Two important aspects of this Rationalism were (1) the view that human beings are not blank slates as in radical (and mistaken) empiricism, and (2) the observation that human language learning in children appears to be an innate biological trait, with universal syntactic structures (Schwartz 2012: 180–181).
The latter view was brought out in Chomsky’s now famous 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, where Chomsky attacked Skinner’s behaviourism and effectively discredited that theory (Schwartz 2012: 181). (A related point is that Quine’s linguistic behaviourism as a basis for rejecting analyticity was also undermined.)
It is obvious that a human biologically endowed language faculty seems to bear some similarity to Platonic ideals or Kantian categories and synthetic a priori knowledge. Nevertheless, that conclusion would be a mistake.
Arguably, the innate language faculty of humans, far from vindicating Kant’s synthetic a priori, is the result of Darwinian evolution, and has, in evolutionary terms, been acquired a posteriori – a biological structure shaped by reality and adaptive selection.
But a highly useful and successful trait or propensity to interpret the world in a particular way, given to us by evolution, does not lead to a priori knowledge in the traditional epistemological sense, a point which even Chomsky hints at in his discussion of the human capacity for doing science:
“Some have argued that [sc. the human science-forming capacity] … is not blind luck but rather a product of Darwinian evolution. The outstanding American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who presented an account of science construction in terms similar to those just outlined, argued in this vein. His point was that through ordinary processes of natural selection our mental capacities evolved so as to be able to deal with the problems that arise in the world of experience. But this argument is not compelling. It is possible to imagine that chimpanzees have an innate fear of snakes because those who lacked this genetically determined property did not survive to reproduce, but one hardly argue that humans have the capacity to discover quantum theory for similar reasons. The experience that shaped the course of evolution offers no hint of the problems to be faced in the sciences, and ability to solve these problems could hardly have been a factor in evolution.I think Chomsky goes too far here in asserting that our innate capacities – for instance, our propensity for inductive reasoning – give “no hint of the problems to be faced in the sciences.” On the contrary, human inductive reasoning (if it stems partly from an innate propensity) seems to have much to do with the ability to do science, though it is a fallible process.
We cannot appeal to this deus ex machina to explain the convergence of our ideas and the truth about the world. Rather, it is largely a lucky accident that there is such a (partial) convergence, so it seems.
The human science-forming capacity, like other biological systems, has its scope and limits, as a matter of necessity. We can be confident that some problems will lie beyond the limits, however the science-forming capacity is supplemented by appropriate background information.” (Chomsky 1988: 158).
Nevertheless, our linguistic abilities and propensity for creating language conforming to syntactic and grammatical rules have the properties of an abstract deductive system (Schwartz 2012: 182), but this does not give necessary a priori knowledge in the traditional sense:
“It is important to note that Chomsky’s language learners do not know particular propositions describing a universal grammar. They have a set of innate capacities or dispositions which enable and determine their language development. Chomsky gives us a theory of innate learning capacities or structures rather than a theory of innate knowledge. His view does not support the Innate Knowledge thesis as rationalists have traditionally understood it. As one commentator puts it, ‘Chomsky’s principles ... are innate neither in the sense that we are explicitly aware of them, nor in the sense that we have a disposition to recognize their truth as obvious under appropriate circumstances. And hence it is by no means clear that Chomsky is correct in seeing his theory as following the traditional rationalist account of the acquisition of knowledge.’”Some of these issues are brought out in this interview with (a young!) Chomsky by Bryan Magee.
“Rationalism vs. Empiricism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004 (rev. 2013)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
Links
“Rationalism vs. Empiricism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004 (rev. 2013)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
Nathalie Gontier, “Evolutionary Epistemology,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006
http://www.iep.utm.edu/evo-epis/
“Evolutionary Epistemology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001 (rev. 2012)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-evolutionary/
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass and London.
Cottingham, John. 1988. The Rationalists. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.
Horwich, Paul. 1992. “Chomsky versus Quine on the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society n.s. 92: 95–108.
Schwartz, Stephen P. 2012. A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.
Actually, in his book language and mind on south end pressm chomsky does say or imply that our language (whatever it is) does represent and recognize existing platonic categories in the world. he seems to think any word actually describes, names or corresponds to something real in the external world. in a sense people innately know everything already, though may have not expressed it yet-----just as a sperm/egg complex 'knows' already how to grow a heart, liver, or any other organ though it hasn't yet; chomsky sees language as such an organ.
ReplyDeletewhen i read that, i decided i consider chomsky 'insane'. he also doesn't think language has much to do with communication. (His evidence for this is that most people mostly use language to talk to themselves).
while his formalism for chomsky grammars can be seen to be a contribution to theoretical linguistics---i.e. he may have written the first translation of language into a formal logico-math form (as people like b russel, peano, boole, etc. did for math 100 years before) ---his interpretation of it as a 'universal innate (genetically determined) grammar' is wrong (by me) and no longer even the dominant view in linguistics (except amongst chomsky's 'cult'). Its only universal because it turns out he wrote down a logic equivalent to a Turing machine, and it is known that that is universal----it can express anything that can be written down (math, language, any pattern). So its a grammar not specific to language.
Also, most people see language as just another aspect of general purpose cognition (the brain); humans may invent and learn quantum theory for the same reasons monkeys may fear snakes, or may learn how to use symbols ---they have the ability to recognize and create patterns linguistically, visually, aurally etc. I'm politically quite sympathetic to libertarian socialism/anarchosydicalism, like chomsky, but his linguistic theory and personal ego i find arrogant and overrated. (Lots of progressives think chomsky is really humble, but you should see him at a linguistics conference, where he is totally authoritarian, contemptuous of people who disagree with him (whose questions he often cannot answer so he just ignores them or dimisses them as trivial), and is typically surrounded by a crowd of devotees who act like a church choir or gang of thugs for chomsky to deal with dissidents.
>Arguably, the innate language faculty of humans, far from vindicating Kant’s synthetic a priori, is the result of Darwinian evolution, and has, in evolutionary terms, been acquired a posteriori
ReplyDeleteCriiiiiiiinge
A priori/ A posteriori refers to whether something is known before or after experience not to whether it's biological or what else could it be exactly if you band socially acquired knowledge with innate knowledge as a posteriori? What would be a priori then?
Again. Cringe.
"A posteriori refers to whether something is known before or after experience"
DeleteAnd our language faculty has evolved through selective processes and very much in response to experience.
The point is that it does not vindicate Kant’s synthetic a priori category of knowledge. Are you disputing this latter point?
>And our language faculty has evolved through selective processes and very much in response to experience.
DeleteThat's not what a posteriori means. Each individual subject has an instrument of reason (a brain) with a specific structure through which he processes experiences (if you want -as I suspect- to get physicalist) The point is that it has that specicific basic structure a priori, before experience and this shapes the way it processes those experiences that further shape its cognition.
We now know that the structure of our brain was evolutionarilly adapted for, but this has literally nothing to do with whether the cognition of each subject has some specific concepts that it doesn't receive based on its experience but in fact has prior to experience.
If you view this from a physicalist perspective, what else could the a priori concepts be other than an emergent property of our biological makeup? Did you think Kant meant they are some short of divine spirit that sleeps inside us? No, of course not. They are just cognitive categories that we don't acquire based on experience.
What you're saying to counter this point (and in the process woefully miss the point) is that those cognitive categories were selected for via evolution. That's fine. The point is that the subject that has them didn't acquire them socially. You can't raise someone into not having a sense of time or causality. What you're saying is that at some point there were two people, one that had that category of thought and another that didn't and one didn't reproduce therefore leading that attribute to die out. Neither of those learnt his way of knowing through experience. He just didn't reproduce due to "experience".The other guy's offspring didn't get taught the a priori categories either, he always had them because he was the offspring of that guy that did.
>The point is that it does not vindicate Kant’s synthetic a priori category of knowledge
Synthetic a priori knowledge is another subject entirely. If what you said wasn't flatly and dully wrong, then a priori analytic judgments would also be a posteriori analytic (since they are literally formal judgments based on the way we rationally/by structural necessity associate ideas, and must of course boil down to the specific physical structure of our brain, that of course we adapted for). The a priori concepts could be tautological. They would still be a priori filters of experience.
I mean you really need to start reading Kant if you want to talk about Kant, as hard as that might be. In another post you're talking about the nooumena/phenomena distinction and seemingly accept it, but this dissolves if you reject the a priori concepts.
I am personally disputing the idea that synthetic a priorisms don't exist, though. I was at one point influenced by wittgenstein and under the impression that synthetic a priorisms are all actually analytic, but I was -after reading a critique of expressivism- persuaded that in some form synthetic a priori knowledge exists.
I don't think you realise this, but if you actually believe that synthetic a priori knowledge is impossible then no kind of ethics can exist (they are literally all feelz or gibberish) and all valuative judgments (fish are pretty) are also either feelz or gibberish. If you do commit to such a hardline positivist perspective then you are literally wasting your time by arguing against individual systems of morality.
Nearly no modern philosophers would agree with you, though. But that's of course not relevat with the soundness of your beliefs.
P.S. None of this is even conducive to your critique of Mises. Read my extensive posts in "How Noah Smith Should Have Criticised Austrian Economics". None of what he was saying follows from kantian epistemology and he likely knew that.
"I don't think you realise this, but if you actually believe that synthetic a priori knowledge is impossible then no kind of ethics can exist (they are literally all feelz or gibberish) and all valuative judgments (fish are pretty) are also either feelz or gibberish."
DeleteNo, it is utterly untrue. Synthetic a priori knowledge is not necessary for either ethics or aesthetic judgements.
"Nearly no modern philosophers would agree with you, though."
This is completely absurd. No modern philosophers think that ethics or aesthetic judgements are possible without synthetic a priori knowledge?
What about consequentialists/utilitarians?
>No, it is utterly untrue. Synthetic a priori knowledge is not necessary for either ethics or aesthetic judgements.
DeleteJust think for a moment. Analytic judgments are formal and thus contentless. A posteriori judgments are descriptive and their content is phenomenal. An ought (All people should do this or that) is by definition neither formal (it has normative content) nor phenomenal (their content isn't observed, it's prescribed).
How can you say "I ought to do this or that" if you don't accept that a priori synthetic judgments exist? This is an a priori judgment (it's not saying "people sometimes do this or that", oughts aren't material or phenomenal. No amount of observation of what people do will lead you to a conclusion about what they ought to do, you can't observe oughts a posteriori). On the other hand It's either an arbitrary tautology or it has some content and it's thus synthetic.
Again I direct you to my posts. Mises thinks that a priori knowledge is a priori knowledge of phenomenal contents. This is literally as retarded as saying you can know what color the walls in france are painted in a priori by reasoning about the necessary categories of color. A priori knowledge is knowledge of a priori concepts (In Kant's own words, vivisecting cognition reveals the categories of pure reason). What he is actually saying -if you correct the errors- is that people necessarilly think in a specific way economically (through specific economic categories, this also doesn't really make much sense) and that therefore he can predict their phenomenal behaviour which he by definition can't know a priori. He just doesn't want to admit this -which we usually call reification- because it makes his theories falsifiable as their actual behaviour of course remains phenomenal which makes philosophising about their economic thoughts kind of redundant (saying A will by necessity will B, therefore he will do B which will lead to C is completely besides the point when you are observing people -any people, let alone the majority- doing D and leading to E. He clearly didn't will B which means something is wrong with your theory and there is no way out of this).
>This is completely absurd. No modern philosophers think that ethics or aesthetic judgements are possible without synthetic a priori knowledge?
Nearly no modern philosophers reject synthetic a priorisms. Those that did (like Carnap and the logical positivists based on the verification theory of meaning that left no place for non-phenomenal knowledge) were expressivists (they literally believed all talk of morality was feelz and that non-verifiable statements -like fish are pretty- were meaningless -for them it'd be like saying fish are afasdasd, since "pretty" can not be verified it has no meaning or at most it's descriptive of your inner disposition towards them and thus again of your feelz -like saying "yay for fish").
Part 2 (I'm genuinely sorry for the long posts)
Delete>What about consequentialists/utilitarians?
Let's take an act utilitarian. What he's saying is this. "This act has moral worth, that which through its consequences maximises utility" or in other words "one should act in such a way that the overall utility is maximised". Does this have phenomenal content? No, Bentham isn't saying "look at that, some/all people are acting to maximise overall utility". He's saying that they *should* do so -even if noone does- based on a general moral rule that prescribes this for actions to have moral worth (which is the same as saying they are "rational" by the way, in case you get on the bunny-Hoppe train again. When any philosopher post-hume is saying an ethic is rational he is saying that such a rule ought to be conceded by all rational subjects which is all ethics ever were. You can not have a descriptive moral system like that passive agressive clown or Harris would like to believe). But this is not and can not be an a posteriori judgment or a tautology. Tautologies are contentless and oughts have no phenomenal content (you can't find molecules of utilitarian morality in the world, the acts it prescribes are phenomenal, but the rule that prescribes them itself isn't).
Otherwise how can you know what *ought* to be done? Through empirical observation? That leads to unsubstantiated dogmatism (and is the clearest form of the naturalistic fallacy). Unless you accept that nothing ought to be done or that what ought to be done is radically subjective (humean subjectivism, stirnerist/nietzschean egoism)
Unrelated P.S. The is/ought division was never considered unbridgeable. Hume himself bridged it. It just clearly ransacks most systems of intersubjective ("objectivist") morality and traditionalist dogmatism (this should be done that is already observed to be done).
"Analytic judgments are formal and thus contentless"
DeleteNot even the logical positivists said that analytic statements are "contentless".
On the contrary, they did think analytic statements have real, meaningful cognitive content:
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2014/03/a.html
"No amount of observation of what people do will lead you to a conclusion about what they ought to do, you can't observe oughts a posteriori). "
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, you can, in either a non-moral or moral sense.
E.g., you ought not to make certain moves at chess if you want to win (a non-moral "ought"). Of course, experience can teach you this and justify the statement "you ought not to make that move, if you want to win".
Even moral statements in consequentialist ethics can be derived from experience of real world actions. E.g., it is immoral to allow austerity in a recession: governments ought not to do this: we can see this in the bad effects this has from real world experience.
Those of the logical positivists that thought analytic judgments have content are merely redefining the terms in order to close obvious holes in their framework.
DeleteIf you want to say that the necessary logical structure of the tautology is in itself some form of content, then sure you can say that. In the sense that their content is the necessary way through which rational ideas are associated. They still have no external factual content (note not external as in empirical, everyone agrees that a priorisms can not create empirical knowledge) which is what everyone else means when he says tautologies are contentless. Both of these ideas are conceded by everyone positivist or post-positivist.
The thing is that the positivists hit a very big wall when they realized that epistemology is in itself obviously metaphysical. Hence they attempted -and failled- to salvage just enough metaphysics for their framework that rejects metaphysics to make sense. These attempts by the positivists could not -however- save literally every single part of their framework (even the verification criterion of meaning on which they based everything!) from sinking. Popper and Quine merely opened the two last wounds on the already dying beast. Much of positivism (being inductivist) doesn't even manage to get over Hume's critique of causality, which is exactly what Popper based himself on in his arguments against verificationism.
>E.g., you ought not to make certain moves at chess if you want to win
That's the way Hume bridged the is/ought distinction. It's what Kant called a hypothetical imperative. If you accept that oughts are formed this way, then you are a humean subjectivist. This is very close (though a little more refined and thus not clearly wrong) than the positivist expressivism. In that sense a person ought to do that which leads to the goal that his passions set for him. This is inherently subjective / borderline egoist.
>Even moral statements in consequentialist ethics can be derived from experience of real world actions. E.g., it is immoral to allow austerity in a recession: governments ought not to do this: we can see this in the bad effects this has from real world experience
This is Hoppe-tier. You say that austerity during a recession is immoral? Why? Is it because it diminishes overall happiness? So what? Why is that immoral? What's the moral law that states diminishing overall happiness is irrational / has moral demerit / is something we ought not to do?
This is what Harris once said and philosophers are still laughing at him.
Your reasoning is this:
Premise 1. Austerity during a recession causes negative economic effects (a posteriori synthetic judgment)
Premise 2: Negative economic effects decrease utility (let's say a posteriori synthetic judgment)
Conclusion: We ought not to impose austerity during recessions
However this conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises. It requires the implicit premise that "we ought not to do that which decreases / does not increase / does not coincede with a rule that decreases / does not increase utility"
However this rule is an a priori synthetic judgment since it has no phenomenal content and is not a tautology.
"It requires the implicit premise that "we ought not to do that which decreases / does not increase / does not coincede with a rule that decreases / does not increase utility"
DeleteHowever this rule is an a priori synthetic judgment "
The statement that "people need to avoid actions that cause harm or increase unhappiness" if they agree that causing harm or increasing unhappiness is a bad thing is not necessarily a synthetic a priori statement at all.
It can be understood as empirical and a posteriori, just like saying that if you want to decrease your changes of having a car accidents, then "you need to avoid driving while drunk".
">Even moral statements in consequentialist ethics can be derived from experience of real world actions. E.g., it is immoral to allow austerity in a recession: governments ought not to do this: we can see this in the bad effects this has from real world experience
This is Hoppe-tier.
What? Hoppe is not a consequentialist.
"Nearly no modern philosophers reject synthetic a priorisms. "
ReplyDeleteGood lord. This statement makes me think you actually have very little knowledge of modern analytic philosophy.
The whole origins and general epistemological position of modern analytic philosophy is rejection of Kantian synthetic a priori (though there are some few dissenters).
E.g., this was the whole purpose of Gottlob Frege's foundational works like the Begriffsschrift (1879), Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (The Foundations of Arithmetic; 1884), and the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic; vol. 1: 1893; vol. 2: 1903), in which works Frege founded modern logic and argued against Kant’s view that arithmetic statements were synthetic a priori knowledge:
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2013/08/schwartzs-brief-history-of-analytic.html
This position was inherited by Russell and, despite what you say, is still the mainstream position in modern analytic philosophy.
Nah huh, arithmetic statements really are not a priori synthetic judgments. Kant was wrong both about algebra and about geometry (this has been proven sufficiently by Wittgenstein in the tractatus).
DeleteThis is irrelevant with the fact that the positivist rejection of a priori knowledge was based on inductivism and the verification theory of meaning, both of which have been criticised to death and are today considered untennable.
Since you dispute that the majority of modern philosophers believe in a priori knowledge, have this survey
http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
Also note how half are moral realists, a position inconsistent with logical positivism.
"Since you dispute that the majority of modern philosophers believe in a priori knowledge, have this survey"
DeleteWrong, Anonymous, and a ridiculous straw man argument.
I DON'T dispute that most modern analytic philosophers think analytic a priori knowledge exists.
I said that most modern analytic philosophers
reject **Kantian synthetic a priori** knowledge. This is true.
Your survey question:
A priori knowledge: yes or no?
Accept or lean toward: yes 662 / 931 (71.1%)
Accept or lean toward: no 171 / 931 (18.4%)
Other 98 / 931 (10.5%)
Note how it only says "A priori knowledge", NOT "synthetic a priori knowledge".
That fact that you are reduced to clear and shoddy straw man argument here is very telling.
Also, it strikes me that seem to think that all modern analytic empiricism is based on logical positivism, which is false.
DeleteRejection of Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge does not require the "verification theory of meaning" at all.
>The statement that "people need to avoid actions that cause harm or increase unhappiness"
DeleteIs a synthetic a priori judgment.
>if they agree that causing harm or increasing unhappiness is a bad thing
This is a hypothetical imperative, which makes it humean subjectivism, not consequentialism.
For example one person may not agree with the stated goal of increasing overall utility and instead accept the goal of increasing his own happiness. This is not what utilitarianism states. In utilitarianism you don't get to pick and choose the moral law, it has intersubjective worth. Actions that don't increase overall utility / coincede with a rule that does are immoral period.
>What? Hoppe is not a consequentialist.
No, but he also thinks that his "ethical reasoning" is somehow a posteriori and therefore value-free. Unless you think valuative judgments are also a posteriori, which the logical positivists -and everyone else, really- would scoff at.
>I DON'T dispute that most modern analytic philosophers think analytic a priori knowledge exists.
Modern philosophers don't consider analytic judgments knowledge, they consider them formal. When you ask a philosopher whether he believes in a priori knowledge he is thinking a priori synthetic judgments. If you dispute that simply correlate it with the amount of moral realists. Logical positivists are expressivists. For them morality doesn't reel.
>Also, it strikes me that seem to think that all modern analytic empiricism is based on logical positivism, which is false.
I am saying the rejection of synthetic a priorisms is based on logical positivism because it is. Sorry. That was the group that did the whole metaphysics don't real thing.
>Rejection of Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge does not require the "verification theory of meaning" at all
Ok then. Tell me how the statement "Fish are objectively -in the sense that all rational subjects should accept this aesthetic judgment) beautiful" is meaningless without appealing to the verification theory of meaning. Not that it's wrong or unsubstantiated, that it's meaningless.
Because it's an apriori synthetic judgment.
If you manage to tell me how it's meaningless, use the same rule and tell me why moral judgments are not meaningless.
Pro-tip: The logical positivists that did reject synthetic metaphysics agreed that moral and aesthetic judgments are therefore feelz.
Correction, Hoppe thinks his ethics are a priori and value-free. So double the stupidity. My bad.
Delete"When you ask a philosopher whether he believes in a priori knowledge he is thinking a priori synthetic judgments."
DeleteNo, Anonymous, that is perfectly ridiculous.
There is a fundamental distinction between (1) analytic a priori knowledge and (2) synthetic a priori knowledge.
Most analytic philosophers reject Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge (2).
You have not been able to refute this, and the fact that you are still trying to shows how poorly you understand modern analytic philosophy.
You don't get it. You are parotting a distinction made by a positivist to fill obvious holes in their framework. What analytic philosophers? Quine? Popper? Can you think of *anyone* who wasn't following the positivist tradition that rejected synthetic a priori judgments? Look to Kripke's project.
DeleteAyer didn't even offer any arguments against synthetic a priori judgments, he just tried to define them away after showing that some of the traditional examples were no longer applicable. Those that did, like Carnap, all based their arguments on the verification criterion of meaning which was self-contradictory -it literally denoted itself as meaningless- and is now considered untennable. Positivism is not all analytic philosophy and modern analytic philosophers do not reject synthetic a priorisms because *it isn't even their field*. Carnap and Wittgenstein both admitted that metaphysical questions have content. They just believed -with different justifications- that there is no base upon which to ground an informative answer to them and that thus -it would be better to be silent-. The base on which they grounded this idea is the verification theory of meaning. Quine detonated Carnap's belief that only analytic and a posteriori questions can be sufficiently answered.
Again,even if you accept this then you must reject aesthetic and moral judgments. This is literally what positivists did, Ayer was an emotivist. You are holding multiple completely contradictory beliefs. You are trying to at the same time claim: Metaphysics don't real. But Morality -which is metaphysical- does real. But that's because morality is a posteriori (wut?)
Try to understand. I'm not discussing this with you. I'm correcting you. Either you'll read more about it or you'll continue embarassing yourself.
No, Anonymous, anyone who thinks that "Nearly no modern philosophers reject synthetic a priorisms" has shown how ignorant they are of modern philosophy.
DeleteAlso, you seem to think that I am a logical positivist; I am not.
You speak of Kripke. Where does Saul Kripke ever defend **traditional** Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge?
E.g., Kripke's necessary a posteriori knowledge is not synthetic a priori, but a very different epistemological category of knowledge.
E.g., let us quote a fairly standard book on the history of modern metaphysics:
Delete"In the first half of the twentieth century Kant's claim that there is synthetic a priori knowledge was widely rejected, by those philosophers who went back to the empiricist idea that our a priori knowledge is restricted to analytic propositions. In the second half of the twentieth century, Kant's account was rejected even more radically, by those who questioned the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the notion of a priority."
Allais, L. "Kant: The possibility of Metaphysics," in Robin Le Poidevin et al. (eds), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge, New York and London. 2009. pp. 142-143.
------------------
Of course, we can add to these those moderate empiricist analytic philosophers who do not go as far as Quine in rejecting the analytic-synthetic division, but who also reject Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge.
But according to you, "Nearly no modern philosophers reject synthetic a priorisms"?
lol.
At this point you are literally quote-mining.
DeleteKant's account, i.e. the specific examples he gave have been rejected. However you can't reject synthetic a priorisms without rejecting intersubjective morality. The fact that most modern philosophers are moral realists and believe aesthetic value is objective proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that they don't follow the positivist tradition of rejecting synthetic metaphysics.
Quine doesn't reject a priorisms in the first place, he rejected the strict and rigid synthetic/analytic distinction (and the a priori / a posteriori distinction) because of his web of beliefs theory. This is a slight departure from kantian metaphysics but not in the way you think.
Again, tell me how aesthetic or moral judgments are not gibberish if synthetic a priorisms are meaningless.
Puerile screaming about "quote-mining" only shows me how you have no response to the evidence, Anonymous.
DeleteQuoting a specific and respected source to provide evidence for my assertion is not "quote-mining": it is solid evidence to back up my claim.
(1) as for aesthetic statements, they are subjective, according to a widely held view in modern philosophy, which I share.
(2) one simply does not need synthetic a priori knowledge to make ethical statements, despite what you say. E.g., consequentialism does not need synthetic a priori knowledge.
>as for aesthetic statements, they are subjective, according to a widely held view in modern philosophy, which I share.
DeleteCheck the survey. The majority of philosophers disagrees with you.
> E.g., consequentialism does not need synthetic a priori knowledge.
Are you saying that "One ought to act to maximise human happiness" is either 1) an analytic judgment or 2) an a posteriori judgment?
This is a simple question.
On aesthetic value, fine, I am happy to change my statement to
Delete"as for aesthetic statements, they are subjective, according to a view held by just over a third of modern philosophers, which I share."
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?
Accept or lean toward: objective 382 / 931 (41.0%)
Accept or lean toward: subjective 321 / 931 (34.5%)
Other 228 / 931 (24.5%)
Also, I woudl point out that since it is unclear what the category "other" involves, your majority may not be so clear cut.
That's not the goddamn point. The point isn't that you must agree with the majority, the point is that the majority can not hold that view if it rejects synthetic a priorisms *because value-judgments have no phenomenal cotent* while they are not analytic.
DeleteAgain. Are you saying that "One ought to act in such a way so as to maximise overall human happiness" is either 1) An analytic judgment or 2) an a posteriori judgment?
It's fine if you are an expressivist. But what you're trying to do here is deny synthetic a priori knowledge but at the same time save all of its content by pretending it's either analytic knowledge or synthetic a posteriori knowledge.
(1) "the point is that the majority can not hold that view if it rejects synthetic a priorisms *because value-judgments have no phenomenal cotent* while they are not analytic."
DeleteWhat? You are saying that an aesthetic statement has no empirical content?
>What? You are saying that an aesthetic statement has no empirical content?
DeleteOf course not. A value-judgment isn't verifiable/empirically observable. Its referent has phenomenal content. Like saying this vase is beautiful. The term vase has a phenomenal content. The term beautiful doesn't, unless it's understood as reflecting the emotions the vase is causing to the subject viewing it in which case it transforms to "yay for vases" (or alternative to vases are asfdasfdasd as Carnap would likely argue) and can never be intersubjective in any way shape or form. It can't even be inserted into a proposition, that was the biggest problem with expresivism. That these statements could in fact be inserted into logical propositions but if they were purely sentimental or meaningless that shouldn't be possible.
Again.
Are you saying that "One ought to act in such a way so as to maximise overall human happiness" is either 1) An analytic judgment or 2) an a posteriori judgment?
"Are you saying that "One ought to act in such a way so as to maximise overall human happiness""
DeleteI would not defend that proposition because I do not support the crude hedonistic form of utilitarianism.
The ethical theory I would defend is here:
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2013/03/thoughts-on-version-of-consequentialist.html
I would defend the statement that "we ought to aim at certain ends in our actions to make society work effectively" as a synthetic a posteriori statement. It is a truth that is probabilistic, not necessary.
>I would defend the statement that "we ought to aim at certain ends in our actions to make society work effectively" as a synthetic a posteriori statement
DeleteWhy? You are saying that we ought to act in such a way that we would make our society more efficient. That's as good an ethical rule as any. But why?
First. How exactly is that an a posteriori statement when it is prescriptive? Can you even observe an ought? It would be a posteriori if it were descriptive. For example if it stated "some/many/all people choose to act in such a way to accomplish the end of an efficient society" or if it stated "If people choose to act in such and such way, they will accomplish the end of an efficient society".
But how is the statement "People ought to act in a way because it will accomplish the end of an efficient society" a posteriori? Do you experience oughts?
In short, insofar as this is presented as a normative framework and not just your subjective value that A may like and B may not, how do you know that all ought to act in that way? Is that knowledge (that they *ought* to act in that way) gained through experience? Clearly you're not saying "I observed that people act in way X which accomplishes the end Y of an efficient society, therefore people ought to act in way X to accomplish the end of an efficient society Y", this is the clearest form of the traditional naturalistic fallacy (Hume's is/ought).
If you had stated. "If people want to accomplish an efficient society, then they ought to act in way X" then you would get over the problem (debatable, but I'm inclined to accept it) but veer either into expressivism or subjectivism / ethical egoism. One part is descriptive (you must do X in order to get Y) and one is subjective/meaningless emotion (if you want to get Y / if Yay for Y).
But your rule, not the adherence to the rule, is both a prioristic and synthetic insofar as it claims intersubjectivity. Obviously the adherence to the rule is a posterioristic (people might or might not adher to it and we can only know this via experience), but the rule itself either is there or isn't.
This is exactly why Kant developed his theory in the critique of pure reason and then the critique of practical reason. He was trying to argue for the existence of an intersubjective moral law in the post-Hume era. This is pretty much all that synthetic a priorisms are even useful for. Evaluating oughts, evaluating aesthetics. Again, I'm not saying you have to accept that there is an intersubjective moral law. You might be a nihilist, an expressivist or a subjectivist.
But I find it inconceivable that you want to argue for an intersubjective (what you call objectivist) moral law while rejecting the epistemology that even makes this possible.
>No, Anonymous, anyone who thinks that "Nearly no modern philosophers reject synthetic a priorisms" has shown how ignorant they are of modern philosophy.
ReplyDeleteRight. Keep believing that the majority of philosophers are moral realists that reject synthetic a priorisms. Whatever.
>Also, you seem to think that I am a logical positivist; I am not.
You are a proponent of that other school of thought that rejected metaphysics? Interesting. Because it doesn't exist.
>You speak of Kripke. Where does Saul Kripke ever defend **traditional** Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge?
What do you mean traditional? The examples he gave? They are irrelevant. We're talking about ability to a priori synthesize non-tautological judgments. Look to Kripke's "length of a stick" example. The length of a stick is both contingent and a priori. But forget Kripke. Popper and Quine both accepted synthetic judgments. Quine even has articles on deontology. Oh wait, I forgot, you think morality is somehow a posteriori. What a joke.
(1) "You are a proponent of that other school of thought that rejected metaphysics?"
DeleteI do not reject metaphysics/ontology as a legitimate branch of philosophy, so even here you have no idea what you're talking about.
(2) Kripke's "contingent a priori" statements -- of which the stick/metre reference is an example -- are NOT traditional Kantian synthetic a priori knowledge. Why?
Because it is **contingent**, not necessary. Kant's synthetic a priori truths are necessary.
Kripke has not saved Kant here.
Moreover, the very idea of "contingent a priori" statements is one of those ideas of Kripke that is highly problematic and frequently rejected in modern analytic philosophy.