Justification and relative apriority

Ratio

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 148-161

  Geirsson, Heimir ^a  

^a IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949460923     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00084     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. I argue for the necessary a posteriori in 'Necessity, Apriority, and True Identity Statements,' Erkenntnis 1994: 227-42
2. and examples of contingent a priori truths in 'The Contingent A Priori: Kripke's Two Types of Examples,' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1991: 195-205
3. 'On Sense and Meaning,' Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. P. Geach and M. Blank (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952)
4. Geirsson, 'Necessity, Apriority, and True Identity Statements.'
5. Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986)
6. and 'Relative and Absolute Apriority,' Philosophical Studies, (1993) 83-100
7. Salmon, 'Relative and Absolute Apriority,' p. 81
8. Scott Soames, 'Substitutivity,' On Being and Saying: Essays for Richard Gartwright, ed. Judith Jarvis Thomson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987) pp. 99-132, p. 125
9. Vision provides a good analogy. If you see object X at two different times and you do not recognize it as being the same object, you nevertheless see object X on both occasions. Like Salmon, I think that the belief relation is a binary relation between a person and a proposition. A belief report simply relates a person to a proposition without making any claims about how she believes the proposition. I discuss belief reports in 'Partial Propositions and Cognitive Content,' Journal of Philosophical Research, (1996) 117-28. It is important to note that even though I accept belief as being a binary relation, as simply standing in the appropriate relation to a proposition, I nevertheless recognize the importance of how a proposition is believed when it comes to its justification
10. Donnellan, K. 'Kripke and Putnam on Natural Kind Terms,' in C. Ginet and S. Shoemaker, eds., Knowledge and Mind (Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 84-104, at p. 88n
11. Only two philosophers have, to my knowledge, argued for relative apriority. K-Y Wong, in 'A Priority and Ways of Grasping a Proposition,' Philosophical Studies 62, (1991) 151-64, has argued that N. Salmon should welcome a relative notion of apriority within his theoretical framework in Frege's Puzzle
12. For Salmon's reply to Wong see 'How Not to Become a Millian Heir,' Philosophical Studies 62, (1991) 165-77
13. See also 'Singular Propositions and the A Priori' in Journal of Philosophical Research, 21, (1996) 107-16. I have argued more broadly for relative apriority, first in Names and Beliefs (1988), a dissertation written at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln
14. Wong, K-Y 'Sentence-Relativity and the Necessary A Posteriori,' Philosophical Studies 81, (1996) 53-91
15. Wong and Salmon discuss this example in their exchange, but there the focus is on whether the proposition expressed by I am here now is or is not a logical truth. Salmon doubts it is a logical truth, and hence that it is a priori. The example that seems to have changed Salmon's mind on the issue (for in Frege's Puzzle he allowed for the proposition to be a priori) is G. Vision's example of the standard answering-machine message 'I am not here now.' But the discussion, as well as Salmon's doubt, are misguided. The issue does not concern the supposed logical truth of I am here now, but whether it is a priori. And assertions in absentia, like in the answering-machine example, do not show that the proposition is not a priori, for the I in the proposition is presumably not entertaining the proposition at the time the machine plays its tape. 21 Salmon, 'Relative and Absolute Apriority' p. 86