Abstract
Contemporary epistemologists typically define a priori justification as justification that is independent of sense experience. However, sense experience plays at least some role in the production of many paradigm cases of a priori justified belief. This raises the question of when experience is epistemically relevant to the justificatory status of the belief that is based on it. In this paper, I will outline the answers that can be given by the two currently dominant accounts of justification, i.e. evidentialism and reliabilism. While for the evidentialist, experience is epistemically relevant only if it is used as evidence, the reliabilist requires that the reliability of the relevant process depends on the reliability of experiential processes. I will argue that the reliabilist account accommodates our pre-theoretic classifications much better. In the final part of my paper I will use the reliabilist criterion to defend the a priori—a posteriori distinction against recent challenges by Hawthorne and Williamson.
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Notes
What is at issue here and in the rest of this paper is not what reasons one has to justify the claim that a particular belief is a priori (a posteriori) justified, but rather what in fact determines the belief’s justificatory status.
Compare (Casullo 2003, pp. 30–31), for further support of the negative definition.
Critical comments by Frank Hofmann helped me to put this point more clearly.
Something along these lines was suggested to me by Frank Hofmann.
In other words, we are looking for a plausible account of when (experiential) facts contribute to the justificatory status of a belief (compare fn. 1).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this general worry.
In general, we can distinguish between technical terms that are introduced by explicit stipulative definitions, like “rigid designation” or “reliabilism”, and technical terms that are introduced on the basis of paradigmatic cases, such as “a priori” and “a posteriori”, or “analytic” and “synthetic”.
Starting with intuitively clear examples of the a priori and a posteriori in order to arrive at a proper account of the distinction seems to be a widely accepted approach. A proponent of this view is, e.g., Williamson (2013), p. 291: “The distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge can be introduced the bottom-up way, by examples.” Compare also p. 294: “I do not deny that [these cases] really are clear cases of a priori and a posteriori knowledge respectively [\(\dots \)].” See also BonJour (1998), p. 7.
Thanks to Joachim Horvath for discussion.
Compare BonJour (1998) p. 7.
Admittedly, introspection is the most controversial case in my list of intuitive cases. While Descartes claimed that introspection is a source of a priori knowledge, Kant classified it as a source of a posteriori knowledge. This controversy continues in current epistemology (see, e.g., McKinsey 1991 for the claim that introspection is a source of a priori knowledge).
Of course, this is a somewhat oversimplified classification of views. More recently, there have been attempts to merge the virtues of evidentialism and reliabilism (compare, e.g., Comesaña 2010; Goldman 2011). In what follows, the resulting evidentialist reliabilism won’t be discussed separately since the counterexamples to evidentialism simpliciter are counterexamples to evidentialist reliabilism as well. The reason is this: according to evidentialist reliabilism, the possession of evidence is a necessary condition for justification and all counterexamples to evidentialism simpliciter rely on the fact that the adequate evidence is missing. Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this point.
On non-mental accounts of evidence, objective facts that support the truth of a claim constitute its evidential basis. Since objective facts typically do not involve sense experience, non-mental accounts of evidence do not provide us with the resources to distinguish between a priori and a posteriori justification in any intuitively plausible way. For this reason, I will put these accounts aside here.
Possessing content should be understood in a very broad sense such that possessing representational content and possessing fact-entailing content (like factive mental states, e.g. knowledge or perception) both should fall into its extension. See, e.g., Pritchard (2012) for an account of fact-entailing evidence. In contrast, Williamson (2000) suggests a factive account of evidence as knowledge that does not fully satisfy the above criteria for evidence. On his view, the factive knowledge states are not reflectively accessible.
For an opposing view see, e.g., Burge (1993).
I owe this objection to an anonymous referee.
Is the envisaged distinction between covariance and causal sensitivity really intelligible? Intuitively, it makes a difference whether facts are just correlated or one fact (causally) influences the other. But the difference can also be spelled out in more technical terms. Assume that something like Lewis’ counterfactual account of causation is correct. Then, two actually occurring facts c and e are such that c causes e iff it is the case that if c did not occur, e would not occur either. Further, assume that abstract or modal facts are necessary. Then the counterfactual relation between abstract/modal fact and the corresponding belief comes out trivially true. This is so because the antecedent of the counterfactual conditional is necessarily false: an abstract or modal fact could not be otherwise. But this is surely not sufficient for a causal relation between modal reality and our beliefs about it. On the other hand, there can be a modally robust necessary correlation between abstract/modal reality and our true beliefs about it, if they rely on a robustly reliable or safe psychological mechanism (compare Grundmann 2007). Thanks to an anonymous referee for the present worry.
Here I use Hawthorne’s terminology of developing the problem. See Hawthorne (2007), pp. 210–211.
Here, I simply assume that Short is an epistemically independent process if there is at least one possible world in which Short reliably produces true beliefs without receiving reliable input. This is a relatively weak requirement for epistemic independence. Alternatively, one might claim that something stronger is required for epistemic independence, i.e., that in the next possible worlds in which the input is unreliable Short will nevertheless reliably produce true beliefs. I will call processes that satisfy the first requirement “weakly independent” and processes that satisfy the second requirement “strongly independent.” Why should we think that belief-producing processes whose reliability is weakly independent of reliable sense-experiential processes are sufficient for producing a priori justified beliefs? One can at least indirectly argue for the adequacy of weak independence. Suppose, for reductio, that strong independence of reliable sense-experiential input is necessary for epistemic dependence in the relevant sense. Then a belief that is actually based on a reliable process such that it lacks reliability in the next possible worlds in which the experiential input-processes are unreliable will count as a posteriori justified. Now, consider Math Book again. In this case, Tyler reads some mathematical equations in a textbook but believes them only on the basis of his own reliable mental calculation. This is surely a paradigm case of a priori justification. Nevertheless, it might turn out that in the next possible worlds in which Tyler’s vision is unreliable his capacity to do mental math will also suffer considerably. Consider, e.g., the possibility that the next worlds in which Tyler’s vision is unreliable are worlds in which his vision is impaired by a kind of radiation that also impairs Tyler’s capacity to do mental calculations. Possibilities like this one seem to suggest that strong dependence is too strong as a requirement for epistemic independence. Critical comments by Jessica Brown, Carrie Jenkins, Jens Kipper and Nikolaj Nottelmann helped me to improve on this point.
Of course, I presuppose here that Bachelor is an internalistically individuated concept. If you don’t agree, just take your favorite example of an internalistically individuated concept instead.
In this case, causal contact with the truthmakers is absent as long as we regard mathematical reality as an abstract domain without any causal influence on the natural world. But the testimonial process still counts as sense-experiential here simply because it involves sense experiences.
Compare (Williamson 2013, p. 294): “Instead, I will address the distinction more directly, by comparing what would usually be regarded as a clear case of a priori knowledge with what would usually be regarded as a clear case of a posteriori knowledge. I will argue that the epistemological difference between the two cases are more superficial as they first appear.”
Williamson (2013, pp. 297–298).
This qualification was prompted by critical comments of an anonymous referee.
This version of semantic externalism is called “moderate” since it does not imply that the world itself partly determines reference, as e.g. environmental externalism claims. It is compatible with a fully descriptivist view of reference fixing that, in addition, assumes that the relevant descriptions are not necessarily known by every competent speaker, as social externalism claims.
Critical comments by Frank Hofmann helped me to see this point more clearly.
Thanks to Albert Casullo and Amy Floweree who independently pressed me on this point.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier drafts and parts of this paper were presented on a number of different occasions: at a conference on Intuition and Evidence-Naturalistic or Anti-Naturalistic? at the University of Lorraine in Nancy in June 2012; at the University of Vienna in June 2012; at the 8th International Congress of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie at the University of Constance in September 2012; at a workshop on Moderne Transzendentalphilosophie at the International University Center in Dubrovnik in September 2012; at a conference on The Roles of Experience in Apriori Knowledge at the University of Cologne in October 2012; at the workshop Neue Perspektiven der epistemischen Rechtfertigung at TU Dresden in January 2013; at the Epistemology Brownbag Series at Northwestern University in February 2013; and at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in March 2013. Substantial comments from and extensive discussion with the following colleagues helped me to work out the significantly revised final version of this paper: Magdalena Balcerak Jackson, Sven Bernecker, Jessica Brown, Albert Casullo, Amy Flowerree, Christopher Gibilisco, Sandy Goldberg, Frank Hofmann, Joachim Horvath, Jens Kipper, Tim Loughlin, Nikolaj Nottelmann, and Andrew Spaid. I am extremely grateful to all of them.
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Grundmann, T. How reliabilism saves the apriori/aposteriori distinction. Synthese 192, 2747–2768 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0422-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0422-5