The past twenty-five years have seen a major renewal of interest in the topic of a priori knowledge. In the sixteen essays collected here, which span this entire period, philosopher Albert Casullo documents the complex set of issues motivating the renewed interest, identifies the central epistemological questions, and provides the leading ideas of a unified response to them.

The past twenty-five years have seen a major renewal of interest in the topic of a priori knowledge. In the sixteen essays collected here, which span this entire period, philosopher Albert Casullo documents the complex set of issues motivating the renewed interest, identifies the central epistemological questions, and provides the leading ideas of a unified response to them.

Some recent discussions of a priori knowledge, taking their departure from Kant's characterization of such knowledge as being absolutely independent of experience, have concluded that while one might delineate a concept of a priori knowledge, it fails to have any application as any purported case of such knowledge can be undermined by suitably recalcitrant experiences. In response, certain defenders of apriority have claimed that a priori justification only requires that a belief be (...) positively dependent on no experience. In this paper, I begin by showing how the exchange of arguments between the disputants comes down, in the end, to no more than a display of conflicting intuitions. I shall then provide a diagnosis explaining how our explication of a priori justification depends on our standards for applying the term 'a priori' with this, in turn, reflecting our prior intentions as to whether we are willing to allow the existence of such warrants. I shall further argue that the claim that such knowledge can be affected by subversive experience is not entirely compatible with the spirit of apriority. Finally I conclude by making some methodological remarks about the prospects of a positive characterization of a priori knowledge by comparing it to the concept of knowledge. (shrink)

This volume presents a series of influential essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. The essays are organized under four headings: the nature of content; content and self-knowledge; knowledge, content, and the a priori; and colour concepts.

This paper attempts to shed light on three sets of issues that bear directly on our understanding of Locke and Kant. The first is whether Kant believes Locke merely anticipates his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or also believes Locke anticipates his notion of synthetic a priori cognition. The second is what should we as readers of Kant and Locke should think about Kant’s view whatever it turns out to be, and the third is the nature of Kant’s (...) justification for the comparison he draws between his philosophy and Locke’s. I argue (1) that Kant believes Locke anticipates both the analytic-synthetic distinction and Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori cognition, (2) that the best justification for Kant’s claim draws on Locke’s distinction between trifling and instructive knowledge, (3) that the arguments against this claim developed by Carson, Allison, and Newman fail to undermine it, and (4) that Kant’s own justification for his claim is quite different from what many commentators have thought it was (or should have been). (shrink)

The book sets out to analyse the notion of a priori justification and of a priori knowledge.

In the First Chapter, I give an interpretation of Kant's characterization of a priori knowledge which sharply distinguishes Kant's from an innatist conception; in this way, I distinguish Kant's transcendental explanation of a prioricity from both innatist and naturalistic explanations. ;The arguments given by Kant to support his claim that we are in fact in possession of a priori knowledge rely on his criterion of a prioricity: if a truth is necessary then it must be justified (...) a priori. I criticize the criterion's failure to account for actual cases of being justified in believing necessary truths. Finally, I discuss whether Kant has arguments to show that there is a priori knowledge which are independent of the criterion. ;In the Second Chapter, I examine the similarities and differences between Kant's and Frege's conceptions of a priori knowledge. I argue that Frege, like Kant, concentrates exclusively on the ways we must justify our beliefs in certain truths . I show, however, that Frege does not have straightforward arguments to prove that we can and do know a priori any arithmetical or logical truths, and that he does not have any straightforward explanation of the a prioricity of the laws of logic. Finally, I argue that even though a priori items of knowledge play a privileged role in Frege's project, this role differs from the one that such items have in a Kantian-transcendental project. ;In the Third Chapter, I explore whether we can make sense of the notion of a prioricity and prove that there is a priori knowledge by adopting an approach to justification which differs from both Kant's and Frege's. This approach does not concentrate on the ways we must be justified, but on the actual ways we justify our beliefs. I argue that this approach faces enormous difficulties regarding a prioricity. The central difficulty is that the actual complete justification for a belief cannot be captured exclusively in propositional terms. If a belief is based on inference, practical abilities, tendencies or dispositions enter in its justification. . . . UMI. (shrink)

According to the most popular account of the a priori, which we might call Analytic Account of the A Priori, we can explain the a priori in terms of the notion of analyticity. According to the least popular account of the a priori, the explanation of the a priori proceeds by appealing to the faculties used in the acquisition of a priori knowledge, such as the faculty of rational intuition – call this Rationalist (...) Account of the A Priori. The main aim of this paper is to challenge the analytic account of the a priori to motivate a return to rationalism. To achieve this aim, I discuss and challenge two very different analytic accounts of the a priori: a concept-based account that relies on meaning-justification links, and an understanding-based account that does not rely on such links. I argue that the former is both extensionally inadequate and explanatorily deficient, and the latter can be made to work but only by employing such a rich notion of understanding that renders it a form of rationalism in disguise. I conclude by motivating a rationalist faculty-based account of the a priori. (shrink)

Epistemology has recently witnessed a number of efforts to rehabilitate rationalism, to defend the existence and importance of a priori knowledge or warrant construed as the product of rational insight or apprehension (Bealer 1987; Bigelow 1992; BonJour 1992, 1998; Burge 1998; Butchvarov 1970; Katz 1998; Plantinga 1993). This effort has sometimes been coupled with an attack on naturalistic epistemology, especially in BonJour 1994 and Katz 1998. Such coupling is not surprising, because naturalistic epistemology is often associated with thoroughgoing (...) empiricism and the rejection of the a priori. In this paper, however, I shall present a conception of naturalistic epistemology that is entirely compatible with a priori justification or knowledge. The resulting conception, I claim, gives us a better appreciation of the respective merits of the rational and the empirical, as well as a better understanding of how moderate epistemological naturalism comports, at least in principle, with moderate rationalism. This paper defends moderate rationalism; but it does not defend everything rationalists have often wanted, only what it is reasonable to grant them. (shrink)

The major divide in contemporary epistemology is between those who embrace and those who reject a priori knowledge. Albert Casullo provides a systematic treatment of the primary epistemological issues associated with the controversy. By freeing the a priori from traditional assumptions about the nature of knowledge and justification, he offers a novel approach to resolving these issues which assigns a prominent role to empirical evidence. He concludes by arguing that traditional approaches to the a (...) class='Hi'>priori, which focus primarily on the concepts of necessity and analyticity, are misguided. (shrink)

Suppose a sentence of the following form is true in a certain context: ‘Necessarily, whenever one believes that the F is uniquely F if anything is, and x is the F, one believes that x is uniquely F if anything is’. I argue that almost always, in such a case, the sentences that result when both occurrences of ‘believes’ are replaced with ‘has justification to believe’, ‘knows’, or ‘knows a priori’ will also be true in the same context. (...) I also argue that many sentences of the relevant form are true in ordinary contexts, and conclude that a priori knowledge of contingent de re propositions is a common and unmysterious phenomenon. However, because of the pervasive context-sensitivity of propositional attitude ascriptions, the question what it is possible to know a priori concerning a given object will have very different answers in different contexts. (shrink)

The theory of mental models postulates that meaning and knowledge can modulate the interpretation of conditionals. The theory's computer implementation implied that certain conditionals should be true or false without the need for evidence. Three experiments corroborated this prediction. In Experiment 1, nearly 500 participants evaluated 24 conditionals as true or false, and they justified their judgments by completing sentences of the form, It is impossible that A and ___ appropriately. In Experiment 2, participants evaluated 16 conditionals and provided (...) their own justifications, which tended to be explanations rather than logical justifications. In Experiment 3, the participants also evaluated as possible or impossible each of the four cases in the partitions of 16 conditionals: A and C, A and not-C, not-A and C, not-A and not-C. These evaluations corroborated the model theory. We consider the implications of these results for theories of reasoning based on logic, probabilistic logic, and suppositions. (shrink)

This dissertation is about a priori justification and its relationship to experiential evidence. I begin with the assumption that a priori justification is justification that is independent of experience. It has been argued that putative examples of a priori justification are implausible because they are not, in any significant sense, independent of experience. My two central claims are that (a) a subject is plausibly justified a priori in believing a proposition only if (...) the belief is not revisable on empirical grounds, which I will call the empirical unrevisability thesis; and (b) moderate rationalists can resist four empirical challenges considered by many to be decisive against the empirical unrevisability thesis. I begin by developing an account of experiential evidence that is neutral between rationalists and empiricists in order to make clear the distinction between a priori and a posteriori justification. I then argue that a moderate rationalist account of a priori justification is plausible only if the beliefs justified a priori are empirically unrevisable in a qualified sense. I then argue that four classical objections that putative cases of a priori justification are not independent of experience fail, namely, that they are revisable by some instances of contrary testimony, by mistakes in long proofs and memory, that a paradigm example of a priori knowledge was overturned by new evidence in physics, and that psychological data undermines the reliability of sources of a priori justification. I conclude that there is only one potentially threatening case, derived from neurological malfunction, and I leave the solution to this case to future research. (shrink)

In this work Pollock attempts to recast the epistemological enterprise. Traditional epistemology has been centered on the search for truth conditions. It has been assumed that unless these are found the sceptic’s attack on knowledge claims cannot be conclusively answered. Pollock contends that traditional epistemologists have been barking up the wrong tree. The problem of epistemology is not to prove the trustworthiness of the justification condition. The proper task of epistemologists is to reveal the logical connection between the (...) source of our knowledge and the knowledge the source provides. This is to be done through an analysis of the meaning of statements, and the meaning of a statement is determined by the "justification conditions of it and its denial." Epistemological issues, such as perception, other minds, historical knowledge, a priori knowledge, amount to "nothing more than describing the justification conditions for statements in the different areas of knowledge." But, then what is meant by "justification conditions"? (shrink)

A selective annotated bibliography of recent literature on a priori knowledge.

Paul Benacerraf’s argument that mathematical realism is apparently incompatible with mathematical knowledge has been widely thought to also show that a priori knowledge in general is problematic. Although many philosophers have rejected Benacerraf’s argument because it assumes a causal theory of knowledge, some maintain that Benacerraf nevertheless put his finger on a genuine problem, even though he didn’t state the problem in its most challenging form. After diagnosing what went wrong with Benacerraf’s argument, I argue that (...) a new, more challenging, version of Benacerraf’s problem can be constructed. The new version—what I call the Defeater Version—of Benacerraf’s problem makes use of a no-defeater condition on knowledge and justification. I conclude by arguing that the best way to avoid the problem is to construct a theory of how a priori judgments reliably track the facts. I also suggest four different kinds of theories worth pursuing. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Boghossian's explanation of how we can acquire a priori knowledge of logical principles through implicit definitions commits a transmission of warrant-failure. To this end, I will briefly outline Boghossian's account, followed by an explanation of what a transmission of warrant-failure consists in. I will also show that this charge is independent of the worry of rule-circularity which has been raised concerning the justification of logical principles and of which Boghossian is (...) fully aware. My argument comes in two steps: firstly, I will argue for the insufficiency of Boghossian's template which is meant to explain how a subject can acquire a warrant for logical principles. I will show however that this insufficiency of his template can be remedied by adopting what I call the Disquotational Step. Secondly, I will argue that incorporating this further step makes his template subject to a transmission of warrant-failure, assuming that certain rather basic and individually motivated principles hold. Thus, Boghossian's account faces a dilemma: either he adopts the Disquotational Step and subjects his account to the charge of a transmission of warrant-failure, or he drops this additional step leaving the account confronted with explaining the gap that has previously been highlighted. I will then suggest various rejoinders that Boghossian might adopt but none of which - I will argue - can resolve the dilemma. Lastly, I will raise and briefly discuss the question whether this worry generalizes to other accounts, such as Hale and Wright's that aim to explain our knowledge of logic and/or mathematics in virtue of implicit definitions. (shrink)

This paper will make the case that we can find in Kant’s Second Analogy a substantive response to Hume’s argument on induction. This response is substantive insofar as it does not merely consist in independently arguing for the opposite conclusion, but rather, it identifies and exploits a gap in this argument. More specifically, Hume misses the possibility of justifying the uniformity of nature as a synthetic a priori proposition, which Kant looks to establish in the Second Analogy. Note that (...) the focus on the paper is on Kant’s identification of the form that a solution to Hume’s inductive scepticism must take. In making this point, my paper will look to establish two lemmas: Kant identifies synthetic a priori judgments as a means of justifying metaphysical knowledge in a way that circumvents Hume’s dichotomy between matters of fact and relations of ideas; the Second Analogy looks to establish the uniformity of nature of as a synthetic a priori proposition. However, my paper generally abstains from the question of the tenability of Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy. Doing justice to this latter discussion would require more space than I am able to offer here. My paper therefore has a conditional bearing on the philosophical issue of inductive scepticism. If one believes Kant’s Second Analogy to be philosophically cogent, then Kant offers a successful justification of induction against Hume’s scepticism. If not, then at least one can still admire Kant’s identification of the gap in Hume’s argument, which, to a degree, can be exploited independently of Kant’s system. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, a naturalistic approach to epistemology seeks to explain human knowledge – and justification in particular – as a phenomenon in the natural world, in keeping with the tenets of naturalism. Naturalism is typically defined, in part, by a commitment to scientific method as the only legitimate means of attaining knowledge of the natural world. Naturalism is often thought to entail empiricism by virtue of this methodological commitment. However, scientific methods themselves may incorporate a priori (...) elements, so empiricism does not follow from the methodological commitments of naturalism alone. And given a suitably-naturalistic conception of the a priori, a priori forms of justification may be compatible with naturalism generally. A priori justification is, in principle, compatible with naturalism – and hence naturalistic epistemologies – if the a priori is understood in a way that is free of some of the inessential properties that have been associated with the concept. I argue that some of the more prominent strategies for accommodating normative notions within a naturalistic framework allow for the possibility of a priori justification. These include reliabilism, instrumental rationality, and nonfactualism about justification. A priori justification thus need not be seen as standing in opposition to all naturalistic epistemologies. It is only with nonnormative naturalistic epistemologies that a priori justification per se is incompatible, and this only because the notion of justification itself has no role to play within a nonnormative approach to epistemology. (shrink)

The distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge has been the subject of an enormous amount of discussion, but the literature is biased against recognizing the intimate relationship between these forms of knowledge. For instance, it seems to be almost impossible to find a sample of pure a priori or a posteriori knowledge. In this paper, it will be suggested that distinguishing between a priori and a posteriori is more problematic than is often (...) suggested, and that a priori and a posteriori resources are in fact used in parallel. We will define this relationship between a priori and a posteriori knowledge as the bootstrapping relationship. As we will see, this relationship gives us reasons to seek for an altogether novel definition of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Specifically, we will have to analyse the relationship between a priori knowledge and a priori reasoning , and it will be suggested that the latter serves as a more promising starting point for the analysis of aprioricity. We will also analyse a number of examples from the natural sciences and consider the role of a priori reasoning in these examples. The focus of this paper is the analysis of the concepts of a priori and a posteriori knowledge rather than the epistemic domain of a posteriori and a priori justification. (shrink)

Radical empiricism is the view that experience is the only source of knowledge. Hence, radical empiricism denies the existence of a priori knowledge. Its most famous proponents are John Stuart Mill and W. V. Quine. Although both reject a priori knowledge, they offer different empiricist accounts of the knowledge alleged by their opponents to be a priori. My primary concern in this paper is not with the cogency of their positive accounts. My focus (...) is their arguments against a priori knowledge. My goal is to establish that although they offer very different arguments against the existence of a priori knowledge, each of their arguments suffers from a common defect. They both fail to appreciate the phenomenon of epistemic overdetermination and its role in the theory of knowledge. (shrink)

There are propositions that upon understanding them it seems that one can “just see” that they are necessary or impossible. A commonly discussed example is the claim that it is not possible for an object to be red and green all over at the same time. My purpose in this paper is to account for how it is that such beliefs are justified. I begin by criticizing a suggestion defended lately by Laurence BonJour and others. BonJour argues that because these (...) beliefs are necessarily true external factors are irrelevant to their epistemic status. This is how BonJour can defend a foundationalist account of the a priori while at the same time attacking foundationalism with respect to empirical knowledge. I argue that this view of the a priori is mistaken. External factors are relevant even in the case of those a priori beliefs it seems we can just see to be true. I defend an alternative account of the justification of such beliefs. I argue that these beliefs may be justified in virtue of their being the products of a basic belief-forming mechanism one has no reason to distrust. In particular, I argue that this approach can be employed to account for the non-inferential justification of a priori beliefs without falling prey to the line of objections BonJour lodges against other forms of foundationalism. (shrink)

This paper provides a defense of two traditional theses: the Autonomy of Philosophy and the Authority of Philosophy. The first step is a defense of the evidential status of intuitions (intellectual seemings). Rival views (such as radical empiricism), which reject the evidential status of intuitions, are shown to be epistemically self-defeating. It is then argued that the only way to explain the evidential status of intuitions is to invoke modal reliabilism. This theory requires that intuitions have a certain qualified modal (...) tie to the truth. This result is then used as the basis of the defense of the Autonomy and Authority theses. The paper closes with a defense of the two theses against a potential threat from scientific essentialism. (shrink)

The paper argues that, although a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge (or justification) can be drawn, it is a superficial one, of little theoretical significance. The point is not that the distinction has borderline cases, for virtually all useful distinctions have such cases. Rather, it is argued by means of an example, the differences even between a clear case of a priori knowledge and a clear case of a posteriori knowledge may (...) be superficial ones. In both cases, experience plays a role that is more than purely enabling but less than strictly evidential. It is also argued that the cases at issue are not special, but typical of a wide range of others, including knowledge of axioms of set theory and of elementary logical truths. Attempts by Quine and others to make all knowledge a posteriori (‘empirical’) are repudiated. The paper ends with a call for a new framework to be developed for analysing the epistemology of cognitive uses of the imagination. (shrink)

In recent years many influential philosophers have advocated that philosophy is an a priori science. Yet very few epistemology textbooks discuss a priori knowledge at any length, focusing instead on empirical knowledge and empirical justification. As a priori knowledge has moved centre stage, the literature remains either too technical or too out of date to make up a reasonable component of an undergraduate course. Edwin Mares book aims to rectify this. This book seeks (...) to make accessible to students the standard topics and current debates within a priori knowledge, including necessity and certainty, rationalism, empiricism and analyticity, Quine's attack on the a priori, Kantianism, Aristotelianism, mathematical knowledge, moral knowledge, logical knowledge and philosophical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper is aimed at understanding one central aspect of Bolzano's views on deductive knowledge: what it means for a proposition and for a term to be known a priori. I argue that, for Bolzano, a priori knowledge is knowledge by virtue of meaning and that Bolzano has substantial views about meaning and what it is to know the latter. In particular, Bolzano believes that meaning is determined by implicit definition, i.e. the fundamental propositions in (...) a deductive system. I go into some detail in presenting and discussing Bolzano's views on grounding, a priori knowledge and implicit definition. I explain why other aspects of Bolzano's theory and, in particular, his peculiar understanding of analyticity and the related notion of Ableitbarkeit might, as it has invariably in the past, mislead one to believe that Bolzano lacks a significant account oï a priori knowledge. Throughout the paper, I point out to the ways in which, in this respect, Bolzano's antagonistic relationship to Kant directly shaped his own views. (shrink)

In 1967, Alvin Goldman prominently claimed that the traditional JTB analysis is adequate for non-empirical knowledge. Since then, this claim has remained widely unchallenged. In this paper, I show that this claim is false. I provide two examples in which a true belief is a priori justified but epistemically defective such that it does not constitute knowledge. Finally, I submit a novel analysis of a priori knowledge that avoids the Gettier problem. What is particularly important (...) and distinctive about my analysis is that I neither need to make the justification condition so strong that only infallible justification is allowed, nor do I need to explicitly introduce a truth condition. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the alleged capacity of the human mind to arrive at beliefs and knowledge about the world on the basis of pure reason without any dependence on sensory experience. Most recent philosophers reject the view and argue that all substantive knowledge must be sensory in origin. Laurence BonJour provocatively reopens the debate by presenting the most comprehensive exposition and defence of the rationalist view that a priori insight is a genuine basis for (...) class='Hi'>knowledge. This important book will be at the centre of debate about the theory of knowledge for many years to come. (shrink)

Kant famously argued that, from experience, we can only learn how something actually is, but not that it must be so. In this paper, I defend an improved version of Kant's argument for the existence of a priori knowledge, the Modal Argument , against recent objections by Casullo and Kitcher. For the sake of the argument, I concede Casullo's claim that we may know certain counterfactuals in an empirical way and thereby gain epistemic access to some nearby, nomologically (...) possible worlds. But I maintain that our beliefs about metaphysical necessities still cannot be justified empirically. Furthermore, I reject Casullo's deflationary thesis about the significance of such justification. Kitcher's most troublesome objection is that we can gain any modal justification whatsoever through testimony , i.e. in an experiential way. This can be countered by distinguishing between productive sources of justification, like perception, and merely reproductive sources, like testimony. Thus, some productive a priori source will always be needed somewhere. (shrink)

This book answers three questions: (i) What is it for a statement to be analytically true? (ii) What is a priori knowledge? (How does it differ from inherited empirical knowledge? And how does it differ from acquired conceptual (non-empirical) knowledge, such as one's knowledge that not all continuous functions are differentiable?). (iii) Do we have a priori knowledge? It is shown that content-externalism is an 'epistemologicization' of the (logically, not psychologically) innocuous fact that, (...) if a sentence S of natural language expresses a multiply quantified generalization, S also expresses each quantified generalization obtained by permuting the quantifiers in it. It is also shown that, through judicious usage of Kaplan's dthat-operator, the shred of truth in content externalism can be reconciled with the datum that, in virtue of having a given representational content R, a mental state M has causal powers that it would not otherwise have. And it is thereby shown how to reconcile content-externalism, so far as the latter is true, with the legitimacy of individualist approaches to psychology. Finally, it is shown that content-externalism embodies a crude and false conception of the nature of the relationship between the literal meanings of linguistic expressions, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the contents of the thoughts underlying our usage of such expressions. More precisely, content-externalism presupposes that literal meaning and cognitive content are in lockstep with each other; which, it is shown, is not the case and---what is also shown---only appears to be the case because of a failure on the part of semanticists to know where to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics. (shrink)

Laurence BonJour's (1985) coherence theory of empirical knowledge relies heavily on a traditional foundationalist theory of a priori knowledge. He argues that a foundationalist, rationalist theory of a priori justification is indispensable for a coherence theory. BonJour (1998) continues this theme, arguing that a traditional account of a priori justification is indispensable for the justification of putative a priori truths, the justification of any non-observational belief and the justification of (...) reasoning itself. While BonJour's indispensability arguments have received some critical discussion (Gendler 2001; Harman 2001; Beebe 2008), no one has investigated the indispensability arguments from a coherentist perspective. This perspective offers a fruitful take on BonJour's arguments, because he does not appreciate the depth of the coherentist alternative to the traditional empiricist-rationalist debate. This is surprising on account of BonJour's previous defense of coherentism. Two significant conclusions emerge: first, BonJour's indispensability arguments beg central questions about an explanationist form of coherentism; second, BonJour's original defense of coherentism took on board certain assumptions that inevitably led to the demise of his form of coherentism. The positive conclusion of this article is that explanatory coherentism is more coherent than BonJour's indispensability arguments assume, and more coherent than BonJour's earlier coherentist epistemology. (shrink)

A thumbnail sketch of the philosophical thinking about the a priori would surely include that it has been dominated by two major approaches: the Kantian absolute conception of it and the Millian-Quinean absolute rejection of it (section 2). Yet, one can find in the literature claims about the existence of a ›functional a priori‹, a ›relative a priori‹, a ›relativised a priori‹ and suchlike. They are all meant to carve a space between the two extremes. An (...) important thought behind the search for a middle ground is that the supposed coincidence between the constitutive and the unrevisable is wrong. The entitlement to accept a principle as being constitutive of experience prior to any empirical justification of it is compatible with an entitlement to revise or abandon such a principle on empirical grounds. If a priori principles are meant to be independent of experience, how should this claim of independence be understood so that room is left for the possibility that a principle is both independent of experience and revisable on empirical grounds (section 3)? A straightforward and natural way to approach this issue is to think of constitutive principles along the lines of Poincaréan conventions, which can be seen as delineating a new sense of the a priori – the conventional a priori principles. These are substantive principles that are constitutive of theoretical frameworks – in the sense that they define (or constitute) the object of knowledge – without being either synthetic a priori or empirical generalisations. Still, their negation is conceivable and they are revisable on empirical grounds (section 4). (shrink)

There are propositions that upon understanding them it seems that one can “just see” that they are necessary or impossible. A commonly discussed example is the claim that it is not possible for an object to be red and green all over at the same time. My purpose in this paper is to account for how it is that such beliefs are justified. I begin by criticizing a suggestion defended lately by Laurence BonJour and others. BonJour argues that because these (...) beliefs are necessarily true external factors are irrelevant to their epistemic status. This is how BonJour can defend a foundationalist account of the a priori while at the same time attacking foundationalism with respect to empirical knowledge. I argue that this view of the a priori is mistaken. External factors are relevant even in the case of those a priori beliefs it seems we can just see to be true. I defend an alternative account of the justification of such beliefs. I argue that these beliefs may be justified in virtue of their being the products of a basic belief-forming mechanism one has no reason to distrust. In particular, I argue that this approach can be employed to account for the non-inferential justification of a priori beliefs without falling prey to the line of objections BonJour lodges against other forms of foundationalism. (shrink)

I argue that you can have a priori knowledge of propositions that neither are nor appear necessarily true. You can know a priori contingent propositions that you recognize as such. This overturns a standard view in contemporary epistemology and the traditional view of the a priori, which restrict a priori knowledge to necessary truths, or at least to truths that appear necessary.