Abstract
The main general goal of this paper is to consider in a new light what is usually referred in the phenomenological tradition as “material a priori”. Through a consideration of the evidence we have of anything colored being extended, the paper attempts to show that this evidence is of a different kind from the one we have of other propositions also involving necessity. The main peculiarity of this evidence is found in its dependence on linguistic meaning therein involved being rooted in a factual world and on an imaginative process deployed on the background of that rooting.
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Notes
Throughout my paper I will use single commas to name expression types and double commas to name meaningful expressions.
Similarly, the evidence that bachelors are necessarily unmarried has got nothing to do with an empirical research that would support the fact that English speakers use the expressions ‘bachelors’ and ‘unmarried’ as synonyms. If by sameness of meaning we understand a relationship in the empirical use of two expressions, a sameness of meaning between ‘bachelor’ and ‘unmarried’ cannot be ascertained (Cf. Quine 1953). We are justified to affirmatively say something like ‘bachelors are unmarried’ because and as long as with those words we are asserting that proposition whose truth is recognized in the evidence that to something we meaningfully deal with (“bachelors”) something we mean is inherent (“being unmarried”). The proposition that we asserted is true because that proposition is what we are evidencing. Evidence is already the awareness of the truth of a certain proposition. Once we have evidence of a proposition, asking for a further ground of the truth of that proposition makes no sense.
Cf. Ricoeur 1986, p. 219.
In order to claim that a particular geometry holds for the physical world it is necessary to state, among other things, which are the elements that are taken as irreducible. In the theory of relativity, for instance, absolute criteria of spatial congruence have to be postulated for “rigid bodies”. These criteria are neither empirically descriptive nor absolute: they are a matter of convention. Physical theories with the same empirical adequacy and predictive power may thus give birth to different geometrical accounts of the world. Classical expositions of this can be found in Von Helmholtz 1968, pp. 130–131; Reichenbach 1958, pp.14-19, 30–37.
References
Quine, W. V. (1953). Two dogmas of empiricism. In A. P. Martinich (Ed.), The philosophy of language (pp. 39–52). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reichenbach, H. (1958). The philosophy of space and time. New York: Dover Publications.
Ricoeur, P. (1986). Du Texte à l’ action. Paris: Éd. du seuil.
Von Helmholtz, H. (1968). On the origin and significance of geometrical axioms. In J. Kockelmans (Ed.), Philosophy of science, the historical background. New York: The Free Press.
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Fernández, J.R. Imagination, meaning and the phenomenological material a priori. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 613–627 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9341-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9341-z