Before Kripke’s Naming and Necessity modal sceptics held ascendancy. Quine’s allegations of philosophical confusion at the basis of modal logic and modal idioms were influential. It was Kripke’s work, both his formal account of the semantics for modal logic and the philosophical perspective provided by Naming and Necessity, that made talk of necessity and counterfactual situations part and parcel of the philosophical toolbox.
He also tore apart the alignment of necessity and a priority and with it their alignment with the semantic category of analyticity.
Whereas necessity is now taken for granted in philosophical discourse (even if different philosophers understand it differently), the notion of the a priori is still associated with disquiet and scepticism. Among recidivist description theorists, there has been an attempt to domesticate the a priori reducing it to the familiar space of possible worlds by giving an account of it using two-dimensional modal logic. This gives an, at best, partial account of the a priori that misses key aspects of the a priori which allows the notion to do the work we want it to do.
I will detail how the two-dimensional approach misses the epistemic aspects of the a priori. Can we do better?
In this paper I sketch an approach with seems promising, if difficult. It starts with a contested notion, the self-evident, and suggests that we can ground the a priori in this notion. Along the way we will see how this construction can be used to do philosophical work we needed doing.
Associate Professor Michaelis Michael studied zoology and philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne before doing a PhD in philosophy at Princeton University. He works across a broad range of topics in philosophy, from human rights to formal logic. He has recently published on the role of non-cognitive factors in religious conversion, on arguments on the metaphysics of mind, and against the idea we need to adopt deviant logics to deal with inconsistent theories in science.
A recent focus has been on the way Big Data has changed the way we do science and the possible costs of those changes.
He has recently published a book on the conceptual and empirical aspects of the theory of natural selection.
