The Future of the A Priori

Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (9999):23-34 (2003)
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Abstract

Two conceptions of a priori methods and assumptions can be distinguished. First, there are the assumptions and methods accepted prior to a given inquiry. Second, there are innate assumptions and methods. For each of these two types of a priori methods and assumptions, we can also allow cases in which one starts with something that is a priori and is justified in reaching a new belief or procedure without making any appeal to new experiential data. But we should not suppose there is some further sort of a priori explained in terms of some other notion of justification. If we try to construct a notion of the a priori by considering ways in which knowledge, belief, or reasoning might be though to be directly a priori, via direct insight, inability to imagine something false, intentions about use of language, and the language faculty, the resulting conception of the a prior in each of these cases reduces to either of the first two conceptions.

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Gilbert Harman
Princeton University

Citations of this work

Self-Evidence.Carl Ginet - 2010 - Logos and Episteme 1 (2):325-352.
A puzzle about normativity.Giovanni Rolla - 2014 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 18 (3):323.

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References found in this work

Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Two Dogmas of Empiricism.W. Quine - 1951 - [Longmans, Green].
Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.Nelson Goodman - 1965 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):278-279.
New horizons in the study of language and mind.Noam Chomsky - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

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