Understanding, Intuition and the a Priori

Abstracts

Paul Boghossian “Understanding, Intuition and the A Priori” I will be exploring prospects and limits to conceptual explanations of a priori knowledge.

Mark Richard “Meanings as Species”

Suppose we accept what I take to be Quine’s view in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, that there are no analyticities, that no statement is immune from revision. Does that mean, as Grice and Strawson and others suggest, that we must reject talk of sameness of meaning, or that the notion of meaning has no explanatory power?

Not at all. Quine’s claims are best understood as suggesting that we need to think of word and phrase meaning as a dynamic phenomenon: meanings are population level entities, in many ways like species. A phrase’s meaning in a population is constituted by those presuppositions of speakers that are, as we might call it, interpretive common ground: roughly those presuppositions that it is common knowledge that users of the phrase expect auditors to recognize that they make in use and expect auditors to employ in interpretation. Just as the genomic and phenotypical profile of a species changes over time without the species ceasing to exist –there can be changes in the species a population lineage realizes without there being a change of the species it realizes –so there can be changes in what constitutes the meaning, the interpretive common ground, of a word in a population without a change of what the word means. Quine’s remarks on analyticity are a straightforward consequence.

In this talk I begin developing this view. I discuss the notion of linguistic competence and the relations between meaning cum anchor of linguistic competence and reference, truth, and the notion of a proposition. And I say (a little) something about meaning dynamics –about the forces that shape and change word meaning within a community.

Kevin Scharp “Constitutive Principles and Meaning Reflection”

Traditional theories of constitutive principles take them to be directly involved in linguistic competence and concept possession. However, these sorts of views have been thoroughly criticized by Quine, Williamson, and others. Nevertheless, human behaviour seems to require some kind of distinction between people who mean different things and people who merely have different beliefs. I propose a theory of concepts and their constitutive principles that is not based on concept possession. Instead, it is based on the hitherto overlooked phenomenon of meaning reflection. Meaning reflection is the stage in a conversation at which one or more participants reflect on whether everyone involved means the same thing by the words involved. A constitutive principle is one that, if denied in a conversation, initiates meaning reflection. This theory of constitutive principles has a number of advantages over traditional theories, and can even be extended to explain concept possession. Zeynep Soysal “Analyticity in Set Theory”

In this paper, I argue that the basic axioms of set theory are analytic relative to set theorists’ way of possessing the concept set; that is, possessing the concept set in the way that set theorists do is sufficient for being in a position to know the basic axioms of set theory. I first argue that if one can possess the concept set without being in a position to know the basic axioms of set theory, then there are other ways of possessing the concept set. I then argue that on one way of possessing the concept set, the facts that make it the case that one possesses the concept set also make it the case that one is in a position to know the basic axioms of set theory. Finally, I argue that this is the way that set theorists possess the concept set.

Brian Weatherson “Inferentialism and Logical Knowledge”

I review some of the examples that drive the debate between Boghossian and Williamson. I note that it is taken for granted in much of the debate that people can tell whether a particular argument is of a particular form. This assumption seems questionable; indeed it is false in the Vann McGee example that started the whole debate off. Dropping the assumption provides a way to save the letter of inferentialism, though probably not the spirit of it. I use these considerations to investigate the possibility, and desirability, of a limited, externalist, inferentialism.

Åsa Wikforss “Understanding, Assent and Deviant Speakers”

According to traditional inferentialism meaning is determined by implicit definitions, requiring an internal link between understanding the meaning of a term (grasping a concept) and assent. In his 2007 book, Timothy Williamson argues against inferentialism on the grounds that it cannot account for deviant speakers: Individuals who fail to exhibit the required pattern of assent, but who nevertheless understand the meaning of the terms involved. Williamson not only rejects inferentialism, however, but the very idea that understanding is epistemic. I argue that Williamson’s criticisms of traditional inferentialism are compelling, but that he goes too far in severing the link between meaning and assent. Rejecting inferentialism requires an alternative account of meaning determination, and the most plausible alternative, I suggest, is a version of semantic holism combined with a principle of meaning determination that appeals to rationality constraints. On this account, understanding will be epistemic in nature, despite the rejection of inferentialism. Indeed, I argue, the principle of meaning determination that Williamson himself proposes (the principle of ‘knowledge maximization’) is incompatible with the radically non-epistemic conception of understanding that he wishes to defend.