The A priori
Isn’t All That It Is Cracked Up To Be,
But It Is Something
David Henderson and Terry Horgan
1. Introduction
Alvin
Goldman’s contributions to contemporary epistemology are impressive—few
epistemologists have provided others so many occasions for reflecting on the
fundamental character of their discipline and its concepts. His work has
informed the way epistemological questions have changed (and remained
consistent) over the last two decades. We (the authors of this paper) can
perhaps best suggest our indebtedness by noting that there is probably no paper
on epistemology that either of us individually or jointly have produced that
does not in its notes and references bear clear testimony to the influence of
Professor Goldman’s arguments. The present paper is no exception (and this
would be a particularly inapt place to break with our tradition of
indebtedness). Professor Goldman has produced a series of discussions that we
find particularly important for coming to terms with the venerable idea that
there may be truths that can be known a priori (Goldman 1992a, 1992b, 1999). We
do not altogether follow his lead, while he draws on the idea that a priori
justification has something to do with innateness or processess, we prefer to
accentuate the idea that a priori justification turns on a conceptually
grounded truths and access via acquired conceptual competence (at least in many
significant philosophical cases). Still, in developing our understanding we
have been aided by much that Professor Goldman says regarding concepts,
conceptual competence, and related psychological processes. The influences
should become progressively clear, particularly in the later sections of this
paper.
What would
it take for there to be a priori
knowledge or justification? We can begin by reflecting on a widely agreed on
answer to this question—one that purports to identify something that would at
least be adequate for a priori
justification. The answer will then serve as one anchor for the present
investigation, a bit of shared ground on which empiricists and rationalists
can, and typically do, agree. Of course the empiricist and rationalist
traditions fall out over the extent of what can be known a priori. Many empiricists allow that there are conceptually
grounded truths, and that epistemic agents can come to have a distinctive kind
of justification for believing such truths by virtue of drawing on their
conceptual competence. Empiricists who recognize a place for a priori justification at all insist
that conceptual-competence based reflective justification constitutes all the a priori justification there is.
Rationalists agree that such conceptual-competence based justification provides
a priori justification, but go on to
insist that there are yet further a
priori justification to be had. They insist that the truths that can be
known by way of reflection are not limited to truths that are simply
conceptually grounded. These parties thus dispute whether there are cases of a
particular kind of a priori truth;
they dispute whether there are synthetic
ones. Still, they commonly are in agreement that there are a priori truths. More to the point, they agree that the following
would make for a priori knowledge and
justification: a claim is a priori if
(a) it is conceptually grounded and (b) individual epistemic agents can be
justified in holding it by virtue of their reflectively drawing on their
conceptual competence. This may not be the only way in which a claim may
qualify as a priori; it may not
represent a necessary condition for a
priori justification. But, it at least expresses a sufficient condition for
a claim being a priori.
An account
that provides for conceptual-competence-based reflective justification has good
claim to providing an account of a priori
justification, or at least of an important class of such justifications.
Accordingly we can claim to provide an account of a priori justification, as we argue that there are claims that can
be so justified—so there are a priori
truths. However, we also argue for a particular understanding of the reflective
justification, or at least of that reflective understanding that commonly
features in philosophy. On our understanding, a priori justification itself must have an empirical dimension. We
mark this somewhat paradoxical result by writing of “low-grade” a priori justification—as opposed to the
“high-grade” a priori justification
of epistemic lore.
One can
think of the matter this way. Central to the concept of a priori justification is the idea of an epistemic justification by
reflection—justification that can be obtained “from the agent’s armchair,”
without “going out” and collecting empirical evidence regarding what the actual
world is like. Supposedly such reflective justification is exhibited in
familiar philosophical and mathematical cases and is distinct in kind from that
empirical reasoning found in the sciences. (Although it is typically
acknowledged that the relevant form of reflective justification does play a
limited role in scientific contexts. Still, it is less prominent there.)
Empiricists hold that reflective justification turns on agents drawing on their
competent understanding of their own “ideas,” or “meanings,” or “concepts.”
That is, empiricists hold that the reflective understanding that makes for a priori justification turns on
competence with some manner of semantic entity, or some entity with a
semantics.[1]
Rationalists hold that that is part of the correct story—but insist that there
are other kinds of justificatory reflection—kinds that give justification for
truths that are not conceptually grounded. Without prejudice to this
rationalist claim, we hope to pick up on the empiricist suggestion and give an
account that vindicates reflection drawing on conceptual competence as a
distinct justificatory route—though not as distinct as has commonly been
supposed.
So, we take
as a starting point the idea that conceptually grounded reflection provides a priori justification:
(CGR) a claim is a priori if
(a) it is conceptually grounded and (b) individual epistemic agents can be
justified in holding it by virtue of their reflectively drawing on their
conceptual competence
The picture is roughly this. All
truths are true in part by virtue of the concepts there featured and their mode
of composition. This dependency holds no less for claims like, (1) “There are
brown dogs,” than it does for those like, (2) “Water is H2O,” or
those like (3) “Water is stuff with the same microstructure as the stuff in our
prominent samples (filling lakes and rivers, …),” and (4) “Capacitors store
electric charge.” But there is this notable difference. Given the semantics of
the concepts and their mode of composition (and thus given whatever it is about
the world that made or makes for the semantics of those concepts) the latter
three claims could not help but be true—they are necessary (true in all
possible worlds). We say that such truths are conceptually grounded—and this
much is a matter of their semantics, and not of epistemology. Thus, CGR says
that a claim is a priori if it is so
conceptually grounded and (without
“leaving the armchair) agents can relate to it in a way that is appropriately
sensitive to this fact.
The three
conceptually grounded truths above are of very different epistemic characters.
The differences turn on the extent to which the elements of the conceptual
semantics (on which the truth of the claims depends) may be “internally
accessible” to one by virtue of acquiring a competence with the relevant
concepts. It is now a commonplace to note that “meanings are not in the head.”
Commonly, the semantics for a concept is not determined wholly by internal
states of one who counts as having acquired the concept. To use the common
example, our concept of water refers
to stuff with the same microstructure as the stuff in a set of historical and
contemporary samples. Its reference is fixed by the historical interactions of
a community (or set of related communities) with a stuff in the world.
Nonetheless, the (externalistic) semantics for water guarantees that water is H2O. Because of this
semantical guarantee, (2) counts as a conceptually grounded truth. But it is
clearly not an a priori truth. One is
generally required to learn certain things in acquiring a concept. The truths
that may be counted among the internally accessible components of a concept’s
semantics are those that have both of these features: they are
conceptually grounded necessary truths, and they also are truths that one has
to learn in order to acquire the concept. One need not have come to appreciate
all that is conceptually grounded, but by virtue of having acquired the
concept, one must have come to appreciate or be sensitive to some of what is
conceptually grounded. One does not count as having acquired the concept of a capacitor if one does not appreciate that
capacitors store electric charge. Thus, (4) is not just a conceptually grounded
truth, it is also one that is grounded in internally accessible elements of
semantics. As a result, one who has acquired the featured concepts should be
able to reflectively appreciate that (4) is true, where this reflective
appreciation draws on one’s conceptual competence with those concepts. Unlike
(2), (4) is grounded in internally accessible elements of the semantics of its
featured concepts, and thus is a priori.
Claim (3),
“Water is stuff with the same microstructure as the stuff in our prominent
samples (filling lakes and rivers, …),” is a delicate matter. It seems that a
closely related claim is a priori:
(3*) “Water is stuff of the same natural kind as the stuff in our prominent
samples.” But, one may certainly doubt that it is a priori that being of the same natural kind (of substances) turns
on microstructure (in any substantive sense of “microstructrue.” After all, the
discovery that natural kinds for substances do turn on microstructural
similarities and differences—as opposed to brute qualitative kinds—is a point
that seems to have been empirically supported by the work of physicists such as
Lavoisier, Dalton, and Maxwell. Also, it would seem that the prominent samples
need not have been drawn from lakes and rivers; as folk on an arid world in
which naturally occurring water is now subterraneous could yet share with us
the concept of water. Perhaps it would be best to say that, while (3*) like (4)
may well be conceptually grounded and a
priori, (3) is strictly speaking like (2): viz., conceptually grounded in a
way that involves an externalistic dimension, and hence is not a priori.
This
then adds up to the suggestion for a route to a priori justification. When one has acquired a competence with the
concepts featured in a claim, and when the claim itself expresses a truth that
is grounded entirely in internally accessible elements of the semantics of the
featured concepts, then a rather distinct route to justification would seem to
be available: drawing on conceptual competence, the agent can come to
appreciate that the claim must be true. Rather than consulting experiential
evidence regarding features of the actual world, one comes to see that the
semantics of the relevant concepts adds up to ensure that the world is as
claimed—no matter what possible world is the actual world. Put simply (as we
will see, perhaps somewhat deceptively simply, but not falsely) the individual
agent “need only” access what are the internal elements of the semantics of the
concepts that he or she has acquired in order to appreciate that the claim is
true. Insofar as one need only draw on one’s conceptual competence, and does
not have to look beyond that to determine what world is the actual world, this
justificatory route is indeed distinctive.
Since
the epistemic justification just entertained would not depend on experiential
evidence about what the actual world is like,[2]
this form of justification is commonly held to be uncontaminated by the
empirical. As we will soon see, while reflecting a kernel of truth, this claim
to empirical uncontamination is often something of an overstatement. Here we
will focus on an important special case of reflective investigation, for which
a modified understanding is in order: viz., reflective inquiry, as practiced in
philosophical contexts, into the kinds of concepts that figure importantly in
philosophy. What we now hope to bring into focus is the character of
philosophical reflection insofar as it conforms to the general understanding of
a priori reflection advanced
above—insofar as it involves reflection that draws on conceptual competence,
and thus on the internally accessible elements of the semantics of concepts,
and thereby leads one to appreciate that certain claims are necessarily true.[3]
We hold that such reflective justification of claims has rightly been
understood as an epistemic breed apart—although just how apart is in need of
discussion here—and that the long philosophical tradition that sees it as a priori justification is correct.
However, we believe that this reflection also possesses an empirical
dimension—and is not “high-grade” a
priori in the sense envisioned in much philosophical lore. Accordingly, we
term it “low-grade” a priori.[4]
Philosophical
reflection about philosophically important concepts, then, will serve as our
principal example of low-grade a priori
reflective inquiry. On the other hand, considerations to be adduced are
potentially generalizable to various other putative cases of the a priori. We will leave this
generalizability issue largely open here.
2. The Low-grade A priori
2.1: The
easy model, an easy mistake
So, the
mode of philosophical inquiry often called “conceptual analysis” has served as
one prominent example of a priori
reflection. Such reflection (or a large and important portion of it) can be
understood as drawing on conceptual competence, and thus on internally
accessible elements of the semantics of concepts featuring in the claims at
issue. It is tempting to move freely from this understanding of reflection
(which we believe to be essentially correct) to the idea that philosophically
interesting results emerge “fully formed,” as direct deliverances of conceptual
competence. We will call this the “easy model” of reflection. On the easy
model, after “turning ideas over in one’s mind,” one “just sees” on the basis
of one’s competence with the featured concepts that certain general claims are
necessarily true. On this view, the philosophical claims somehow just “float
into consciousness” with a certain kind of obviousness—as conceptually
guaranteed. (The model is suggested by BonJour’s formulations in which general a priori results are “grasped” in a
“direct” and “immediate” fashion.)
We term
this account the “easy model” for two reasons. First, it makes a priori reflection a fairly
straightforward, one-step, affair. Turn over some ideas in your mind and,
provided you start with an adequate grasp of the concepts, the general results
putatively stand out as immediately and obviously true. Insofar as one is then
spared the toil of careful inferential moves of a sort we will soon discuss,
the model makes reflection out to be rather easier than what it actually is.
Second, it
is easy to simply fall into holding this model without careful examination:
given that reflection draws on one’s conceptual competence with the internally
accessible elements of conceptual semantics, should not what comes in this way
be simply or directly accessible? No. We will argue that general claims can be
grounded in elements of conceptual semantics, elements that are in an important
respect internally accessible, without being direct deliverances of conceptual competence. This point is
crucial; it and the supporting understanding of conceptual competence will be
central to our account of low-grade a
priori justification.
2.2: Three
important observations, and the need for a two-stage model
If one is
to have a sober understanding of what can be expected from reflection that
draws upon conceptual competence, and if one is to have a considered view of
just how reflection itself can deliver justified beliefs, one must not succumb
to unexamined presumptions regarding its workings. We think that the following
three conjectures are jointly more than reasonable.
First, a
prominent way of drawing upon one’s conceptual competence, particularly in
evidence in much well-received philosophical work, involves generation of
judgments about relatively specific and concrete scenarios. For example, one
begins:
[Suppose
that] somewhere in the galaxy there is a planet that we shall call Twin Earth.
Twin Earth is very much like Earth; in fact, people on Twin Earth even speak English. In fact, apart from the
differences we shall specify in our science-fiction examples, the reader may
suppose that Twin Earth is exactly
like Earth. …
One of the
peculiarities of Twin Earth is that the liquid called ‘water’ is not H2O
but a different liquid whose chemical formula is very long and complicated. I
shall abbreviate this chemical formula simply as XYZ. I shall suppose that XYZ
is indistinguishable from water at normal temperatures and pressures. … (Putnam
1975a, 223).
In response to such a scenario,
conceptual competence spawns in a direct
way fittingly specific and concrete judgments:
On Twin Earth the word
“water” means XYZ (Putnam 1975a, 223)
and,
Our concept water refers to H2O; it does not refer
to the XYZ on Twin Earth.
or simply,
Water is H2O.
Perhaps it
should not be surprising that human conceptual competence is particularly
suited to the generation of responses to such concrete specific scenarios.
After all, in everyday contexts, where conceptual competence serves us in a
largely unnoticed way, it would seem to function largely in the direct and
automatic generation of applications of concepts.
Second,
conceptual competence is much less steady and reliable when called upon to
directly generate conceptually grounded general
truths. Perhaps conceptual competence can generate general truths with
reasonable success when they turn on certain concepts of relatively
straightforward sorts that do not commonly come to feature in philosophically
interesting claims. For example, having acquired the concepts of capacitor and electrical current, perhaps the general claim that capacitors store
electrical current comes fully formed when one pauses to wonder. But, we think
that the sorry track record of philosophers grasping for conceptually grounded
general truths (regarding freedom and determinism, or regarding causation,
epistemic justification, or the character of mental states, for example)
suggests that at least greater caution is needed. [5]
Particularly with respect to certain concepts that have commonly been
significant for philosophers, one’s conceptual competence may be much better at
directly delivering presumably veridical judgments regarding specific applications of our concepts
than it is at directly generating veridical judgments regarding generalities.
Third, by drawing upon what conceptual
competence does provide, one can manage to justifiably believe certain
conceptually grounded generalities that are not themselves the direct
deliverances of that competence. Consider the justly famous result of Putnam’s
(and Kripke’s 1972) reflections:
In all possible worlds,
water is stuff with the same micro-structure as the stuff in the salient
samples.[6]
This conceptually grounded general
truth is justified in terms of more particular judgments about the referent of
‘water’ in various concrete scenarios. We believe that such general results are
rightly taken to be a priori. The
central question becomes just how one can get to such truths.
The
above three observations strongly indicate that, at least as it has application
to philosophical cases, an adequate model of a priori reflection drawing on conceptual competence will need to
recognize at least two stages: one in
which reflection on specific concrete scenarios generates correspondingly
particular judgments (the direct deliverances of conceptual competence,
mentioned in the first observation), and another in which one reflectively
draws on these particular judgments to support a judgment whose content is
abstract and general (the need for this is evident in the second and third
observations above).
2.3: An
instructive parallel: investigations of syntax in theoretical linguistics
Lest
traditional assumptions regarding the character of philosophical reflection
have an undue impact on one’s thinking about the two stages, it may be helpful
to consider a parallel two-stage epistemic process: the methodology typically employed by linguists in constructing and
evaluating theories of natural-language syntax. The empirical data for
syntactic theory includes certain judgments of competent language-users—in
particular, judgments concerning the grammaticality or ungrammaticality of
various sentence-like strings, and concerning grammatical ambiguity or
nonambiguity of various sentences. Notably, such judgments are relevant
simultaneously to psychological theories of human language processing, and also
to linguistic theories about the syntax of language itself. Native speakers,
after all, can be expected to have judgment dispositions about these matters
that reflect a solid mastery of their own language (or their own regional
dialect, at any rate). So, when native speakers are intersubjectively
consistent and also uniformly confident about such syntactic judgments, then
normally these judgments reflect the natives' syntactic competence, their mastery of the syntactic norms or
syntactic structures underlying their language. And this psychological
hypothesis, in turn, has a direct implication
for linguistic theory--viz., that under an adequate theory of syntax for
the natives' language (or dialect), those syntactic judgments will turn out
mostly correct.
Although intersubjective consistency
in grammaticality judgments is important, much of the crucial data for
syntactic theorizing about one’s own language is available from the armchair,
in the form of introspectively accessible, confidently held, first-person
judgments about grammaticality. The linguist’s own grammaticality judgments
already constitute a very rich, and evidentially very significant, body of
empirical data vis-à-vis syntactic theory—because the default presumption in
the first person case too is that such grammaticality judgments are normally
the products of one’s own linguistic competence, and hence are mostly correct.
A two-stage structure is evident in linguistic inquiry into natural
language syntax. When the linguist proposes certain abstract general syntactic
principles, claiming that they are the rules of grammar for a given language,
these proposals are not themselves the direct deliverances of the linguist’s
cognitive mechanisms of grammatical competence. Rather, the proposed rules of syntax
are theoretical hypotheses about the
language. Thus, first, grammatical competence generates grammaticality
judgments about specific
sentence-like word-strings. Although these judgments presumably are generated
in a manner consistent with the general rules of syntax—so that the competent
speaker possesses an implicit mastery
of those rules, whatever they are—grammatical competence does not generate
explicit beliefs whose contents are the syntactic rules themselves.[7] Then,
second, the linguist’s own grammaticality judgments, with their default status
of presumptive correctness, are empirical
data vis-à-vis these proposed rules. The evidential connection between the
data and the theoretical hypotheses—here, as elsewhere in science—is inference to the best explanation.
As is virtually always the case with inference to the best explanation,
the evidential considerations involved, in proffering the proposed rules of
syntax as the putatively best explanation of the data, operate via wide
reflective equilibrium. Considerations of fit vis-à-vis wider theory, and with
various kinds of facts less directly connected to the matter at hand, are
potentially relevant. For example, some kinds of possible rules might fit less
well than others with extant psychological understandings concerning human
language-processing, or with extant theory in linguistics.
As this last point makes clear, the relevant
wide-reflective-equilibrium methodology (WRE methodology) certainly need not be
confined to armchair-obtainable data. Often a linguist can arrive at a
reasonably well confirmed theoretical hypothesis from the armchair, but (i) the
linguist’s background theoretical knowledge (e.g., knowledge of linguistic
theory) may well play an important role in the overall evidential support the
hypothesis possesses, and (ii) this evidential status certainly can be further
strengthened epistemically, and/or weakened, by potential evidence obtainable
beyond the armchair. Relevant considerations can include, for example, the
grammaticality intuitions of other people. They can also include theories and
results in cognitive science concerning natural-language processing, since
ultimately an adequate formulation of the rules of syntax would have to mesh
with a detailed cognitive-scientific account of how those rules get implicitly
accommodated by human language-processing mechanisms.
Another important dimension of the WRE methodology employed in the
nondeductive inference from the linguist’s introspective data to the proffered
rules of syntax is the availability of plausible supplementary hypotheses for
“explaining away” any recalcitrant data—in particular, recalcitrant
grammaticality judgments, or judgment-tendencies, that do not conform with the
proposed syntactic rules. Common examples are so-called center-embedded
sentences, such as this one:
The man the cat the dog chased
scratched sued for damages.
Such
word-strings are difficult for humans to process, and are often judged
ungrammatical. But, to the extent that cognitive science can provide independent
reasons why such center-embedded strings are hard to process whether or not they are grammatical,
ungrammaticality-judgments vis-à-vis such cases should not count heavily
against certain proposed syntatic rules that count them as grammatical. Moreover,
a recalcitrant grammaticality-judgment will be even less of a problem if it can
be reversed or mitigated with the aid of a suitable paraphrase, such as this
one: The man sued for damages who was scratched by the cat that the dog chased.
Thus,
in producing their accounts of the grammar of a language, theoretical linguists
begin with judgments about grammaticality that are defeasibly presumed to be
the relatively direct results of the grammatical competence of informants. To
make the matter vivid, a linguist might even produce a model of his or her own
idiolect—and in so doing, the linguist would begin with his or her own
judgments, from the armchair.[8]
This first stage provides the data for subsequent inferential moves. While the
set of such grammaticality judgments at least contains a healthy proportion
that are direct products of the linguist’s own grammatical competence, the full
set of such judgments enters into subsequent (second-stage) linguistic
theorizing in a somewhat different epistemic modality. The judgments become
data for a theory that must provide an explanation of their status and their
source. This theory will necessarily have dual dimensions—one regarding the
rules of the grammar for the language, and the other involving psychological hypotheses
regarding the extent and form of the informant’s (linguist’s) own grammatical
competence. Accordingly, this second stage clearly involves an empirical
abductive inference, rather than itself being the direct product of the
linguist’s grammatical competence.
These
points are worth emphasis. Consider what is needed to account for the data, the
particular judgments produced in response to specific sentence-like word-strings. These
judgments will conform to the grammar of the language to the (to be determined)
extent that the rules of grammar are successfully tracked by the individual’s
(the linguist’s) grammatical competence. A full psychological account of that
competence would include an account of the grammar; to speak of such a
competence is to speak of a capacity to conform to the rules. If no
theoretical-linguistics account of the grammar of the language is forthcoming,
then there is no place or purchase for an a psychological account of the
individual’s competence—which it itself a capacity of conforming to that
grammar (within reasonable limits). But, any actual competence is subject to
interferences, distortions, and systematic errors. Various performance errors
are to be expected of one who is competent. Actual competence is imperfect.[9]
Accordingly, any satisfactory accounting for sets of judgments will need to
sort out both the grammar of the language and the character of the individual’s
competence. Given the judgments the individual makes, any account of the
grammar will have implication for which judgments are competent judgments and
which are performance errors. One’s account of grammar thus makes demands on
one’s understanding of competence and of the ways that human competence falls
short of ideal competence. Thus, if certain intuitive grammaticality judgments
conflict with a proposed account of grammar, and if these judgments cannot be
plausibly explained away as performance errors by appeal to credible
psychological hypotheses about the limits of human grammatical competence, then
the grammatical account is itself problematized. Any theory of grammar
ultimately calls for an accommodating psychological account of competence.[10]
Overall then, the linguist’s proposed grammar will be informed by background
and broadly empirical understandings of the finite and fallible character of
people’s actual (as opposed to ideal) grammatical competence; the account will
then at least implicitly be committed to a rough understanding of this
competence and its salient limitations; and this understanding will be rightly
affected by, and answerable to, broadly empirical hypotheses about various
human cognitive capacities and limitations. The results of such theorizing are
clearly not the direct product of the
linguist’s grammatical competence. Nonetheless, syntactic theorizing can be
effectively pursued by reflection in the armchair, drawing on the individual’s
own linguistic competence. But, as just witnessed, there are also strong
grounds for thinking that the justification of these results is not devoid of an
empirical element. As we have seen, the investigation cannot plausibly be
undertaken without one eye on a set of psychological issues having to do with
the investigator/informant’s competence. Psychological hypotheses about one’s
conceptual competence and its limitations and linguistic theorizing about the
rules of grammar must be pursued together—as parallel tracks—as mutually
reinforcing strands.
2.4 The two-stage model of philosophical reflection
The
observations of section 2.2 strongly suggest that the reflective investigation
appropriate to many philosophically interesting and important issues is best
understood as having a two-stage structure that parallels the linguist’s
reflective investigations of grammar. As in the case of linguistic investigation,
philosophical reflection draws on the scattered concrete direct deliverances of
a cognitive competence—conceptual
competence, the analogue of grammatical competence. It seeks to arrive at
conceptually grounded necessary truths (CGNT’s), the analogues of the rules of
grammar the linguist seeks to discover. Further, the relevant CGNT’s are not
reflectively generated in a noninferential or direct way out of one’s
conceptual competence; so the ensuing reflection will need to employ these
deliverances as data for abductive inference. As we will soon see, this
reflective procedure has both psychological and conceptual faces, like
investigations of grammar, and it thus properly understood as having an
empirical dimension.
Philosophical
reflection has an empirical dimension importantly analogous to the empirical
reasoning that the armchair linguist employs. There are certain
armchair-accessible (empirical) facts, including in particular facts about
one’s own intuitive judgments about how terms (e.g., ‘water’) and the concepts
they express apply to various concrete scenarios, actual and hypothetical
(e.g., Twin Earth). These judgments are defeasibly presumed to emanate fairly
straightforwardly from one’s own conceptual/semantic competence—perhaps
operating directly and non-empirically (when the resulting judgments are
high-grade a priori), perhaps
operating in combination with fairly non-tendentious, well justified, empirical
beliefs (e.g., the belief that the stuff we call ‘water’ or earth is composed
of H20 molecules, and the belief that H20 is a chemical
natural kind). Given this presumption about the competence-based etiology of
the concrete judgments—itself a broadly empirical assumption, notice—the
occurrence of these various judgments constitutes empirical evidence in support
of the philosophical hypothesis in question, a putative CGNT.[11]
The
abductive reasoning in support of the hypothesis will ultimately rest in part
upon an available side-explanation concerning recalcitrant aspects of the
data—for instance, why certain mistaken judgment-tendencies are present that go
contrary to the philosophical hypothesis in question; and this explanation
itself will often be an empirical (and partly psychological) hypothesis, whose
credibility or lack thereof affects the overall wide-reflective-equilibrium
credibility of the principal inference to the reflective claim that
such-and-such is a CGNT. When discussing the case of theoretical grammar, we
noticed that accounting for the data demanded a coordinated account of grammar
and competence—where the latter included an understanding of various
performance errors. Similarly, the reflective abductive move from the data
(from the particular judgments) to an account of certain elements of the
semantics for the relevant concepts, and to certain general CGNT’s, turns on
mutually supporting understandings of both conceptual competence and certain
corresponding performance errors.[12]
Thus, not only do one’s judgments qualify as data for an account of conceptual
semantics or CGNTs by virtue of a background of broadly empirical
understandings of one’s own conceptual competence, but also the eventual
evidential status of particular subsets of that data, particular judgments,
must be affected by understandings of one’s own conceptual competence and
tendencies to performance error.
Ideology is the term we
recommend for the kind of broadly empirical inquiry into the workings of
concepts here described (cf. Horgan 1993, Graham and Horgan 1994, Henderson and
Horgan 2000a, and in press (b)). Ideology is a multi-discipline enterprise,
whose philosophical dimension is continuous with relevant work in disciplines
like cognitive science, linguistics, and sociolinguistics. Insofar as ideology
relies primarily on armchair-accessible data, it can be effectively practiced
by philosophers. Philosophical thought expermiments, like Putnam’s Twin Earth
case, really are experiments: they
generate empirical data for ideological theorizing, much as a linguist’s
intuitive grammaticality-judgments constitute data for syntactic theorizing.
Although
the linguistics analogy is helpful and suggestive, the kinds of
armchair-obtainable data that are pertinent to philosophical ideological
inquiry appear to be fairly diverse (more so than in the linguistics case),
with some kinds being more directly analogous to grammaticality judgments than
others. The types of data that can figure in philosophical ideological
reflection include the following:
1.
Intuitive judgments about what is correct to say
concerning various concrete scenarios, actual or hypothetical.[13]
2.
Facts about conflicting judgments or
judgment-tendencies, concerning the correct use of certain concepts in various
actual or hypothetical scenarios.
3.
Facts about standardly employed warrant-criteria for
the use of various concepts.
4.
Facts about the key sociolinguistic purposes served by
various terms and concepts.
5.
General background knowledge, including untendentious
scientific knowledge.
Facts
of all these kinds can go into the hopper of wide reflective equilibrium
whereby ideological claims are defended in philosophy. One makes a case for a
certain ideological hypothesis—for instance, the contention that the meaning of
natural-kind terms depends on the language-users’ environment—by arguing that
it does a better job, all things considered, of accommodating the relevant data
than do any competing ideological hypotheses. Such reasoning is broadly
empirical: inference to the best explanation, in which empirical data of all
the kinds 1-5 are potentially relevant. Although it can be conducted from the
armchair and it is aimed at discovering CGNT’s, it is not high-grade a priori.[14]
Again, a
compelling reason for thinking of the results of such investigations as a priori is that one there draws on
deliverances of one’s conceptual competence—deliverances that are at least
presumptively a priori—in a
reflective process that can be pursued “in the armchair,” to establish certain
conceptually grounded necessary truths. Notably, the truth of such claims can
be appreciated without looking to acquire data about whether the world is as
there represented.
On the
other hand, there are multiple reasons for recognizing that such
investigation—and in particular, the second stage of ideological reflection
from the armchair—is not itself devoid of empirical dimensions. For now, we
wish to focus on one pivotal general point. (We will return to develop several
related and reinforcing considerations in section 4.) As explained, ideological
reflection takes its departure from those judgments concerning concrete,
specific scenarios that are the most characteristic direct deliverances of our
conceptual competence. Insofar as responses to scenarios are the direct output
of one’s conceptual competence, they may be thought of as high-grade a priori.[15]
Of course, not all such judgments are really the results of conceptual
competence.
Variations
on this theme will occupy us at length in section 4.) So, such judgments enter
as input into subsequent reflection as only presumptively and defeasibly a priori. These become data for a kind
of abductive generalizing process. What is the character of the abductive
inference?
There
are those who think that fundamental processes and methods of nondeductive
inference must themselves have a kind of a
priori status—somehow we can just see a
priori that such a method is appropriately truth-conducive. BonJour (1998)
holds such a view. We suspect that something like this understanding of
epistemic processes, or at least of those at play in reflection, could play a
central role in obscuring the empirical dimension of such reflection. We have
serious doubts regarding such rationalist-foundationalist understandings of
epistemic processes and methods. But for present purposes we will concede the
point for argument’s sake, in order to evaluate what really would follow
regarding the results of philosophical reflection. In effect, we will argue
that the second-stage of armchair-based ideological theorizing involves an
important empirical dimension anyway—even granting both (i) that the concrete
judgments at the first stage are presumptively high-grade a priori, and also (ii) that the non-demonstrative principles and
methods that are applied to these concrete input-judgments in the second stage
are themselves high-grade a priori.
So,
reflection begins with particular or concrete judgments that are, at least
commonly, the deliverances of our conceptual competence applied to concrete
scenarios. Insofar as these judgments are the direct deliverances of conceptual
competence, they may be thought of as high-grade a priori. Further, for the sake of argument we are now supposing
that the reflective process that takes us beyond these judgments is itself a priori indicated—that somehow one can
just see a priori that such a method
is appropriately truth-conducive. It is tempting to view the results of such a
process operating on such input as themselves high-grade a priori truths. After all, by hypotheses the process is an a priori indicated way of moving from
high-grade a priori starting places.
This would seem to be sufficient to make the results themselves high-grade a priori. However, on closer inspection,
the temptation just enunciated reflects something of an oversimplification, and
the temptation should be resisted.
We can
begin to appreciate the problems with this overly a priorist understanding when we notice that the careful and
cautious formulation with which the previous paragraph began spoke of the
concrete judgments being “at least commonly the deliverances of conceptual
competence.” It was noted that, when such judgments really are deliverances of
conceptual competence, then they reasonably may be taken to be high-grade a priori. But, this does not support the
blanket claim that the second-stage processes start with “a priori input.” At best, they take their start from input that are
commonly a priori. Accordingly, these
judgments must be taken up in further reflection as largely, and thus presumptively, a priori.[16]
It is an
important empirical point, one that must be marked well, that not all the
judgments produced in response to concrete scenarios are really the products of
conceptual competence. There are performance errors of various kinds to be
found in the first stage. Thus, it is commonly recognized that, as one settles
on a satisfactory general philosophical result, some of the “data points”
generated in the first stage will ultimately need to be explained as erroneous.
The data set for subsequent reflection is thus impure—and accordingly must be
taken up as only presumptively, only defeasibly, a priori. This point about the input to the second stage of
reflection crucially affects the epistemic character of that reflection—it
bestows on it an ineliminable empirical dimension.
As
presented in our initial characterizations of both the case of theoretical
linguistics and the case of philosophical reflection, the move to
generalizations turns on a kind of inference to the best explanation. Such
inference cannot be understood simply as an a priori move to a
generalization that accounts for a pure set of high-grade a priori judgments by
subsuming them under an embracing generalization. The inference cannot be
understood as a kind of pure a priori codification of a pure set of
high-grade a priori “data points.” For, since the inputs are not pure, the best
explanation for the set of them will explain some of them as performance errors
of various kinds. The empirical dimension to the investigation should then be
obvious. Philosophical reflection must be sensitive to issues regarding the
character and content of human conceptual competence, issues that are
essentially at the level of psychology; reflection must be sensitive to these
matters while pursuing issues regarding the content of that conceptual
competence. The best explanation of judgments pertaining to various concrete
scenarios (e.g., Twin Earth scenarios, brain-in-vat scenarios, “Gettier cases,”
etc. ) will ultimately involve empirical hypotheses about the workings and
character of human semantic/conceptual competence and at the same time uncover
certain conceptually grounded necessary truths.
3. A Tempting Alternative
Christopher
Peacocke (1993, 1998) has advanced a view of a priori knowledge that is in many respects like ours—but is also
significantly at variance with our account. Like us, Peacocke is interested in
accounting for a priori justification
as a matter of drawing on conceptual competence—on what he terms the
“possession” or “mastery” of the concepts featured in the relevant claims. His
account of the character of concept possession leads him to a two-stage model
of the a priori justification one can
have for general truths: various particular truths may be derived directly from
one’s conceptual competence, and the subsequent justification of general truths
inferentially builds upon these particulars. In these respects, we are in
agreement. However, Peacocke’s over-idealized take on the epistemic situation
of one who has acquired the relevant concepts leads him to understand the
second stage (the generalizing stage) as devoid of empirical elements and thus
as high-grade a priori.
On
Peacocke’s well known account, concepts are identified and individuated in
terms of what it takes for an arbitrary individual to possess them: “Concept F is that unique concept C to possess which a thinker must meet
[certain] conditions” (1992, p. 6). Such possession
conditions for any given concept can be understood in terms of transitions,
and thus simple claims, that one must “find primitively compelling.” The
reference of concepts, and their semantic value generally, and thus the
semantics of the claims featuring those concepts are, on Peacocke’s account,
fixed by a charitable treatment of the possession conditions: we are to “assign
semantic values to concepts in such a way as to ensure that the belief-forming
procedures mentioned in the possession conditions lead to the formulation of
true beliefs” (1993, p. 190). So, the claims that fall out of the primitive
moves associated with the possession conditions for concepts will be true
(1993, pp. 180-1, 189-90). On this understanding of concepts, possession
conditions constitute concepts and demand a determinate semantics that makes
the conforming judgments true and the conforming transitions truth-preserving.
Accordingly, those judgments and transitions spawned by one’s possession of the
relevant concepts provide an epistemic route to the truth. Such are truths
delivered directly by one’s conceptual competence, on Peacocke’s account.
Without
adopting Peacocke’s full understanding of concepts, one can at least recognize
a virtue of his account: he keeps clearly in view a distinction between what
are the direct deliverances of conceptual competence and the wider set of
conceptually grounded truths that can be known drawing on conceptual
competence. He appreciates that what falls directly out of conceptual
competence are particular responses to concretely presented scenarios. In
effect, these judgments are applications of the relevant concepts to particular
cases—actual or hypothetical. He writes of taking one’s capacity for the
application of concepts “off-line” to apply it to a range of cases: “As in any
other simulation exercise, he then exercises a capacity off-line. This capacity
is the very same, understanding-based capacity he would be exercising in a real
case” (1998, p. 45).
One
may take this as as a fair description of what we have in mind as the
first-stage reflective generation of (high-grade) a priori truths—and as characterizing a set of judgments that are
relatively direct deliverances of conceptual competence.[17]
Moving beyond these basics will turn on a range of inferential moves. Consider
the straight logical consequences of the set of particular concrete truths that
can be derived from conceptual competence. One may reasonably think of these as
being as much high-grade a priori as
are those direct verdicts of conceptual competence. However, these would also
not be interesting general truths. (The conjunction: ‘The XYX in the lakes and
rivers on TE-1 is not water and the XY2Z in the lakes and rivers on
TE-2 is not water’ is not much closer to a philosophical generality than are
its conjuncts.) Interesting a priori
philosophical results require more daring inferential moves.
Peacocke’s
treatment of such inferential moves is somewhat underdeveloped. He clearly
recognizes that the project turns on “finding general axioms from which truths
already known to be a priori truths
follow” (1993, p. 196). But, one surely would not want to say flatly that all
claims from which those basic a priori
truths follow are themselves a priori
justifiable; this would be far too permissive and needs to be restricted. There
are too many and too various a class of general truths from which the
antecedently available particular a
priori judgments would follow. So, what is needed is not simply an
inference to some (or just any) subsuming generalization, but rather an
inference to one that accounts for those concrete judgments in the best fashion. What one needs is
not just inference to any or some “explanation” (or subsuming generalization),
but inference to the best
explanation. The point is recognized in Peacocke’s guarded formulation:
The method obviously has
affinities with Piercian abduction. It is not, though, required by recognition
of the fourth method that the general axioms discovered by it be regarded as
explanatory in exactly the same sense as theoretical general hypotheses of the
empirical sciences (1993, p. 196).
Peacocke’s
formulation seems to be motivated by a perceived need to forestall any rush to
a view such as that we are urging in this paper—one in which philosophical
generalizations are arrived by way of an investigation that has an ineliminable
empirical dimension. However, one reading Peacocke (1993) will find very little
in the way of a fleshed out positive characterization of what makes for a
better and worse explanation.
The
near absence of positive accounting of the character of the needed inference to
the best explanation is perhaps excusable after a fashion. It is natural enough
to think that there are clear cases to point to—Peacocke commonly points to
mathematical examples (such as Peano’s axioms) where generalizing inference is
in play. But, we believe that Peacocke’s sketchy characterization facilitates a
convenient over-idealization in his general treatment of the a priori. The over-idealization
commences long before Peacocke mentions any a
priori abductive process. It is already in play in his characterization of
concept possession and the epistemic situation of the concept-possessing agent.
For Peacocke,
one who has come to possess a concept (or set of concepts) has acquired certain
dispositions: dispositions to find certain transitions “primitively
compelling.” We agree with this much. Concept acquisition turns on
internalizing certain information and coming to have associated dispositions.[18]
What remains to be determined is the exact character of the epistemic situation
that results: just how an agent is thereby situated for purposes of generating
general and philosophically interesting truths. To determine this one must know
more. Peacocke recognizes that what are “primitively compelling” by virtue of
having acquired concepts are relatively particular truths. But, this is only
the beginning of the story. It is crucial to also recognize that the set of
claims an agent finds primitively compelling may yet not be limited (indeed is
not substantially limited) to truths that are conceptually grounded. While one
who has acquired the relevant concepts may thereby come to find certain
transitions and claims primitively compelling, this only ensures that certain
conceptually grounded truths will be among
those that such an individual finds primitively compelling. Furthermore, those
judgments that are rooted in conceptual competence (those that turn on concept
possession) and those that are not so based need not come so tagged at their
inception. That is, our judgments in response to various scenarios may result
either from conceptual competence, or from central bits of learned
non-conceputally-grounded information, or from various performance errors—and,
as the individual responds to scenarios, the various judgments themselves may
simply arise without the corresponding labels (“conceptually grounded” or “not
conceptually grounded”). If “primitively compelling” judgments are such an
undifferentiated lot, then this will importantly condition the character of the
epistemic task of generalizing to conceptually grounded philosophical truths.
The “primitively compelling” judgments will confront the agent as a varied and
untagged array.
For now, it
is worth noting how the situation is portrayed by Peacocke. He begins with an
agent who has mastered the relevant concepts—who by definition will find some
class of particular judgments primitively compelling. This is fine, as far as
it goes. But this presumptive focus moves off-stage certain elements of the
epistemic action (without denying, or even mentioning, them). To begin with,
the reflective agent proceeds in a way that presupposes, at least implicitly,
that he or she has indeed “mastered” the concept(s) under ideological
investigation. The point is reflected in BonJour (1998) who envisions
rationalist successes as turning on an adequate grasp on the relevant concepts.
But, whether or not the agent does possess that grasp is not ultimately
internally accessible. At best, it is the sort of external matter that an agent
can (imperfectly) gauge. Thus, BonJour concludes that, in proceeding, the agent
is at least presuming an answer to an externalist issue—one that the agent can
have some (nondispository) evidence for taking as settled one way of another.
This point should be taken: whether a given “primitively compelling” judgment
of the agent is indeed produced as Peacocke supposes is itself an empirical
question that the agent probably has some purchase on, and to which the agent
should be sensitive.[19]
Peacocke provides little notice of the epistemic tasks and the needed
sensitivity.
Focusing on
the conceptually competent agent, Peacocke explains that such an agent can
generate a set of conceptually grounded judgments in response to concrete
scenarios. The project is then understood as one of moving beyond those
conceptually grounded particulars to conceptually grounded generalities. But,
understanding the project in just such terms obscures questions of great
epistemic moment that the agent must confront—as it supposes an idealized
conceptual competence delivering a delimited set of conceptually grounded
truths that can then unproblematically be treated as conceptually-given data
points constraining some high-grade a
priori inference to a subsuming generalization (when such is finally hit
upon).
We do not
deny that part of the epistemic action is finding a generalization that
subsumes the direct deliverances of conceptual competence—as these are
typically spawned in judgments responding to concrete scenarios. But, we insist
that there are families of questions that must be sorted out and answered at the same time. As we have indicated,
the result is an epistemic project with empirical as well as “high-grade” a priori constraints. First, as just
noted, there are questions regarding the agent’s own conceptual
competence—whether the agent is competent with the relevant concepts. Second,
there are questions regarding the concrete judgments. Which of these are the deliverances of conceptual
competence? This question is crucial, and it is forced on the agent by the
mixed and undifferentiated character of the agent’s set of concrete judgments.
It is just this issue that is most obscured in Peacocke’s picture of an ideally
competent agent with a clearly delimited set of conceptually grounded judgments
awaiting an adequate subsuming generalization. Third, there are questions
regarding the character and structure of conceptual competence. For example,
can conceptual competence best be understood as working at a surface and at a
deeper level? If so, are judgments reflecting the deeper-level workings
sometimes obscured by more automatic surface-level workings? Presumably, the
deeper-level workings should be more constraining on one who seeks conceptually
grounded philosophical truths.
The real
epistemic situation, the issues it forces on the reflective agent, and
epistemic hurdles to be cleared, can be appreciated once we leave the
over-idealized picture behind.
4. Real Conceptual Competence
Granted,
there are things one must learn in acquiring a given concept. In order to have
acquired the concept (in some important and recognizable sense that is more
demanding than what is required for merely “using” the concept in a blindly
deferential fashion), there are claims and transitions that one must find
“primitively compelling”. As just noted, saying this much is at best the
preface (or perhaps the first chapter) to an account of the epistemic situation
of one with conceptual competence. To light the terrain that must be crossed as
a conceptual competent in order to arrive at the promised land of a priori justification for
philosophically interesting generalities, we can begin with some very general observations.
Consider
the typical situation in which one learns concepts. This is not a situation in
which one’s informants are interested solely, or even primarily, in one’s
acquiring the concept. Typically, the occasion for instruction arises when one
is not capable of understanding some substantive point that the teacher wishes
to convey. Perhaps one’s instructor is trying to explain why a given monitor is
better than another. The instructor mentions the pixel-density of the two, and
gets a blank look in return. One apparently needs to acquire the concept of pixel in the course of this instruction.
Instruction is then forthcoming both in certain concepts and in particular information about the monitors in question. And
the two lessons may be given in a highly integrated and largely
undifferentiated course of instruction. Similarly, we suspect, early childhood
lessons about morally right behavior are not well understood as lessons solely
about what happens to be morally right or solely about the concept morally right. The child (or colleague)
is instructed in both within an integrated and largely undifferentiated lesson. Claims in that
lesson are not marked out as being conceptual instruction or “substantive”
doctrine—and many claims in the lesson may function both ways. Thus, the bottom
line: what one learns while acquiring
a concept is not what one learns in
or by virtue of acquiring that
concept.[20]
From the start, then, one acquires a mix of conceptually-based and
non-conceptually-based information and transitions.
Again (by
way of emphasis on what has been said already), in acquiring this mix of
information, the pieces do not come tagged, categorized, or otherwise reliably
marked as either “conceptually based” or “other.” And this largely
undifferentiated mix can then spawn largely undifferentiated judgments in
response to scenarios. This is to say that the judgments the conceptually
competent person produces in response to scenarios can reflect central bits of
non-conceptually-based lore as well as conceptual competence. The judgments one
finds primitively compelling may reflect this mix.
These
observations force on the reflective agent seeking to capitalize on his or her
conceptual competence a question mentioned in the closing paragraphs of the
last section: the question of which of the compelling judgments really are the
direct deliverances of one’s conceptual competence. While the judgments reflect conceptual competence, they may
and typically do reflect more (rather than emanating directly from conceptual
competence alone). Other information, other processes, cast their shadows
across this then imperfect reflection of one’s conceptual competence. Thus, one
is not entitled to any simple categorical presumption regarding the judgments
produced in response to the sort of scenario that is common philosophical seed.
One who
would identify general philosophical truths drawing on concrete judgments in
response to scenarios, will need to come to terms with shadows. The shadows may
result from several sources. In the final pages of this paper, we discuss four
very general and rather common sources. To say that one must come to terms with
shadows in the set of presumptively a
priori particular judgments is to say that one must ultimately account for
which judgments are conceptually grounded and which are from other sources. As
we will soon see, it will also be important to say just in what respects a
judgment is conceptually based.
The first
kind of shadow is something we have been lately emphasizing: typically concepts
are acquired in a context that is marked by mixed learning agendas. As a
result, what is learned is ultimately a undifferentiated mixed bag of
conceptually grounded and non-conceptually-grounded elements. The concrete
judgments that a conceptually competent person finds primitively compelling
will likewise be a poorly differentiated mixed bag. That is, central pieces of
(non-conceptually grounded) information will cast their shadows in the
judgments that must be accounted for. Coming to terms with these shadows is a
matter of ultimately determining that some particular judgments have
nonconceptual bases. Since we have already emphasized the importance of this
situation for the partly empirical character of the epistemic task facing the
reflective investigator, there is little that needs to be added here. We simply
lead off our list of general shadow sources by mentioning this highly general
and very pervasive source of shadows: broadly empirical information (that is
commonly learned early on, commonly while also acquiring one’s conceptual
competence and) that remains largely undifferentiated from more conceptually
grounded elements in one’s understanding.
It is
important to realize that there may be aspects of the semantics of some
concepts that invite a kind of hasty conceptual generalization that is
ultimately distorting. Of particular importance here—a second major source of
shadows affecting ideological reflection—are contextual aspects of the
semantics of various concepts. Whether certain concepts apply in a case or
scenario may be sensitive to a conversational (or other background) context
that affects what counts “for present purposes” as “one of those.” Lewis (1979)
has been instrumental in calling to our attention the importance of
conversational contexts in the application of concepts. If indeed there are
such contextually-grounded context effects for certain philosophically
important concepts—if it is part of the semantics of a given concept that its
vagueness be managed in application by context-sensitive standards—then one
reflecting on the concept will need to take care to have a rich enough diet of
contexts featured in one’s data set. Failure to do so will be pitfall to be
avoided, in reflective inquiry.
This point
about hasty generalization can be usefully illustrated by recent contextualist
treatments of the concept of knowing
(e.g., Lewis 1996, Cohen 1987, 1988, Goldman 1992a, DeRose 1995, Lewis 1996).[21]
Crudely, it seems that what is required to know that P turns (within limits) on the context in which the claim to know
(or not know) that P is considered.
Contextually salient claims set more or less demanding standards. Again
crudely, to know that P, one’s belief
regarding P (or not-P) would need to “track” the truth or
falsity of P across a more or less
wide set of possible worlds. One’s belief that P would need to be sensitive,
in this sense: were P not to obtain,
one would not then still believe P.
Across how wide a set of possible worlds would one’s belief regarding P need to track the facts in order for
one’s belief that P to count as a
piece of knowledge? How demanding are the standards for sensitivity that must
be satisfied for a given belief to count as knowledge? One plausible answer is
that this is determined by what are the nearest possible worlds in which
various contextually salient claims
are false. Contextually salient claims then set a contextual standard for how
sensitive one’s beliefs must be in order to be knowledge. These suggestions are
elaborated and defended in DeRose (1995). And, although we believe that
something along these lines is correct, for present purposes we need only
consider the implications of such conceptual sensitivity for reflection.
Skeptical
philosophers commonly attempt to keep certain skeptical scenarios prominent in
one’s reflections. When a knowledge claim is in the offing (say, that I know
that my gas tank is close to empty), they ready their thought experiments
(making vivid the work of demons and brain scientists). In so doing, they seek
constantly to condition the contexts in which one reflects on cases. While this
may lead to consideration of a fairly wide range of possible worlds, it also impoverishes the reflective diet of
judgments in contexts. As a result, one may readily overlook the contextual
elements of the semantics of the concept knowing,
and may then be led to suppose that knowing requires a single contextually
invariant (and very high) degree of sensitivity of belief. The suggestion:
flatfooted skepticism and flatfooted denials of skepticism are both
conceptually mistaken, and both arise from reflecting on judgments drawn in
overly narrow sets of contexts. (Perhaps this is mistaken. But, if so, one can
only determine that it is mistaken by a consideration of judgments made in a
sufficiently varied set of contexts.)
The lesson
is that when reflecting on a concept with a contextual element to its
semantics, if the particular judgments in one’s data set are all generated in
or with respect to contexts within some narrow range, then this will itself
obscure aspects of the conceptual semantics. The “biased” data, while yet the
product of one’s conceptual competence (albeit employed in a narrow range of
contexts), will yet cast a distorting shadow over one’s reflective inquiry,
obscuring from view other elements of the conceptual semantics. The resulting
reflections will yield a flawed appreciation of the status of certain
claims—which will not be conceptually grounded, although one is led to them by
a (flawed) reflection drawing upon one’s conceptual competence. If not handled
appropriately, then contextual elements of the semantics of concepts can cast
their shadows over the reflective “data” and the resulting abductive
generalizations.
A third
general source of shadows in the judgments that constitute data for ideological
reflection is context effects that are not themselves anchored in the semantics
of the relevant concepts. One can construe ‘context’ more inclusively and
broadly. For example, Alvin Goldman writes of “various of [an individual’s] other
beliefs, background information, and so forth, which I shall lump together
under the term ‘context’” (1992a, p. ). Goldman argues that there are general psychological context effects, and that
philosophers engaging in concept analysis will need to be alive to their marks
or results.[22]
Sometimes such psychological contexts may distort our judgments, by “priming” a
kind of differential sensitivity to certain elements of the presented concrete
situation. Such priming may skew the individual’s judgmental responses. One who
wishes to produce an understanding of the semantics of contexts must ultimately
“control for” such distortions in evidential judgments by accounting for their
nonconceptual roots.
It is undeniable that beliefs that
the subject has, and which have been made salient by conversational or
contemplative context, can affect the subject’s judgment in ways that distort
that individual’s application of concepts. Recent harrowing experiences, or
recently recalling or even reading about such experiences, could “prime” an
individual to categorize presented people, animals, or objects as objectively
threatening, for example.[23]
Attorneys in courts of law seek to induce context effects in jurors. It is
commonly noted that defense attorneys seek to manipulate the context in which
jurors approach a case so as to make proof
beyond a reasonable doubt seem equivalent to proof beyond any doubt. They seek to frame convictions in terms of
risks, and reflect on the bare possibility of mistaken conviction. Prosecutors
may work to produce a mirroring set of conceptual mistakes—inducing the jurors
to conflate proof beyond a reasonable
doubt with a showing that something is merely probable, given the balance of evidence. While the standards for proof beyond a reasonable doubt are
subject to conceptually appropriate and mandated variation, these do not
encompass the standards for proof beyond
any doubt or for being probable, given the balance of evidence. (At
least they do not encompass the standards for these other concepts in the
context of real law courts.) So, the competing strategies would seem to boil
down to inducing errors by setting up various context effects. Even without the
help of lawyers, we are prone to some context effects that are not conceptually
appropriate, and these can cast shadows over the set of concrete judgments that
serve as one’s basis for reflective generalization. The best explanation for
those judgments will occasionally explain away some of them as mistakes induced
by context.[24]
Finally is
a fourth kind a shadow affecting the intuitive concrete judgments that serve as
data-points for ideological reflection: what is learned in acquiring a concept
may itself be somewhat varied in its conceptual
depth. Put differently, one’s conceptual competence may itself encode and
reflect more and less deep elements of the semantics of the relevant
concepts—both deep and surface elements of conceptual
semantics. To get a handle on what is intended here, consider the plausible
account of conceptual dynamics suggested by Goldman’s “two-stage reliablism.”
Goldman argues that a flatfooted treatment of concrete judgments can yield an
incomplete understanding of the relevant conceptual dynamics, and that this can
foster ready generalizations that obscure or distort deeper elements of the
relevant conceptual workings (Goldman 1992b, 1999). He suggests that the best
account of our particular judgments regarding justification is that those
judgments most directly reflect internalized lists of approved processes and
methods. Ultimately, however, these list-structures are themselves influenced
by a deeper evaluative basis: understandings of real-world reliability. The
lists are a part of one’s conceptual competence, and do have some (defeasible)
conceptual and epistemic standing—and they strongly and most directly affect
the judgments one makes about concrete cases. The underlying evaluative basis
is, however, a deeper and more enduring element of the semantics—although it
commonly affects concrete judgments only indirectly. We think that there is
much to this suggestion, although we maintain that reliablism is only one
component of the underlying conceptual dynamics (Henderson and Horgan, in press
(a)).
If indeed
there are both deep and surface elements to the semantics of some concepts,
then this gives rise to certain pitfalls in generalizing from a set of concrete
judgments. Too simple an accommodation of the particular judgments may fix upon
relatively surface elements, thereby obscuring the underlying or deeper
elements of conceptual semantics. To use Goldman’s plausible caution: it may
fix upon elements of a surface list structure while obscuring the deep
evaluative basis for the list itself. Common responses to scenarios may reflect
what might be termed a “surface-competence.” One must sort out what turns on
surface-competence (e.g., common list applications) and what turns on
deep-competence matters (e.g., responsiveness to deep evaluative basis). As
Goldman rightly notes, this understanding of the workings of common conceptual
competence invokes empirical psychological hypotheses.
5. Conclusion
We began
with the idea that, while rationalist and empiricist philosophers may disagree
concerning the extent of a priori
knowledge, and concerning some purported ways of getting to a priori justification for claims, they
agree on at least one point concerning what would be sufficient to make for a priori justification. When one has
acquired a competence with the concepts featured in a claim, and when the claim
itself expresses a truth that is grounded in internally accessible elements of
the semantics of the featured concepts, then a rather distinct route to
justification would seem to be available: drawing on conceptual competence, the
agent can come to appreciate that the claim must be true. Rather than
consulting experiential evidence regarding features of the actual world, one
comes to see that the semantics of the relevant concepts suffices to ensure
that the world is as claimed—no matter what possible world is the actual world.
Insofar as one need only draw on one’s conceptual competence, and does not have
to look beyond that to determine what world is the actual world, this
justificatory route is indeed distinctive. We believe that there are cases of
such justification to be had, and that it is epistemically distinctive and
important enough to honor with the designation “a priori.” Accordingly, we have set out to take a closer look at
this a priori justification.
On the
account we have developed here, with philosophical reasoning about
philosophically important concepts as a paradigm case, a priori justification for interesting generalizations typically
will come by way of a two-stage process. In the first stage, one employs one’s
conceptual competence to do what it does best: to generate particular judgments
regarding concrete scenarios. However, such direct but particular results of
conceptual competence do not have the generality that is sought in philosophy.
This set of particular judgments provides the basis for a reflective generalization
that is abductive in character. Our central objective here has been to urge on
the reader an understanding of the epistemic character of this generalizing
stage.
We
have shown that the abductive inference required to get one from the set of concrete
judgments made in response to scenarios to general truths has an ineliminable
empirical dimension. One must take the concrete judgments as defeasiblly a priori, and one then seeks to provide
the best explanation one can for those judgments. To say that they are
defeasibly a priori marks several
things at once. Insofar as a concrete judgment is itself the direct result of
the agent’s conceptual competence, it is a
priori. But, from the perspective of the inquiry that would take the agent
from such concrete judgments to to a justified grasp of the general truths that
are wanted, the concrete judgments are a mixed-bag—only some of which are a priori. Thus, they become data points,
many of which will be accounted for as the direct results of a conceptual
competence, but some of which will be accounted for as shadows from other
sources. This is largely what we intend by saying that the particular judgments
are “taken up for purposes of further inquiry” as “defeasibly a priori.” Any account adequate to explain
the set of judgments is bound have two parts: (1) a part that explains many of
the concrete judgments as being directly produced by conceptual competence, and
as being instances of certain general claims that are held to be conceptually
grounded necessary truths, and (2) a part that explains away certain
recalcitrant concrete judgments as performance errors of various sorts. The
account will thus yield certain general claims that are put forward as
conceptually grounded necessary truths. But such general claims will be the
outcome of an abductive inference that relies partly on hypotheses of a
unmistakably psychological, unmistakably empirical, character.
Christopher
Peacocke has recognized the two-stage structure of philosophical reasoning to a priori truths. However, we argued that
he starts with an over-idealized understanding of the epistemic situation of
the reflective agent, and thus produces an account that misses the empirical
elements in philosophical reflection. Peacocke’s over-idealizations and
mistakes arise because his account ignores the essentially mixed-bag character
of the judgments with which the reflective agent begins. In arriving at an
adequate understanding of one’s concepts, and in arriving at conceptually
grounded general truths, the reflective agent must deal with myriad “shadows”
in the data—in the set of concrete judgments. These shadows stem in part from
the unmarked contributions of conceptual and nonconceptual information in the
concrete judgments. They also arise from the various conceptual sources that
require special care that has not been common in philosophy. Context effects
provide examples of both. Some context effects are conceptually appropriate—and
yet have led to mistakes in philosophical reflection because of insensitive
generalization from a too limited range of contextually spawned judgments.
Other context effects are not conceptually appropriate, but will cast their
shadows over the set of concrete judgments. Additionally, one’s grasp on
concepts will typically reflect both deep and surface semantic elements. This
is nicely captured in Goldman’s suggestion that an individual’s concept of
justification commonly takes the form of a list structure (the surface element)
with an underlying evaluative element (the deep element). Without attending to
such possibilities, generalizations reached by ideological reflection may be
hostage to surface semantic elements, and thereby hostage to passing
understandings of what satisfies the deeper evaluative basis. In discussing such
suggestions, we have been concerned to catalog a few of the prominent and
highly general sources of shadows in the data. These shadows make for the
necessity of an account that has an empirical dimension.
The
upshot is a route to epistemic justification that has been pointed to
repeatedly by philosophers—although they have had various descriptions of what
is there going on. We think that they have been dealing with samples of an
epistemic kind: justification of (putative) conceptually grounded, necessary,
general truths that draws uoon conceptual competence. Philosophers’
descriptions have commonly been mistaken, by ignoring the empirical abductive
character of the relevant inquiry. Accordingly, while we are happy to retain
the designation “a priori” for the
epistemic kind referred to, we add the qualifier “low grade” as a caution: the
relevant inquiry does not have one feature that has commonly been thought to
mark the a priori, viz., it is not
uncontaminated with the empirical. When philosophers undertake to reflectively
discover interesting, general, conceptually grounded necessary truths, the kind
of justification they should expect to obtain—and typically have obtained, despite widespread
misconceptions about their own reflective methodology—is low-grade a priori justification.
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[1] These semantic entities—the concepts—have been variously understood, and how they are construed affects how the notion of a conceptually grounded truth is best understood. In this paper we remain neutral about such questions, although we do assume that there are indeed conceptually grounded truths—whatever might be the right account of concepts and conceptual grounding.
[2] Or at least it does not depend on experiential evidence in the standard or traditional fashion. As we will argue, in drawing on reflection one must sometimes treat the most direct deliverances of one’s reflective thought-processes as evidence for an empirical understanding of our concepts. The investigation is not purely a priori in the sense of being free from empirical contamination—but neither is it devoted to determining whether the world is as advertised in the relevant claims. It has rather to do with drawing on the results of one’s reflections to determine the character of those claims.
[3] This theme is also developed in Henderson and Horgan 2000a.
[4] This paper is importantly an outgrowth of Henderson and Horgan 2000a, where we develop at somewhat greater length the case for recognizing as a priori the sort of philosophical reflection we describe there and here. When that paper was presented at the 1999 Spindel Conference in Philosophy, many participants seemed to think that the two-stage process what we describe (the two-stage process of reflectively drawing on conceptual competence) does indeed give rise to a priori justification. However, we found ourselves pressed (notably by Albert Casullo, Michael DePaul, Richard Feldman, ) to better explain why the second stage of reflection should be understood as having the empirical dimension that we envision. Making this case is then the central task we face as we here develop our views. We expect to be pressed from two directions. There are those who, like many at the Spindel Conference, would like to see the results of philosophical reflection as high-grade a priori, and resist recognizing the empirical dimension that is important to the second stage of that reflection. And there are those, perhaps Goldman (see 1999, p. xx, who are quick to appreciate the empirical dimension of second-stage reflection, but who will resist calling the results a priori, even low-grade a priori. Here are here concerned to address the concerns of the first camp in this paper. In doing this, we draw on ideas Goldman has developed (1992a).
[5] Proposed conceptual analyses very often end up encountering counterexamples—including analyses that initially seem intuitively obvious, like the putative analysis of knowledge as justified true belief.
[6] Related examples include metalinguistic parallels to the object-language truths. For example:
Natural-kind substance concepts are rigid.
The reference of a natural kind substance concept depends upon an interaction of a community with a stuff (with some underlying structure) in the world.
On our understanding, the family of conceptually grounded necessary truths typically arrived by reflection includes both object-level and meta-level claims.
[7] This leaves it open whether what we are here calling “implicit mastery” is a matter of the subconscious deployment of explicit representations of general syntactic rules by human language-processing mechanisms, or instead occurs without the deployment of rule-representations even at the subconscious level. Either way, rule-mastery is implicit in the sense that language processing conforms to the rules without deploying conscious explicit representations of them.
[8] It is not implausible to suggest that these judgments, when they are the products of properly exercised grammatical competence, are themselves (high-grade) a priori, being the product of the linguist’s implicit mastery of the concept grammatical in L (where L is the linguist’s own language). But this suggestion is not essential to our use of armchair syntactic theorizing in linguistics as a model for armchair philosophical inquiry in pursuit of conceptually grounded necessary truths.
[9] The present points are broadly empirical. The linguist approaches the study of any language with these points in mind; they inform how the linguist “takes up” the judgments as data for further investigation. It is worth noting, however, that nonlinguists possess some inarticulate grasp of these points. After all, the ideas of performance error and competence would seem to be bound up with the notions of correctibility and correctness that are implicit in the everyday grammatical practice ultimately being accounted for. This observation is reflected in Brandom (1994). All grammatically competent speakers would seem to have some understanding of these matters in place.
[10] Linguists draw on various understandings of the general form of competence and or competence-related cognitive processes when developing their accounts of grammar. The point is reflected in earlier remarks on expectations regarding center-embedded sentences, for example. But, again, linguists are not alone in having and making use of broadly empirical understandings of competence and tendencies for error. All would seem to have and employ understandings of some of the dimensions affecting the rate of performance errors (or of those contexts where they may well need correction). For example, it would not be news to anyone that one is more likely to err when judging long and complex sentence-like strings. Further, one’s judgments may be expected to include rough judgments of complexity as well as judgments of grammaticality.
[11] Note that the occurrence of a specific concrete judgment is an empirical fact, even if the judgment itself happens to be high-grade a priori. The empirical fact of the judgment’s occurrence, in combination with the empirical presumption that the judgment emanated fairly straightforwardly from the judge’s conceptual/semantic competence, provides empirical support for the relevant theoretical/philosophical hypothesis.
[12] As in the linguistics case, the operative understandings of conceptual competence and performance-error tendencies need not amount to a full-dress psychological theory about such matters. Rather, typically these understandings will take the form of plausible psychological hypotheses. Such hypotheses are themselves empirical, of course, being ultimately susceptible to vindication or to refutation by ongoing theoretical developments in cognitive science. And their status as empirical carries over to the status of the abductive reasoning in which they figure as background assumptions, since that reasoning typically relies upon such supplementary hypotheses (e.g., ones about performance-error tendencies) as a way of explaining away recalcitrant concrete judgments that do not accord with the abductive conclusion that such-and-such general claim is a CGNT.
[13] Often, but not always,
pertinent empirical considerations are effectively “built into” the scenarios
by stipulation, so that the judgments are about conditionals of the form “Given
that …., the correct way to describe the case is …” Judgments of this form are
perhaps most directly analogous to intuitive grammaticality judgments in the
linguistics case, and also are candidates for high-grade a priori status themselves.
[14] For a piece of ideological refection that illustrates the working of each of these kinds of data vis-à-vis the ideological hypothesis that the concept of freedom does not presuppose the falsity of causal determinism, see the example discussed in Henderson and Horgan (2000a). See Henderson and Horgan (in press (b)) for a similarly structured piece of ideological reflection that illustrates the workings of each of these kinds of data vis-à-vis the ideological hypothesis that folk-psychological concepts like belief and desire are ideologically “austere” in such a way that the truth of folk-psychological ascriptions would not be undermined by the kinds of scenarios for mature science typically envisioned by eliminativists.
[15] At any rate, they may be thought of this way provided that any pertinent empirical considerations—for instance, the general background knowledge that microstructure is the basis for physical natural kinds—are effectively “built into” the scenarios by stipulation, so that the judgments are about conditionals with a form such as this: “Given that …., the correct way to describe the case is …” Cf. note 12.
[16] The
observation in note 10 is pertinent again here: the occurrence of a concrete judgment about a specific scenario is an
empirical fact, whether or not the judgment itself is (high-grade) a priori. Such concrete judgments qua occurrences are empirical phenomena,
and when such a judgment fails to be a
priori, this is an empirical fact about it. (We are inclined to add that
even when such a judgment is indeed a
priori, this too is an empirical fact about the judgment qua empirical occurrence—and that this
alone is already enough to inject an empirical dimension into the second stage
of ideological reflection, thus preventing it from being high-grade a priori. But we do not pursue these
further claims in the present paper; the issues they raise are subtle and
complex.)
[17] In a related vein, Peacocke believes that, an individual who satisfies the possession conditions for a set of concepts thereby has some ability to fix on referents of those concepts (or on their semantic values generally): “Possessing a concept is knowing what it is for something to be its semantic value” (1992, p. 23). He writes of this as having some knowledge of the “determination theory” for the concepts. Thus, he insists that one who possesses the relevant concepts has a priori access to “contents whose truth follows from the limiting principles of the determination theories for the concepts they contain” (1993, p. 195). He seems to think of this access as fairly direct (although perhaps not as direct as that associated with those judgments mandated by the possession conditions themselves). On Peacocke’s account, then, this knowledge of the determination theory of the relevant concepts provides a source of judgments that is supposedly akin to that deriving from the satisfaction of the possession conditions themselves. It might be thought of as a second component of what is behind the generation of particular judgments at the first stage of reflection. We are not clear on just how this second component is supposed to work epistemically, and we are thus unable to determine the extent to which we would want to embrace this aspect of Peacocke’s two-stage model.
[18] We doubt that all of concept identification and individuation can be managed or understood in terms of such dispositions. But these concerns need not detain us here. For the epistemology of a priori justification, what matters is that one who has acquired the concept(s) thereby has access to certain conceptually grounded truths.
[19] We are not suggesting that the agent need articulately or explicitly address this issue in order to proceed with reflection. Rather, we chose to write of a “sensitivity” to the matter for a reason: this seems to us to represent an epistemic task that is commonly (and commonly best) handled by cognitive processes that accommodate information that cannot be fully articulated. It would seem to present an example of the sort of epistemically crucial use of “morphological content” that we discuss in (Henderson and Horgan 2000b).
[20]
There is seldom a test
to pass. Seldom does one get certified as one who has acquired a set of
concepts—in the sense of having “mastered” or come to really “possess”
them. One commonly gets to employ
concepts on which one has only a tenuous grasp, and one uses concepts in
attributing beliefs to folk who have only such a tenuous grasp of some of the
featured concepts. (Peacocke marks these contexts by distinguishing between
possession conditions, and attribution conditions.) So, even one who is employing
a concept may yet be acquiring the concept in the same conversation.
[21] While we ourselves are very sympathetic to these accounts, it will suffice for present purposes that they might well be correct. If they are, then they bring to light an important type of shadow looming over ideological reflection about the concept of knowledge.
[22] It is worth noting Goldman’s own understanding of philosophical analysis presents it as a two-stage process in which one elicits “intuitive” judgments and then seeks a general understanding of the relevant concepts and the operative psychology that accounts for those judgments. “The question as I see it is one of trying to give a plausible, parsimonious explanation of people’s (linguistic) intuitions” (1992, p. 146). As he explains, the reflective investigator must then manage to sort out the mixed sources of the judgments:
Presumably, the intuitions of an informant, or judge, are the product of (at least) three factors: (A) (his grasp of) the meaning of ‘know’, (B) his beliefs about the state of the putative knower in the target example, and (C) various of his other beliefs, background information, and so forth, which I shall lump together under the term ‘context’. Although the analyst is primarily trying to pinpoint the effects of (A), she needs to assess the contributions of the other factors as well. It is at this juncture that psychology becomes germane. (1992, p. 146)
Thus, Goldman would presumably join us in criticizing Peacocke for presenting an overly idealized understanding of the epistemic situation of the reflective investigator—and for underplaying the empirical contamination of the reflection. He would thus join us in insisting that “philosophical analysis” cannot be a high-grade a priori affair. However, he would part company with us about what we call “low-grade a priori justification” in connection with philosophical reflection. But we believe that the continuity with philosophical tradition makes it reasonable to believe that we are talking about just those philosophical practices that were dubbed “a priori” earlier, and that these practices have features sufficiently distinctive to warrant still employing that term (Henderson and Horgan 2000a, p. XXX).
[23] Plausibly, there is a contextual dimension to the semantics for the concept of threatening. Thus different degrees of presented risk may qualify something or someone as threatening in different contexts. But, not all context effects can be chalked up to such conceptually appropriate variation. Sometimes contexts effects may make one more sensitive to presented risks than is (contextually) appropriate.
[24] Both of the examples employed here are of non-conceptually-appropriate context effects involving concepts with contextual elements to their semantics. Perhaps it is to be expected that concepts with contextual dimensions should be subject to certain non-conceptual context effects as well. In both the cases considered here, the mistakes occur by a context-induced employment of standards that are beyond the range that is contextually appropriate.