In the 1960s and 1970s, Hilary Putnam articulated a notion of relativized apriority that was motivated to address the problem of scientific change. This paper examines Putnam’s account in its historical context and in relation to contemporary views. I begin by locating Putnam’s analysis in the historical context of Quine’s rejection of apriority, presenting Putnam as a sympathetic commentator on Quine. Subsequently, I explicate Putnam’s positive account of apriority, focusing on his analysis of the history of physics and geometry. In (...) the remainder of the paper, I explore connections between Putnam’s account of relativized a priori principles and contemporary views. In particular, I situate Putnam’s account in relation to analyses advanced by Michael Friedman, David Stump, and William Wimsatt. From this comparison, I address issues concerning whether a priori scientific principles are appropriately characterized as “constitutive” or “entrenched”. I argue that these two features need to be clearly distinguished, and that only the constitutive function is essential to apriority. By way of conclusion, I explore the relationship between the constitutive function of a priori principles and entrenchment. (shrink)

In this paper I claim that Quinean naturalist accounts of science, that deny that there are any a priori statements in scientific frameworks, cannot account for the foundational role of certain classes of statements in scientific practice. In this I follow Michael Friedman who claims that certain a priori statements must be presupposed in order to formulate empirical hypotheses. I also show that Friedman's account, in spite of his claims to the contrary, is compatible with a type of non-Quinean naturalism (...) that I sketch. Finally I also show that Friedman's account needs amending because it cannot provide a rational account of theory change. I accomplish this by arguing for a structural realist view of theory change. I show how this view fits well with an account like Friedman's and helps it deal with the problem of theory change and in retaining its superiority over Quinean naturalism. (shrink)

I criticize two ways of interpreting Kant's claim that property rights are merely ‘provisional’ in the state of nature.Weak provisionalityholds that in the state of nature agents can make rightful claims to property. What is lacking is the institutional context necessary to render their claims secure. By contrast,strong provisionalityholds that making property claims in the state of nature wrongs others. I argue for a third view,anticipatory provisionality, according to which state of nature property claims do not wrong others, but anticipate (...) a condition in which the authority to make such claims can no longer be unilaterally determined. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its historical development. Friedman argues on historicist grounds that mathematical claims serve as principles constitutive of languages within which empirical claims in physics and the (...) special sciences can be formulated and tested, where these mathematical claims are themselves not empirical but conventional. For Friedman, their conventional, constitutive status accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Here I evaluate Friedman’s challenge to Quine and Quine’s likely response. I then show that though we have reason to find Friedman’s challenge successful, his positive project requires further development before we can endorse it. (shrink)

Kuhn’s account of scientific change is characterized by an internal tension between a naturalist vein, which is compatible with the revolutionary perspective on the historical development of science, and an aprioristic or Kantian vein which wants to secure that science is not an irrational enterprise. Kuhn himself never achieved to resolve the tension or even to deal with the terms of the problem. Michael Friedman, quite recently, provided an account which aspires to reconcile the revolutionary and the aprioristic elements of (...) the Kuhnian historiography by placing the latter in the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. In this paper, I suggest that Friedman manages to provide a convincing description of the structuration of scientific knowledge and, further, to present science as a rational enterprise. I argue that despite these virtues Friedman’s account faces a major problem with regard to the context of transcendental idealism which he is not willing to abandon. I also argue that discarding transcendental idealism in the way the philosophical perspective of John McDowell does, we can dispose of the flaws of Friedman’s account while retaining its virtues. (shrink)

Friedman’s perspective on scientific change is a sophisticated attempt to combine Kantian transcendental philosophy and the Kuhnian historiographical model. In this article, I will argue that Friedman’s account, despite its virtues, fails to achieve the philosophical goals that it self-consciously sets, namely to unproblematically combine the revolutionary perspective of scientific development and the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. As I attempt to show, the impossibility of putting together these two aspects stems from the incompatibility between Friedman’s neo-Kantian conception of the role of (...) philosophy and the role of the notion of incommensurability, and the framework of transcendental idealism and the radical character of scientific revolutions. Hence, I suggest that pace Friedman and pace Kuhn’s own self-understanding, the Kuhnian theory of scientific revolutions cannot be seen as ‘Kantianism with moveable categories’ and consequently we should either abandon the notion of radical scientific revolution or place the Kuhnian account into another, non-Kantian philosophical framework. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA much debated passage in the Metaphysics of Morals often leads commentators to believe that it is not possible to act from juridical duty. On the one hand, Kant says that all lawgiving inc...