Abstract

Quine challenged traditional views of the a priori by appealing to two key premises: that any statement may be held true “come what may” and that no statement is immune to revision in light of new experience. Chalmers has recently developed a seemingly compelling response to each of these claims. The critique is particularly threatening because it seems to rest on the Bayesian premise that upon acquiring evidence E, a rational agent will update her credence in any statement S to equal her prior conditional credence in S given E. We argue that Chalmers’s criticisms misfire. When properly understood, Quine’s two theses are largely consistent with Bayesianism.