Abstract
The question addressed in the paper is the following: what gives justification of warrant for naïve but logically correct reasoning, and for elementary logical procedures and beliefs? Appeals to unavoidability and indispensability as warrant providers have been extremely prominent in the revival of interest for a priori justification in the last decade, most prominently in the work of P. Boghossian, C. Wright and P. Horwich. The paper argues first that indispensability is incompatible with apriority, and that unavoidability also points in the direction of an empirically grounded naturalism. Second, it joins the current agreeing that they are among the best warrant-providers, and then concludes, against the current, that they make the full reflective justification of logic partly a posteriori. The main burden is on the incompatibility claim. The paper argues for it from the assumption that the use of unavoidable and indispensable means can derive its justification from projects only when the projects are themselves meaningful. However, we have an admissible ground for optimism: our most general cognitive project has been at least minimally successful, and therefore, it is meaningful, so we are justified in believing that it is, and the naïve thinker is entitled to her logical reasoning. But this justification and entitlement are to a large extent a posteriori, so that the reflective justification of logical beliefs and the entitlement to naïve logical reasoning have at least one strong a posteriori component.
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Notes
- 1.
A terminological note: since the considerations to be adduced are only distantly related to the traditional empiricism(s), and since the issue is purely normative epistemic, I will call the two opposing camps “apriorists” and “aposteriorists” (instead of rationalists and empiricists, to avoid terms charged with ambiguities).
- 2.
The relevant rules are, of course, the familiar ones: \(\frac{P, Q}{P\wedge Q}\) and \(\frac{P\wedge Q}{P}\), \(\frac{P\wedge Q}{Q}\)
- 3.
The literature abounds with proposals. Boghossian [10], in his paper says he will “use the terms ‘justification’, ‘warrant’ and ‘entitlement’ interchangeably.” (p. 236). Peacocke in his “The Realm of Reason” writes: “The notion of entitlement also conforms to the following principles. A transition to which a thinker is entitled is a rational transition. A judgment is knowledge only if it is reached by a transition to which the judger is entitled. A thinker may be entitled to make a judgment without having the capacity to think about the states which entitle him to make the judgment. A child may be entitled to make an observational judgment by his perceptual experience without his having the concept of perceptual states.” [10, p. 7]. And he offers a largely reliability account for the case of logic:
PRINCIPLE I: The Special Truth-Conduciveness Thesis
A fundamental and irreducible part of what makes a transition one to which a thinker is entitled is that the transition tends to lead to true judgements (or, in case the transition relies on premisses, tends to do so when its premisses are true) in a distinctive way characteristic of rational transitions. [10, p. 11]
Burge defines entitlement as an epistemic warrant to accept something and adds the crucial waiver: “Entitlements are epistemic rights or warrants that need not be understood nor even accessible to the subject.” [15, p. 458] C. Wright follows the suggestion that warrant is that property, whatever it is, that makes the difference between knowledge and mere true belief.
- 4.
There is an alternative way to save apriority, by redefining it in a more modest manner: neither reflective “purity” nor immunity to empirical refutation are necessary for apriority, the recipe goes. We mentioned the later change, and here we document the attempts to the former. Albert Casullo [16] and G. Rey [32] concentrate on sufficiency of spontaneous level and allow for a posteriori justification on reflective level. To illustrate, Casullo has raised the issue of reflective access: how can we come to be informed about the status of our beliefs? Casullo proposes an a posteriori inquiry at the second level: it is empirical research that will tell us which, if any, of our beliefs are justified a priori. The main line of Casullo’s final overall picture has quite a lot in common with the naturalistic picture sketched by G. Rey in his papers on a priori, but arrived at from the opposite direction (e.g. Rey [32]). Rey starts from a naturalist computationalist account of roughly analytic a priori beliefs, and then looks for a way to make the notion of a priori precise. He ends up by denying immunity, immediate second level access, and by insisting on an a posteriori account of the a priori. Rey’s account is very sketchy on analysis of a priori, but it nicely supplements Casullo’s in matters of cognitive psychological account, on which Casullo is practically silent, in spite of recommending it in principle.
In fact, such minimalistic views like Casullo’s finely illustrate the progressive weakening of the idea of pure apriority. First, the immunity from empirical refutation is gone. This adds weight to the a posteriori considerations: if one believes that p on a priori grounds, one’s belief is still threatened by potential a posteriori defeaters. The originally a priori glass is getting filled with a posteriori liquid. Step two. You wonder if your belief that two plus three equals five is a priori? Well, consult your cognitive psychologist. Gone is the second level a priori accessibility. This adds another sip of a posteriori liquid into the glass. And here is the last drop, but not the least one: you may not rest content with your candidate a priori belief, say about two plus three, before you have an explanation of your hoped for reliability! And the explanation will be an a posteriori one, since the identification of the belief as a priori is already an a posteriori one. If Casullo is right, not much is left of apriority indeed. The most we can have is justification that has its source in a non-experiential natural cognitive capacity, but that itself stands in need of a lot of a posteriori support and underpinning. This line yields a less then minimal apriority. If a belief is justified (virtuous) partly because it has not been empirically defeated, then it automatically has some a posteriori negative justification. Add the empirical support it can get from reflective explanation and it will have a structured justification with a strong a posteriori component, not very different from the view we are proposing.
- 5.
In fact, we can distinguish two components in Wrigth’s discussion. First, in his earlier work he brilliantly shows that the Madmen (and for that matter also Dreamers) Argument in a way destroys or “implodes” itself. For the Madman’s (our Beautiful Mind person’s) thinking he uses the word “maundering”. If the reasoner in the scenario is “maundering”, she cannot be correctly inferring from her maunderings. So, the skeptical argument does not show that the thinker has no warrant.
If, as I earlier suggested, an effective argument from Dreaming, or from Brain-in-a-Vathood, etc., cannot proceed without all these elements—if our analysis does indeed capture the essential implicit detail of this kind of sceptical train of thought—then we may indeed draw a large but negative conclusion: that there is actually no method of sceptically undermining our right to rely on any of our cognitive faculties using a fantasy, whatever its exact nature, of first-personally undetectable impairment. [37, p. 116]
We thereby conclude that … it is not true that x has no warrant at t to believe that she is not then dreaming, and hence that the impossibility of earning a warrant to believe that one is not now dreaming—if that is what … argument showed—does not imply that no such warrant is ever possessed. (pp. 107–8)
However, and this is the crucial point, the Argument does suggest that the warrant cannot be earned by any kind of reasoning. The solution is to accept the possibility of an unearned warrant.
- 6.
- 7.
I am leaving aside a related line that denies the need for justification or warrant, since it has not been prominent in accounting for apriority.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments Earlier versions of the paper have been presented at conferences in Rijeka, in May 2009 and in Dubrovnik in August the same year. Thanks go to Majda Trobok, Nenad Smokrović, Zsolt Novak, Andras Simony, Tom Stoneham, Tim Williamson, David Davies and Miša Arsenijević. The paper develops ideas sketched in Miščević [28], and there is a bit of overlap.
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Miščević, N. (2012). Logic, Indispensability and Aposteriority. In: Trobok, M., Miščević, N., Žarnić, B. (eds) Between Logic and Reality. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2390-0_8
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