Specter of Reason

As Brian Leiter explains , there's now a petition being signed over the Synthese affair, which centers around a controversial disclaimer shrouding the print edition of the journal's recent special edition entitled "Evolution and Its Rivals." There have been some interesting developments over the last week. Leiter posted the full response from the journal's Editors-in-Chief , which does not address the concerns about their behavior. Lots of good points are made in the comments section, especially this, by Ingo Brigandt . (There's also some rather absurd criticism of Leiter and defense of the EiC by one Darrell Rowbottom.) The guest editors formally responded to the EiC , expressing their dissatisfaction. Also, Leiter ran a poll. It looks like a strong majority agrees that foul play is afoot, while the community is split over whether or not to boycott. The petition is a less drastic means of putting pressure on the EiC to come clean and make ammends. A...

A storm is churning over Barbara Forrest's paper, " The Non-Epistemology of Intelligent Design: It's Implications for Public Policy, " which appears in a special edition of Synthese (a highly reputable philosophy of science journal) devoted to controversies surrounding evolutionary theory, called "Evolution and Its Rivals." As a result, Brian Leiter is organizing a boycott . Leiter's problem is not with the article, but the way the editors-in-chief handled it. Most offensively, they hung a disclaimer over the entire issue, claiming (perhaps disingenuously) that it is not up to their professional standards. This, even though they guaranteed the guest editors that they would not do so. The disclaimer makes the guest editors and all of the contributors suspect. Even if they had singled out Forrest's contribution, it would have been an insult to her and the guest editors who approved her paper. (That is, assuming her paper is not a departure fr...

I want to flesh out the idea, which I expressed yesterday, that a priori knowledge is knowledge of rules which exist solely by virtue of knowledge of them, and which therefore is not justifiable in principle. The idea is a little obscure, but I think I can make it plainer. First, we have to recognize the distinction between propositional knowledge (representational knowledge, often called "knowledge that") and non-propositional knowledge (competence, often called "knowledge how"). A priori knowledge is not a matter of representational verisimilitude, but a matter of competence. Proceduralism is the view that mathematical truths express cognitive procedures. The equation "2+2=4" does not represent a fact which could be corroborated by empirical observation, but a procedure which exists solely by virtue of the minds which carry it out. In that sense, it is a rule which is known, but which exists solely by virtue of the fact that it is known--that there a...

I've just looked at Michael Devitt's paper, " Naturalism and the A Priori ." He claims that epistemological naturalism cannot accommodate the a priori. According to epistemological naturalism, he says, all knowledge is justified by experience and nothing else. Since a priori knowledge is, by definition, knowledge which does not rely on empirical evidence for its justification (regardless of whether or not it is obtained by experience), then a priori knowledge is incompatible with epistemological naturalism. And since he is an epistemological naturalist, he claims there cannot be a priori knowledge. I won't go through all of his arguments, which are largely critical: he is primarily concerned with criticizing various arguments for the a priori, though he does lay out two arguments against it: the first is that the notion lacks motivation; the second is that it is too obscure to be taken seriously. (This latter argument reminds of one of Mackie's argument...

I just reread this post of mine from June, 2008: The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and The Knowledge Argument . My approach to the distinction is quite different from the one I presented ten days ago , but perhaps these two views are complementary. In the first post, I approach the distinction in epistemological terms. Analyticity and syntheticity are two different ways of testing the validity of the same propositions. They are different propositional attitudes--different knowledge relationships towards propositions. In my more recent post, I regard the distinction as a way of indicating different sorts of speech acts: one in which rules are stated and another in which predictions about the world are made. On the face of it, these are distinct ways of looking at the distinction, though they don't seem so far apart from each other. I'll have to think more about it to see if one entails the other. For now, I have to say that both views make sense to me, and I thi...

For my own edification, I present the following review of a paper I'm reading called "The Distinction Between Semantics and Pragmatics" by Zoltan Gendler Szabo, which appears in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (2006). (All page references are to this text unless otherwise noted). I. Introduction Szabo defines pragmatics as "the study of contexts of utterance, or more precisely, a study of the way context can influence our understanding of linguistic utterances" (363). Semantics , in turn, is presented as "the study of linguistic meaning, or more precisely, the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings" (363). This might look simple enough, but I find it impenetrable. Presumably, what a linguistic expression means in some circumstance depends on context. Thus, following Szabo's characterization, pragmatics and semantics both study the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings. Similarly, i...

I've been discussing moral noncognitivism lately, and the topic turned to the question of whether or not mathematical truths are analytic. Analytic truth is truth by definition (or truth by virtue of meaning), whereas synthetic truth is truth in relation to what is the case. There's a lot of controversial history in philosophy over how to construe this distinciton, and whether or not we should even take the distinction seriously. Some say it is not a principled distinction at all. Much of the disagreement stems from different attitudes towards the very notions of meaning and truth . I prefer a pragmatic view of the distinction, since I regard meaning and truth as matters of how sentences are used, and not as properties of sentences themselves. Thus, sentences are neither analytic nor synthetic, but they can be used to make analytic or synthetic assertions. One consequence of this view is that all sentences can be used to make both analytic and synthetic assertions. The ...