concept of knowledge is a concept of discovery. For example, Williamson holds that our concept of knowledge is a concept of a certain kind of mental state (2000, p. 22), and surely our concepts of mental states are concepts of discovery. Specifically, Williamson holds that “knowing is the most general factive stative attitude” (2000, p. 34), where factive mental states are “states whose essence includes a matching between mind and world” (2000, p. 40). I do not have the space here to address Williamson’s views with the care which they deserve. Let it suffice for now to say that I see no reason to think that there are mental states “whose essence includes a matching between mind and world”, and I do not think that Williamson has provided any reasons to think that there are such mental states. Therefore I see no reason to think that our concept of knowledge is the concept of the most general of this kind of mental state.
I should also note here that although I hold that our concept of knowledge is a concept of invention, I do think that there are concepts of discovery in the epistemological vicinity. For example, as an internalist about justification, I hold that a justified belief is a rational belief. And I do hold that our concept of a rational mental state is a concept of discovery.
In this paragraph, I am influenced by Sect. 1 of Ludwig (2007); see especially pp. 131–132.
It may also be a manifestation of something else. Ludwig distinguishes between judgments about philosophical thought experiments “based solely on competence in deploying concepts in relation to the scenario as described and, variously, judgments based on well-entrenched empirical beliefs, judgments based on what would be standardly implicated by the sentence that expresses the judgment, judgments based on reading more or less into the scenario than is intended by the experimenter, judgments based on information carried by the linguistic vehicle for it as opposed to what it means … or, generally speaking, judgments whose etiology is not solely the competence of the subject in use of the concepts in response to the scenario as described” (2007, p. 138; see also p. 144). According to Ludwig, it is only judgments in the former group that are justified (2007, p. 137). Similarly, I am arguing that it seeming to me that Smith does not know can justify me in believing that Smith does not know only if the seeming manifests my conceptual competence with respect to the concept of knowledge, that is, my ability to employ the concept of knowledge appropriately in thought.
Of course there very well may be more than one property that would make such assertions come out true. I will ignore that complication here, and continue to refer to the property that makes these assertions come out true.
Here I am appealing to the idea of Implicit Definition; see, for example, Boghossian’s development and defense of this idea in his 1996 and 2003. Boghossian’s project is to show how the idea of Implicit Definition can enable us to give an account of how we can have a priori knowledge of epistemically analytic truths. His primary interest is in explaining how we employ Implicit Definition in our understanding of the logical constants, whereas I am claiming that Implicit Definition applies only to concepts of invention, and I am inclined to think that our concepts of the logical constants are concepts of discovery. See also Peacocke 2000, p. 265.
Thus my account of how (intellectual) seemings provide justification for non-substantive a priori claims is significantly different from Sosa’s account. On Sosa’s view, “the intuitions [i.e., the intellectual seemings] immediately delivered by our rational competences are preponderantly true, even if occasionally false”; therefore, “all seemings delivered by such competences are thereby epistemically justified” (Sosa, 2007, p. 60). Where we differ is in our accounts of why these seemings are preponderantly true. According to Sosa, the competences that deliver these seemings are rational in that they enable the subject to “discriminate, among contents that he understands well enough, the true from the false, in some subfield of the modally strong” (2007, p. 61). By contrast, I am claiming that these seemings are deliverances of a conceptual competence, not a rational one, and that they are true, not because they are the deliverances of a rational ability to distinguish the true from the false, but because these seemings employ concepts of invention, and concepts of invention are such as to be about properties that make the seemings that employ them come out true.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Elijah Chudnoff and two anonymous referees for this journal for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank Alex Byrne for helpful discussion.
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Langsam, H. Two kinds of a priori justification. Synthese 201, 90 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04087-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04087-5