Lecture Supplement of Alston’s The Reliability of Sense Perception Chapter 3
Copyright © 2009 Bruce W. Hauptli
Chapter 3. A Priori Arguments
Note that a proposition is a priori if it can be known (or justified) wholly independently of sensory experience. That is, if it can be known or justified through reason alone (once its constituents are understood). An argument is an a priori one if all of its premises are a priori and it is deductive in character. The distinction is an epistemological one—an alleged distinction between propositions (or arguments) whose justifications depend upon evidence derived from experience and those which do not depend upon such evidence. As long as a non-empirical procedure of validation exists, we are said to be confronted with an a priori proposition. The distinction is sometimes held to be partially a metaphysical one (between “what is prior” and “what is posterior”). According to Aristotle, A is prior to B in nature if-and-only-if B could not exist without A; A is prior to B in knowledge if-and-only-if we cannot know B without knowing A.[1] Aristotle believed that it is possible to demonstrate causal relationships in syllogisms in which the term for the cause is the middle term. Hence to know something in terms of what is prior is to know it in terms of a demonstrable causal relationship. To know something from what is posterior can involve no such demonstration, since the knowledge will be inductive in form. Leibniz made only an epistemic distinction: a posteriori knowledge is knowledge by effects in experience (by sense); a priori knowledge is achieved by exposing the “cause” or “reason.”
Given the difficulty with showing empirically that SP is reliable, it is natural to inquire whether or not we can provide an a priori argument to this effect. Alston will consider a number of different possible sorts of a priori arguments and will find that none of them do the job any better than the empirical ones he had discussed in Chapter 2. This will lead him, in Chapter 4 to look again, and more carefully, at empirical arguments for the reliability of SP. As I have noted, he will then provide, in Chapter 5, his argument from Practical Rationality.
i. Theological Arguments:
In Meditation VI Descartes offers an argument for the reliability of SP which appeals to a benevolent deity. Alston characterizes the argument as follows:
[26] since this deity made us as we are (reliant on SP), since he is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, he could not have created us to rely upon SP were it not reliable.
As Alston notes, this sort of argument is wholly similar to the appeal some contemporary naturalists’ make to Darwinian biology to justify SP—such an argument contends that the evolutionary process could not have selected this core cognitive practice if it were not generally reliable.[2]
Discuss Anselm’s ontological argument[3] and then Descartes’ a priori argument[4] in some detail.
27 Alston maintains: “I will take it that the argument from the existence of God…is unexceptionable. If the world depends for its existence and its character on an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God, and given that we have a strong, indeed irresistible, inclination to form beliefs in accordance with SP, then surely the creator would not have given us such an inclination unless following it were for our own good….[however] the cogency of the whole argument depends on whether we are justified in accepting the premise that the world is created and governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good deity.”
27-28 Of course, if circularity is to be avoided here, then the argument for the existence of such a deity can not depend on SP! This fact rules out the following common types of arguments for such a deity:
teleological arguments and cosmological arguments. Instead, we will have to rely upon a priori arguments and this would move us toward the ontological argument.[5]
28-29 Alston contends, however, that such an argument will need to be supplemented by arguments which appeal to SP, and this doesn’t do the trick for us:
29 “if theistic belief is to be sufficiently justified for rational acceptance, these ASP-innocent grounds [the ontological or a priori arguments] will have to be supplemented by others that do rely on SP. They will have to b e set in the context of a “cumulative case” for theism….”
“…when all is said and done, a theological argument for the reliability of SP that has the best chance of being cogent will depend on SP for some of its premises and so will, after all, runs afoul of epistemic circularity. Even apart from circularity, the cogency of the strongest form of such argument will be highly controversial.”
30 Non-theological a priori arguments for reliability, on the other hand, will he says will likely follow either Immanuel Kant[6] [which will mean a transcendental argument (about the necessary conditions for some phenomena)] or Ludwig Wittgenstein [which will be based on considerations regarding our linguistically-centered conceptual scheme (and will appeal to considerations regarding what must be the case if our ordinary language regarding “middle-sized physical objects” is to be meaningful. Some philosophers do not categorize these arguments as a priori, but they are not “empirical” on most accounts.
A Useful Metaphor for the Next Four Sections:
The first of the four arguments he terms “Wittgenstenian” [(a) verificationism, (b) criteria of application for sensory terms, (c) paradigm case arguments and sensory language, and (d) the private language argument), and they have a very similar underlying idea—or at least I think this is the case, and, hopefully, by using the example I discuss first, we can more easily come to understand these arguments. Consider the following two points:
(A) Each lengthy object either is, or is not [exactly] one meter long.
(B) It makes no sense (as the ensuing will show) to say that the Standard Meter (the standard by which meter-length is adjudicated) either is or is not a meter long.
Obviously, the only way for both of these to be true is for one to come to the recognition that standards may not be used to evaluate themselves. This is the background point which Wittgenstein is drawing attention to in the different arguments which are being discussed (though he does not necessarily advance the in the specific context Alston is discussing).
According to Wittgenstein, the “game” or “activity” of meter-measuring is possible only if a standard is adopted which can be used to serve as the “measure” against which things are compared to determine whether they are, or are not, a meter long. Prior to the adoption of such a standard, the statement that something is (or is not) a meter long makes no sense. It is as if one were to ask, before the game of [American] football was developed whether or not a ball crossing a certain line constituted a “touchdown.” Until the game (and its requisite rules or standards) was developed, there were no touchdowns, though balls could be carried across lines. But where something, the Standard Meter, serves as such a standard, it makes no sense to apply it to itself. To say “the standard meter is not a meter long” would be to contend it doesn’t “measure up to itself”—and that is nonsensical. To say, on the other hand, that it is a meter long is to say only that it measures up to itself—and while it does so, it doesn’t require any “measuring.” That is, unlike any other instance of determining whether a lengthy object is a meter long, the “measurement of the standard” (if there is any sense to this”) is capable of being performed without empirical test, and is subject to no margin of error—which is to say, it is not a “measurement!”
In his “Wittgenstein and Skepticism,” James Bogen discusses “E-propositions” (or enablers) which must be accepted if a “game” is to be played, and emphasizes the special role which these enablers play.[7] Cf., also Michael Williams’ Groundless Belief: An Essay on the Possibility of Epistemology.[8] In his The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle notes that the French Standard meter is kept in the pavillon de Breteuil in Sevres.[9]
Thus, the contention goes, the standard occupies a special place in the “game” or activity,” and questions of truth and falsity don’t apply to it in the way they arise when it is applied. Keep this discussion in mind as we work through the following four sections of the text.
Of course, by itself, this does not advance any kind of claim regarding the reliability of SP. That claim must be “derived as a consequence of the application of the idea. It is in the application of this idea that the four arguments differ. To see this, we must look at each of them in turn.
ii. Verificationism:
In his “Verificationism,” Barry Stroud characterizes such views as including:
any view according to which the conditions of a sentence’s or a thought’s being meaningful or intelligible are equated with the conditions of its being verifiable or falsifiable.[10]
30 Alston first discusses a “verficationist’s argument” which contends that the denial of the reliability of SP is without meaning—that is, the claim that SP is not reliable is meaningless, and thus the attempt to raise a question here senseless. Effectively, then, the claim is that purely by appealing to the verificationists’ theory we can see, without any empirical justification, that the unreliability of SP is meaningless. Thus, its reliability can be established a priori, or without empirical inquiry!
Now at first this argument looks as “counter-intuitive” as the ontological one does. How can one believe that discussions of meaningfulness could yield a priori conclusions about the truth of the existence of a deity or the reliability of SP? The “meaningfulness” of Harry Potter’s fear of “he who can not be named,” surely, legitimates no conclusions about the truth of this being’s existence!
Generally verificationists contended that “non-empirical phenomena” are the meaningless creations of metaphysically-inclined philosophers. They recommended that we prescind from such meaningless talk.
Discuss Logical Positivism! The positivists maintained that too much philosophical thought was meaningless discourse. They held that all statements were either empirically verifiable (subject to experiential check) or meaningless,[11] and they recommended that we limit our attention to the meaningful statements. This school of philosophy (which arose at the end of the 19th Century) suffered a rather quick demise (falling into disfavor in the 1920s and 1930s) when it became clear that the core statement of the positivists (the second sentence of this paragraph) was not empirically verifiable! While these philosophers were still very influential for many years, their orientation lasted for less time than any other philosophical orientation I can think of. Discuss the positivists’ orientation and how, paradoxically, their view seems committed to an “a priori” perspective.
31 Alston points out that a related argument could contend that both the denial of the reliability of SP and the assertion of its reliability are meaningless, and thus the effort to question the practice is without sense. He points out that all these sorts of argument could be attacked by questioning the verificationist’s criterion of meaningfulness,[12] but he instead accepts this view, for the purposes of argument, so he can focus our attention on the application of the argument to the question of the reliability of SP. Here he offers for the following argument:
[31] the [verificationists’] criterion [of meaning] presupposes the by-and-large reliability of sense perception [that is, it would make no sense to construe meaningfulness in terms of sensory verification were such verification not indicative of truth]. What would be the point of requiring empirical verifiability or confirmability if p as a necessary condition of factual meaningfulness of p, unless it were possible to verify or confirm a hypothesis by relating it properly to the results of observation?” But, of course, this means we are (again) going in an epistemic circle. If the verificationists’ defense of the reliability of SP is based upon a criterion of meaningfulness which presupposes the reliability of SP, then it looks as if the argument for reliability is passed upon the presupposition of this reliability, and that seems to be tragically circular.
Clearly, then this sort of argument (whether or not it is viewed as a priori) will not do! I think that Alston may categorize it as a priori because the logical positivists didn’t think of their fundamental principle of verifiability as either empirical or meaningless, and this meant that it had to have the status of an a priori truth. But it seems fairly clear, when you reflect upon it (especially after the positivists’ error is exposed), that “All statements were either empirically verifiable or meaningless” is not a simple identity statement.” This means, of course that there must be another sort of category independent of the a priori, the a posteriori (and the meaningless). As we pursue the other “Wittgenstenian” arguments we will, I hope, get clearer on this idea.
iii. Criteria of Physical Object Concepts:
32-45 A different sort of argument [he also calls it a “Wittgenstenian”
one] relies upon claims about the basic nature
of our “physical object language:” that our use of this language requires
that we have certain criteria of application for the
terms or words, or as Wittgenstein prefers to say, these terms have a particular grammar. Such criteria (or such a grammar) provide “guiding and constitutive constraints on the application and use of our language” and this “fact” can be used to provide a
ground for the reliability of SP. This
argument will rely upon a distinction between our explicit criteria for applying a concept or term, and the symptoms which sometimes are employed to
legitimate the use of the term. When we rely upon the symptoms, the
application of the term can turn out to be wrong or inappropriate, but when we
rely on the criteria, this can’t be the case.
Consider telephones and the possible symptom of having a “dial” [that is, a “number dialing mechanism”], while the criterion might be being able to make a phone call. Most phones today don’t have a “dial” (and many aren’t connected to wires either), but we have no trouble calling the latest devices phones—and, clearly, you can use them to make calls. Of course, I am not sure whether or not the development of text messaging and twittering will eventually lead people to say that I-Touches are phones, even though you can’t use them to “make a call.”
Applying the example to the argument here, the claim is that where we are dealing with “basic physical object language”—talk of “redness,” “roundness,” “trees,” etc., the “criteria for the application of the basic terms” are supplied by perceptual properties, and in such cases one can’t talk of SP being unreliable! It is only when one is thinking of “symptoms,” that it makes sense to suppose unreliability here:
33 [citing Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations] the fluctuation in grammar between criteria and symptoms makes it look as if there were nothing at all but the symptoms. We say, for example “Experience teaches that there is rain when the barometer falls, but it also teaches that there is rain when we have certain sensations of wet and cold, or such-and-such visual impressions.” In defense of this one says that these sense-impressions can deceive us. But here one fails to reflect that the fact that the false appearance is precisely one of rain as founded on a definition.” [13]
34-36 Now the argument Alston is offering on behalf of the “Wittgenstenian” claims that when it comes down to the criteria for the meaning of our “physical language discourse” there are going to be “justification conditions” which provide the criteria for the application of the terms (‘rain’, ‘red’, ‘book’, or ‘bird’). Moreover, [36]: “…if concepts of perceptual properties consist of the conditions under which one is justified in perceptually attributing those properties to something, one is thereby in a position to determine just by reflection on the nature of the relevant concepts what it takes to make justified perceptual attribution of those concepts to something. And if we may assume that SP embodies…ways of forming perceptual beliefs that are in accordance with those justification conditions…we can establish the positive epistemic status of SP just by deriving those justification conditions from the concepts in question. And since this only required reflection on the concepts, and does not require any appeal to what we learn from perception, it is a wholly a priori procedure and does not involve us in epistemic circularity.”
That is, in the cases where we are dealing with the “criteria” for application of SP discourse, we are, speaking a priori (or without appeal to any empirical justification or inquiry), going to be guaranteed that the practice is reliable.
Now that is half the story in this section—understanding the a priori argument which will be rejected by Alston. Before we look at his argument against this defense of the reliability of SP (pp. 36-44), let me direct your attention to a useful summary of the whole set of “Wittgenstenian arguments” he is going to consider:
56 note that this argument exhibits more clearly a feature of all the arguments we have called ‘Wittgenstenian’. They all contend that the hypothesis that sense perception is not reliable is self-defeating. If we try to maintain it [that is, the contention that SP is not reliable], it crumbles beneath our fingers. Either it is meaningless because not empirically confirmable, or it takes away criteria features of the terms we use to formulate particular perceptual judgments, or it would render impossible our learning the meaning of such terms or for such terms to mean what they do, or, as in the present argument, it denies a necessary condition of any term’s having meaning.
Of course, Alston denies that these arguments are successful—that is, contra these claims he maintains that the claim that SP is not reliable is not “meaningless,” does not “deprive us of the criteria relevant features,” and does not “render it impossible to learn the meanings of such terms.”
On pp. 36-44 Alston offers a long argument which claims (a) it is not clear that there are justification conditions for perceptual concepts/perceptual properties [see p. 41], and (b) that it is not clear that these provide an a priori justification for claims regarding conditions under which perceptual beliefs are justified [see p. 44]:
41 he contends that if this “Wittgenstenian” argument about justification conditions for the use of physical object language is to be correct, then to use basic perceptual terms like “red,” “round,” and “tree,” one would have to have a concept of justification because the use of the terms requires the acquisition of justification conditions to acquire the relevant “criteria:”
and it seems clear that the least sophisticated humans, very small children for example, lack any concept of justification even in its most rudimentary form. More specifically, it seems clear that very small children acquire concepts of kinds of perceptual items in their physical and social environments, and of the perceptual properties of such items, well before they can be credited with even the most rudimentary grasp of a concept of epistemic justification.
-Critical consideration: of course, it might be possible for the “Wittgenstenian theorist” to avail herself of Alston’s distinction between “having a justification criterion” and “being justified by a criterion” here, but that would be a complicated argument to advance.
44 “…it is dubious that perceptual concepts do, generally, contain justification conditions. And we have seen that even if they do, that fails to provide a conceptual guarantee for the justificatory efficacy of our standard ways of forming perceptual beliefs. But now I want to assume, for the sake of argument, that there are strong reasons for adopting some sort of “justification conditions” account of perceptual concepts of perceptual properties, and that this provides an a priori justification for claims as to the conditions under which perceptual beliefs are justified. And I will then argue that even so, we lack a cogent noncircular argument for the reliability of SP.” That is, as was the case in the verificationists’ argument (and will be the case in the next two) he will claim that the argument begs the question when it is applied in an effort to establish the reliability of SP:
44-45 Wittgenstein and his followers on this point…aspire only to show that the constitution of the relevant concepts guarantees that our ordinary perceptual beliefs are justified, or that their perceptual grounds constitute good reasons or adequate bases or grounds for them. And it would seem that they do not understand those positive epistemic statuses in such a way that they entail reliability [generally].
If the criteria argument
for the use of the terms requires reliability of SP in these cases, it can’t be
generalized to the overall practice of SP without, effectively presupposing the
generally reliability of SP—and, again, we would have ended up going round in a
circle!
iv. Paradigm Case Arguments:
Alston next considers what may, really, be the core argument behind the “criterial” argument he just took up—what is called the paradigm case argument. This argument claims that language use is, necessarily, based upon certain “paradigm cases:” that is, that the use of ‘dog’ is possible only when one is presented with clear cases of dogs and one learns the term as applying to such cases. This claim will be relevant to our argument because it will be claimed that the paradigm cases can not be wrong. Alston cites an argument from Oldenquist regarding ‘red’[14] on pp. 46-47 which neatly summarizes the argument:
“could everybody be fooled all of the time in their judgments of what is red?...I think that this is a conceptual impossibility. If all English users were taught ‘red’…by examples all of which were white things illuminated in red light, and no one ever saw what we now call red things, then it would be a contingent truth that red things were white things illuminated in red light.
The defense of this anti-skeptical claim lies in showing that it is conceptually impossible that all of the examples by means of which we all learn the meaning of ‘red’ should be false examples, and that therefore it is a conceptual truth that many of our color judgments are actually truth.[15]
This argument will rely upon a view of language use as based on ostensive definition and instruction. And, if it is correct on this matter, it only shows that the cases involved in initiation and instruction must be “correct.” If we are to get to the general reliability of SP we are going to have to be able to go further than the cases of initial acquisition of sensory concepts and terms:
48-49 Once we see that the paradigm case argument shows only that the perceptual beliefs involved in ostension itself are correct, we can see that the argument falls into something like epistemic circularity. For it presupposes something very close to that conclusion. Remember that the argument essentially depends on the claim that the meaning of a perceptual property terms can be spelled out as follows: ‘sufficiently similar to m, n, o…’ (the teaching examples). But only if they are importantly similar to each other, only if the exhibit some marked commonality. The supposition that we can successfully impart usable meanings for perceptual property terms by exhibiting a large number of perceptual cases presupposes that SP is accurate enough to group together for this purpose (under a common term) only items that are sufficiently similar to each other to yield a usable single meaning of the above form. That can be seen to be very close to the conclusion of the argument….
Alston considers versions of this argument offered by Hillary Putnam (who claims that “brains in vats” could not refer to trees because they would not be able to refer to them as they are confined to vats), and Sidney Shoemaker (who claims it would be “logically absurd” to suppose sense perception was not reliable because it must be reliable to learn to use the terms), and contends these are just as circular. Effectively, for there to be paradigm cases, SP must be reliable, and so to use the necessity of paradigm cases for language to establish, a priori (independently of any appeal to empirical considerations) the reliability of SP is to argue circularly!
v. The Private Language Argument:
53 Here, finally, we get to the heart of Wittgenstein’s argument according to Alston. As Wittgenstein sees it:
…language essential depends on public rules for the use of expressions, rules that are public in the sense that in principle they are ways available to all the members of a community for determining when the rules are being followed or violated. Without such rules no expression has the kind of use that makes it possible to employ it to say something meaningful.
54 to deny the Wittgenstenian view would be to countenance the possibility of a private language—one that is exclusively available only to a single individual. Note what is in question here: a language which refers to inner experiences and has only a private use. In his “Private Language Argument,” P.M.S. Hacker maintains that this sort of language is supposed to be: “a putative language, the individual words of which refer to what can (apparently) be known only by the speaker, i.e., to his immediate private sensations or, to use the empiricist jargon, to the ‘ideas’ in his mind. It has been a presupposition of the mainstream of modern philosophy, empiricist, rationalist, and Kantian alike, or representational idealism no less that of pure idealism, and of contemporary representationalism that the languages we all speak are such private languages, that the foundations of language no less than the foundations of knowledge lie in private experience.”[16]
As Alston notes, Wittgenstein contends that such a language could have no consistent usage of terms. Language use requires standards of correctness and private standards are oxymoronic. Here cross a nexus of claims regarding solipsism, phenomenalism, and the primacy of the mental. Alston claims, however, that [54] “…even if we agree with Wittgenstein on the unacceptability of solipsism, phenomenalism, and the inference to the external world from private experience, that fails to show that sense perception is reliable or that the hypothesis of its unreliability can be dismissed.
On pp. 55-57 he considers this argument could apply to the reliability of SP, but, of course, contends that here, again, we go around in a circle—we will have to go over this one carefully using the text.
vi. Transcendental Arguments:
In his “Royce: The Absolute and the Beloved Community Revisited,” John E. Smith maintains that “the quest for the conditions which make the actual possible is the task of transcendental philosophy. This reflective enterprise is novel in that it cannot be carried out on the basis of either of the two classical forms of thought: deduction, and induction or probable inference.”[17]
58-59 Alston claims that such arguments endeavor to take claims about the alleged necessary conditions for the applicability of certain [linguistic] concepts and derive from them conclusions about the nature of real things. But [59] the arguments contain “hidden empirical assumptions that rely upon sense perception” and this renders any attempt to use such arguments to establish the reliability of SP epistemically circular.
As an aside, it should be noted that the transcendental arguments employ a “presuppositional regress” from a certain praxis to the regulative and constitutive principles which govern and explain that activity. If this sort of argument is otherwise unproblematic, at least one additional point needs to be established if we are to be led to the desired result (the necessity or appropriateness of our acceptance and employment of these principles): we will have to be convinced that these principles are uniquely suited to regulate and explain this practice. If this point is not addressed, the appeal to some particular regulative principles will allow for the possibility of an appeal to some other principles which might equally well govern and explain the praxis. Clearly this would open the door to the charge of arbitrariness. Stephen Korner emphasizes the importance of such “uniqueness proofs” for transcendental deductions and notes that they are uniformly absent from such philosophical arguments.[18]
[1] Cf., Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Bk. 1.2.
[2] One source for such an argument is in Nicholas
Rescher’s A Useful Inheritance:
Evolutionary Aspects of the Theory of Knowledge (Savage: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1990). Cf., my "Rescher's Unsuccessful Evolutionary
Argument” a review of Nicholas Rescher's A
Useful Inheritance, in The British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science, v. 45 (1994), pp. 295-301, for a
critical look at this sort of argument.
[3] You can learn more about how I view this argument by examining my lecture supplement on it—cf., http://www.fiu.edu/~hauptli/Anselm'sOntologicalArgument.html .
[4] You can learn more about how I view this argument by examining my lecture supplement on it—cf., http://www.fiu.edu/~hauptli/Descartes'MeditationsLectureSupplementIV-VIForPHH3401.htm .
[5] If you wish to pursue the ontological argument further, you might find my lecture supplement on it helpful: http://www.fiu.edu/~hauptli/Anselm'sOntologicalArgument.html .
[6] According to Christopher Hookway, in his “A Priority Knowledge,” “Kant went on to defend three theses which are at the core of the contemporary debate [regarding a priori knowledge]: (1) the existence of a priori knowledge; (2) a close relationship between the a priori and the necessary; and (3) the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge” (in A Companion to Epistemology, eds. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, op. cit., pp. 3-8, p. 4).
[7] Cf., James Bogen, “Wittgenstein and Skepticism,” Philosophical Review v. 83 (1974), pp. 364-373.
[8] Michael Williams, Groundless Belief: An Essay on the Possibility of Epistemology (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1977).
[9] John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (N.Y.: Free Press, 1995), p. 86.
[10] Barry Stroud, “Verificationism,” in A Companion to Epistemology, eds. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 518.
[11] Strictly speaking, however, this is not quite their view. They held that a priori propositions were not empirical, but not meaningless either, instead they were mere tautologies—their truth was simply a matter of their reducibility to an identity statement, and such statements tell us nothing about the world—they merely specify the “logic” of the world, language, etc.
[12] This line of reasoning exposes the classic flaw in the Logical Positivists’ orientation—as noted above, their criterion of meaningfulness seems meaningless on their theory!
[13] Alston is citing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscome (N.Y.; Macmillan, 1953), section 354.
[14] Philosophers use single quotes to surround a word when they are mentioning it rather than using it. For example, in the sentence “‘Long’ is a short word,” the word ‘long' is mentioned (discussed) while the word ‘short' is used!
[15] Andrew Oldenquist, “Wittgenstein on Phenomenalism, Skepticism, and Criteria,” in Essays on Wittgenstein, ed. E.D. Klembe (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 411-412.
[16] P.M.S. Hacker, “Private Language Argument,” in A Companion to Epistemology, ed. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 368-374, pp. 368-369.
[17] John E. Smith, “Royce: The Absolute and the Beloved Community Revisited” [1982] in Smith’s America’s Philosophical Vision (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1992), pp. 121-137, p. 126. Emphasis has been added to the passage. The essay originally appeared in Boston Studies in Philosophy and Religion, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame, 1982).
[18] Cf. Stephen Korner, Categorical Frameworks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), p. 72, and his “The Impossibility of Transcendental Deductions,” The Monist v. 51 (1967) pp. 317-331.
File revised on 03/23/2009.