The a priori

Progress in Philosophy? Well, I Never!

Richard Brown 15 Comments

I finally got around to looking at the recent Philosophers’ Carnival and I was struck by Richard Chappell’s post at Philosophy, etc where he lists what he takes as ‘examples of solved philosophy’. He offers these up as counter-examples to claims made, by people like me, that there are no solved problems in philosophy. He says that by ‘solved’ he means that they are ‘as established as ordinary scientific results’. This in itself causes problems, for one might wonder how well established scientific results are… 

Now, I tend to think that every one of the so-called ‘solved’ issues really begs some question somewhere and so all we can mean by ‘solved’ is ‘generally agreed to be true by philosophers/philosopher X’ but it was number eight that got my hackles up.  This is the claim that it is metaphysically necessary that cats are animals, though ‘cats are animals’ is not analytically true (i.e. that Kripke is right). The ‘evidence’ for this is that, should we find out that what we call ‘cats’ were not animals but demons instead we wouldn’t want to say that we had found out that cats don’t exist. We must surely think that we have found out something new about cats; viz. that they are not animals. But since we have (already) found out that they are animals, we must conclude that they are necessarily animals. But why must we agree with the intuition that ‘we have found out something new about cats’. No reason for this is ever given. It has always seemed to me that we would have found out that there were no cats. So, until intuitions are reliable guides to semantic/metaphysical truths gets ‘solved’ number eight isn’t either; and this is no where near happening any time soon.

So, are there examples of solved philosophy? Well, only in the sense that Richard actually points out. That is, only in the sense in which ordinary scientific clams are thought of as ‘solved’ and that amounts only to this: Given certain assumptions about what counts as evidence at all and what it means for some kind of evidence to be better evidencethan some other kind, there is more evidence for claim a than claim b. But this will always involve substantial begging the question. This is why, I take it, that David Chalmers has recommended that with respect to the dualist/materialist debate the best thing to do is just for each camp to retire to their corners and try to develop their respective theories (I actually forget where he says that at, though…so I may be misremembering the jist of the passage). These issues are only solved from a theoretical standpoint, and no particular standpoint is forced on us.

A Counter-Example to the Cogito?

Richard Brown 6 Comments

Descartes famously argued that the one undoubtable truth is that when he is thinking he exists. This idea, I think therefore I am, is clear and distinct, which are the marks of self-evident necessary truths. Descartes’ idea still has a lot of pull, but isn’t there an obvious kind of counter-example to it?

Couldn’t it be the case that the Evil Demon has multiple personality disorder and that I (or you) am a figment of this fragmented consciousness? Couldn’t it be the case that the Evil Demon has made me up in the telling of some story to ease his boredom? Or maybe the Evil Demon is a Solipsist. In reality He is the only thing that exists and all of us are just a backdrop his all-powerful mind has concocted…It would then be the case that I wonder whether I exist and yet I do not exist…aren’t these kinds of things  counter-examples to the Cogito?

One response that might be made is that, while it is the case that I do not technically exist as I thought I did (as a mind-independent entity), I still exist (as a fictional mind-dependant entity). So, I still exist, just not in the way that I thought I did. This would allow us to keep the general truth that whenever there is some thinking there has to be a thinker (it would just be the Evil Demon himself who is actually doing the thinking), but it does seem to do violence to clearness and distinctness as a criterion of self-evident necessary truths.

Does anyone know if this kind of objection is ever dealt with by Descartes or any of his objectors/commentators?

Devitt on the A Priori

Richard Brown 17 Comments

So I have been reading Devitt’s paper “No Place for the A Priori” where he lays out his case against a prori knowledge. His claim is that there is only one way of knowing, and that is the empirical way. His strategy in the paper is to first argue that the kinds of knowledge that people usually claim to be examples of the a priori (i.e. math, logic, and philosophy) can all be explained on the emprical model. This means that there are two options for how we come to have knowledge of (say) the logical truths and so we would then need to see if each option is equally viable. This lead him to the second part of his strategy, which is to argue that the notion of a priori knowledge is so mysterious and obscure that the relatively well worked out empirical model is to be preferred. He even goes so far as to suggest that if he is right, “it is not rational to believe in the a priori.” Oh irony of ironies!

What then is the empirical model? He says,

An answer starts from the metaphysical assumption that the worldly fact that p would make the belief that p true. The empirical justification of the belief is then to be found in its relationship to experiences that the worldly fact would cause. Justified beliefs are produced and/or sustained by experiences in a way that is appropriately sensitive to the way the world is. This is very brief and we shall return to the question later. Still it is hard to say much more.

So the empirical model looks like it boils down to the correspondance theory of truth. There is though a lot more to say. For instance ‘worldly fact that p’ is ambiguous as between (in Armstrong’s sense) a world of states of affairs (or, in Russell’s older terms ‘facts’), and a world of things. But we can leave that aside. His main claim is that even this sketchy characterization of the empirical model is more worked out than any account of a priori knowledge and can also account for our knowledge that seems to us a priori (math, logic, etc).  

Now I am generally sympathetic to this claim, being a naturalist myself, but the way that he puts it certainly seems acceptable to some ‘a-prioraphiles’. Might not it be the case that the ‘worldly fact’ that modus ponens is a valid logical form play the kind of role that p does in the characterization above? Rational intuition is often characterized as a kind of ‘grasping’ with the mind. It is an intellectual kind of experience where one sees or appreciates some necessary fact about reality. Thus my beliefs about modus ponens would be ‘appropriately sensitive to the way the world is’. Of course, one couldn’t be a physicalist (like I am), again in Armstrong’s sense, but one could still be a naturalist…Or is that the a-priorafile can’t allow that modus ponens is a non-physical natural phenomena (i.e. a worldly phenomena that exists in space and time)?