A Priori Workshop: Finn Spicer

In his talk ("A priori knowledge - you either love it or hate it"), Finn Spicer claimed that there is no urgent reason for naturalism to resist the concept of a priori knowledge. To support this claim, he raised a number of semantic points. If meaning is reference, to begin with, we encounter difficulties discriminating between a priori and a posteriori truths. The sentence “Napoléon is Napoléon” is an uninformative tautology and a priori true. The sentence “Napoléon is Bonaparte” is informative and a posteriori true. Both sentences have the same meaning, however, because they have a common referent. So, reference doesn’t give us any clue why they differ with regard to aprioricity. If the picture is extended to include sense, Finn claimed, these difficulties do not arise. For instance, the sense of ‘Napoléon’ is the knowledge necessary for having a concept of Napoléon. Or it is the conception associated with ‘Napoléon’ (Napoléon was a man from Corsica, won the battle of Austerlitz, spent his last years in exile etc).

Finn now suggested (if I understood him correctly) that aprioricity comes back into this in a naturalism-friendly way if the conception of ‘Napoléon’ is such that it contains bits of knowledge from a reliable source, and is needed to have the concept expressed by the name ‘Napoléon’. This is to say that some Napoléon-knowledge (e.g. Napoléon was a man from Corsica) is necessary to have the Napoléon-concept, and is a priori in that sense, without being knowledge in virtue of its a priori status.

A recurrent criticism of Finn’s approach was that on his account epistemic and semantic matters easily come apart. For the conception of Napoléon to have a priori items (those necessary to have a concept expressed by ‘Napoléon’) is one thing. For these items to be knowledge from a reliable source is another. Even if a conception contains both, they may not (never) be congruent.