Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 34, No. 5, October 2003
0026-1068
554
ERNEST SOSA
555
556
ERNEST SOSA
557
the following conditional (or some variant) would be one we can know
a priori: that if we can improve our epistemic situation then ostensibly
perceptual judgments are justied.
By Chisholms own account of a priori justication, however, neither
the J principles nor even the conditionals of the form F-J-X can
possibly be justied a priori.4 According to that account, in its two parts:
(a) what is necessarily true and cannot be accepted without being
certain is axiomatic, and (b) one knows a proposition a priori if and
only if one accepts it and sees it to follow axiomatically from
something axiomatic.
This is a high standard. Not surprisingly, little can be known thus
a priori. None of the Chisholmian J principles will qualify, nor will the
conditionals of the form F-J-X. The charitable way out requires some
other sense of a priori justication. What Chisholm must mean in the
present context is, I suggest, justication by unaided reection, where
reection covers not only rational intuition and reason but also
armchair thought more generally, including what one can know about
ones own mind, past, present, and future, unaided by perception-based
empirical beliefs.
This understanding of what is a priori helps make sense of how
Chisholm defends his epistemic principles, given only a certain twist on
the faith F, a twist implicit in much of his work in epistemology. We need
to understand the epistemologists faith as not just F but F0 : that we can
improve our epistemic situation by reection. But what might possibly lie
behind Chisholms interest in this particular way of improving our
epistemic situation? Plausibly, he wants to avoid two things: (a)
circularity, to the greatest possible extent, and (b) any reliance on the
epistemic luck of circumstances bearing true beliefs as gifts not
sufciently attributable to our cognitive accomplishment. How does his
requirement of reection help to avoid both (a) and (b)?
Avoiding circularity would seem to require that in explaining what
justies our perceptual beliefs we avoid appeal to facts knowable only
through perception. You might appeal instead, with Moore, to
introspection and reason so as to justify perceptual beliefs on that
epistemically prior basis. But what if you despair of reasoning with
inductive validity, from how things stand in your subjective experience to
how they stand in your objective surroundings? In that case, and if you
still wish to avoid or at least postpone circularity, you might then appeal
to other factors as ones that yield the justication of our perceptual
beliefs: factors, however, that will not circularly specify how it is in our
4
This has been shown convincingly by Noah Lemos in his Chisholm, the A Priori, and
Epistemic Principles, in Hahn 1997, 60929.
558
ERNEST SOSA
559
560
ERNEST SOSA
561
562
ERNEST SOSA
sufce, and both Descartes and Reid exploit this possibility. The
epistemic benets will compound, moreover, if, compatibly with our
epistemic predicament, we manage to ascend to an adequate perspective
on its true nature.7
Department of Philosophy
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
USA
Ernest_Sosa@Brown.edu
References
Chisholm, Roderick M. 1989. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Descartes, Rene. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 2,
translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald
Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foley, Richard. 1997. Chisholms Epistemic Principles. In Hahn 1997,
24165.
Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. 1997. The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm.
Chicago: Open Court.
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1973. Givenness and Explanatory Coherence. Journal
of Philosophy 70 (1973): 61224.
7
An earlier version of this essay was presented in the Chisholm memorial symposium at
the Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in April 2000.