Naturalism, rationalism, and rethinking the a priori/a posteriori distinction.

摘要

Epistemology has undergone a "naturalistic revolution," and one common charge against naturalism (or by naturalism) is that a priori knowledge is not possible given a naturalistic framework. This assumption is incorrect. One can consistently hold a reliabilist naturalistic epistemology and accommodate the existence of a priori knowledge, that is, knowledge which is in some sense 'independent of experience'. Essentially, my goal is to connect two doctrines that might, at first blush, seem incompatible: rationalism and naturalism. Put broadly, rationalism maintains that we have a faculty of 'rational intuition' that directly apprehends necessary truths about the nature or structure of reality, while one form of naturalism states that everything exists in space and time and that we can discover all truths about this natural reality employing the methods of natural science (broadly understood). This project involves two steps. First, I examine the concept of the a priori within the historical tradition in an attempt to clarify the notion of 'independence from experience', which sets the backdrop for my new account of the a priori/a posteriori distinction within a reliabilist naturalistic framework. With it, I present a novel way of identifying propositions that can be known a priori, which involves a focus on 'sensory' and 'non-sensory' inputs. Second, I apply this new conception to help us better understand the faculty of rational intuition, as well as how it can be integrated within a reliabilist framework. My project will be useful for those naturalists who would like to find room for truths that do not appear to be justified through sense experience alone. But, what is more, any naturalist in epistemology will find my work a valuable contribution towards harmonizing naturalism with the classical tradition, in that the view I defend is consistent with the philosophical tradition. Thus, not only does this dissertation allow the naturalist to make room for rational intuition, but it reconnects naturalism with the traditional debate. To my knowledge, no one has openly and unambiguously presented a theory as to how a reliabilist account of the a priori might be used to unify naturalism with a form of rationalism.