A priori workshop: John Skorupski

John gave a paper entitled 'Aprioricity and Normativity'. In it he talked about a certain form of a priori knowledge we have about the relations between reasons. A thinker's epistemic reasons are relative to what John called her 'epistemic field'. This is a set of facts at a specific time that are ascertainable by the thinker, but not necessarily ascertained. If there is outright sufficient reason to believe p then that belief has a priori support in the relevant epistemic field. John then talked of a narrowed epistemic field which he called an 'epistemic state'. A fact p is part of an epistemic state if the obtaining of p at a particular time gives a monotonically sufficient reason for the thinker in this state to believe that p. An example of such a fact might be that if I'm thinking and I have the thought that I'm thinking, I can know a priori that the latter thought is true (no further adduced evidence can falsify the thought).

John then went on to describe 'a priori warrant' as a phenomenological attitude towards a thinker's belief that she has sufficient reason to believe a fact p. If she bases that sufficient reason on her being in an epistemic state which gives outright sufficient reason to believe p, then she has a priori warrant. He then gave what he called the 'critical argument' where he argued that a thinker could not generate the relevant attitude to undewrite a priori warrant with regard to any a posteriori fact. Given his argument for a priori warrant, the conclusion was what John called the cognitive irrealism of the 'normative view' - that the apparently factual a priori propositions we know about reasons are in fact non-factual offshoots of synthetic a priori knowledge of reasons. What such knowledge has as its object is something like what Kant called the pure principles of the understanding - presumably principles of epistemic reasoning as such.