Modest A Priori Knowledge

Abstract

A priori knowledge is out of fashion these days, what with Quine's classic attacks on the analytic/synthetic distinction, with related attacks on Wittgenstein's distinction between criteria and symptoms and on the very possibility of knowledge that is certain, incorrigible, and indefeasible, and more recently, with reliabilist theories of knowledge.' And yet, we really could use something like a priori knowledge: There are some subject matters, for example, mathematics and ethics, that experience arguably could not give us knowledge of (even leaving aside certainty, etc.), so that if we are going to have knowledge of them, we had better have some knowledge not provided by experience. Further, there are principles of inquiry2 in many areas that appear to be justified, but are not justified by empirical evidence. More generally, empirical knowledge itself may be possible only if there is something non-empirical, as Kant and Wittgenstein both insisted. We had better not be too quick to throw the baby of a priori knowledge out with the bath water of extravagant claims traditionally made for that knowledge, or we may find ourselves with no knowledge at all. In this paper, I articulate a minimal, or modest, notion of a priori warrant which shows that there is a position to be taken between those

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