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.

Reading Group: Davidson's 'Can there be a Science of Rationality?'

Davidson’s paper starts with some remarks about Quine’s position with regard to the prospects of a natural scientific account of the propositional attitudes, and more generally of thought and meaning. This detour introduces two possible ways to view the project of giving a scientific account of these phenomena: (1) that there is a natural scientific account to be had because the phenomena in question are behavioural dispositions and as such are physiological entities for which it is natural to expect there to be such an account; (2), that the problematic intentional concepts in question are not reducible to a natural scientific account but should be maintained for their usefulness (p155).

Davidson then goes on to ask whether his own account of thought, meaning and the propositional attitudes (the ‘Unified Theory’), can be called scientific. In this regard he makes some interesting, albeit inconclusive, suggestions. I am not going to discuss these suggestions. Rather, I want to focus on a more general issue regarding the ‘Unified Theory’, one that connects to (1) and (2) above.

Davidson says that the ‘normative, holistic, and externalist elements in psychological concepts cannot be eliminated without radically changing the subject (p157).’ So presumably he thinks (2) above is the way to go. He thinks ontological reduction is possible (hence anomalous monism), but that ‘nomological and definitional’ reduction are off the cards (p168). He does not explain in this paper exactly why such reduction is not possible or in what sense. The story he has given elsewhere usually appeals to the so-called principle of charity. But whatever the detail, what is the content of the claim? Is it that the entities being studied (propositional attitudes, thoughts) *are* not nomologically and definitonally reducible? Or is it that they may well be but that we are incapable of *understanding them* without the prop of a folk-psychology (that the concepts in question are *only* useful)? Moreover, what is not so reducible? Is it that the state of being in a propositional attitude might be reducible to natural scientific terms, but that the practice of interpreting such attitudes is not? If this is the case (as Davidson seems to suggest at p167), then it seems to me deciding whether this matters depends on what view one has on the subject of whether thought and language are constitutively intersubjective. Those (like Fodor and Chomsky) who think they are not, are already committed to some sort of reduction being on the cards, so treat interpretation as a folk-psychological prop. What does Davidson think? If he thinks radical interpretation is just part of a folk-psychology, then his ‘Unified Theory’ is certainly not scientific, as such theories do not describe how we take things to be, but how things actually are with the world (unless of course, it is a theory that formalises how we mistakenly think about how we think, which it is not). So presumably he does not think this. But his invocation of the constitutive role of intersubjectivity in thought and language is based on the fact we can’t *make sense* of these phenomena without concepts like radical interpretation. But this is compatible with it being the case that the constitutive role in question is illusory – radical interpretation may actually be something we only posit as a folk-psychological heuristic. So when he says Fodor et al are changing the subject when they posit that the ‘nature of thought and meaning…' can 'be answered by discovering neural mechanisms’, it doesn’t seem to me he is able to say this. Not unless he can show that intersubjectivity really is constitutive of thought and language. But that is a question his ‘Unified Theory’ is neutral on.