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segunda-feira, 23 de setembro de 2019

BASIC EPISTEMOLOGY (1) (ROUGH DRAFT)


DRAFT C

OBS.: THIS IS WORK IN PROGRESS: A ROUGH DRAFT.


BASIC EPISTEMOLOGY


















Preface

I.               Origins of Knowledge

II.            Definition of Knowledge

III.         The Network of Beliefs

IV.          Limits of Knowledge


















PREFACE

I essentially agree with Susan Haack’s diagnostic of present epistemology as corrupted by scientism, which leads to a fragmentation of the field in an increasing proliferation of sub-theories competing one with the other without any end in view.[1] The result of this methodology of dividing to conquer has produced a kind of a scholastic stalemate – at least when seen from a wider philosophical standpoint. Moreover, I agree with her understanding of consilience: the assumption that nature has a unified structure waiting to be discovered. The same could be expected in the field of epistemology. It is plausible to think that the different central domains of epistemology could be more closely inter-related than they seem to be. Consider, for instance, the parallelism between coherence and foundationalist theories of justification and coherence and correspondence theories of truth. Is does not seem to be by mere accident, but both dichotomies are treated as they had nothing in common. Because of this, a considerable portion of this book is an attempt to select and work out the most plausible approaches, striving in an attempt to associate them in reasonable ways in order to uncover a suspected but never spelled coherent whole. Working with this kind of reintegrative methodological orientation, I am only giving the epistemology the prospect of building the kind of speculative bridge that should be allowed in any non-dogmatic philosophical enterprise.
   For criticism and support, I would like to thank professors Robert Fogelin, Richard Swinburne, John Cottingham, Oswaldo Porchat, and João Branquinho. I also thank Dr. James Brice for his insightful proofreading of my text.





A coup de dés jamais n’abolirá le hazard.
Mallarmé



























I
SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE


Darwin’s idea is like a universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.
Daniel Dennett

Epistemology is usually defined as the investigation of the sources, nature and limits of knowledge, that is, from where knowledge comes, how it is constituted, and how far it is able to go… I begin in this chapter by considering from where it comes.
   Some sources of knowledge are always mentioned in the literature: experience, priori access, memory, and testimony. The first two sources are primary, while the second two are secondary, since they are tributaries to the first ones. If I have the memory of having let my car in the parking lot, it is because I had the experience of having let it there. If I remember the modus ponens, it is because I have learned this logic rule as part of my supposed a priori knowledge. False memories are not rare; they are not real memories, because they do not correspond to their sources. However, memory is mandatory: a person who loses her memory will have her capacity for knowing practically eliminated. Testimony is also an important secondary source of knowledge. We often gain reliable knowledge by means of information given by other people. Moreover, testimony has been amplified today by a plethora of new methods of obtaining information given by others, like radio, television, newspapers, books, and all the information at disposal on the internet. Testimony is but a secondary source, since ultimately all this information will be based on the primary sources of sensory experience, intuition and reason. No doubt, experience and a priori access are the chief candidates to the role of primary sources of knowledge.
   The main divide between rationalist and empiricist philosophers in the philosophical tradition concerns the extension of the a priori knowledge. Rationalists (Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel…) always tended to emphasize the importance and extension of the a priori knowledge, if possible eschewing experiential knowledge. Empiricists, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the role of experience, reducing the a priori knowledge to non-substantive propositions (Locke, Hume…), if not trying to eschew this form of knowledge completely or almost completely (Quine, Stuart Mill…). This distinction is inevitably vague since there is a range of levels and kinds of rationalism and empiricism.
   Our next question is what is, more precisely, experience, and what is, more precisely, a priori access.
   The first question seems to be easier to answer. It gives us the so-called a posteriori or empirical knowledge. When we speak of experience, we usually refer to the perceptual experience given by the five senses of the world around us. An example is a statement like “This computer is on”. But we can also refer to the reflexive or introspective knowledge we have of our mental states like sensations, feelings and thoughts. Statements like “I feel pain” and “I think that Schliemann discovered Troy”, are of this kind. Even occurrences of thought are experiential since, like the other cases, they are contingent and occur in time and space. And as Laurence BonJour noted, even the cartesian cogito é experiential.[2] Moreover, much of our knowledge is indirectly obtained from experience, as our knowledge that the tyrannosaurus was a carnivorous reptilian or that gravitational waves can change the spatial dimensions of physical objects.
   The second question is philosophically more difficult. It concerns the nature of the a priori knowledge. Kant seems to be the first person to have suggested the term ‘a priori’ applied to judgements. He has defined the a priori judgement negatively, as a true knowledge that does not need to be justified by experience, even if it presupposes the experiential learning of its constitutive concepts. In order to make it clear, I give the following list of candidates of a priori statements:

1.    Bachelors are not married. Triangles have three sides. If Mary is the mother of John, then John is the son of Mary. a = a.
2.     1 + 1 = 2. A cube has 8 edges. The sum of the angles of a triangle is 1800.
3.    P = P. ~(P & ~P). P v ~P. P & (P → Q) → Q. (P & Q) → P. (~P v Q) → Q. A > B, B > C, hence A > C.
4.    We should not cause suffering to innocent people. Social justice is equity. Moral action must search the highest happiness to the majority.
5.    A colour has extension. The same surface cannot be read all over and blue all over. Any event must have a cause. The universe is uniform.   

Consider (1): they are cases of a priori knowledge typically called analytic. We can define an analytic statement as the statement that is true in virtue of the arrangements of the meanings of its semantic components.[3] A property of these statements is that their negation produces a contradiction or an incoherence. Triangles do not have three sides contradicts the definition of a triangle as a closed plane geometric figure with three internal angles and three sides. This kind of statements are easily transformed in logical tautologies by replacement of synonymic expressions (pace Quine) like “[Non-married adult males] are non-married” in the place of “Bachelors are non-married”. (Most empiricist philosophers try to reduce the knowledge a priori to this more innocuous case.) The examples given in (2) and (3) are respectively from mathematics and logic. Many believe that at least the principles of these formal sciences are intuitively given a priori. (4) exemplifies some ethical principles. (5) exemplifies some candidates to what we could call synthetic a priori judgments, which would be statements a priori but able to tell something about the world.[4] Their identifying criterion is that, differently from analytic statements, they can be negated without contradiction.

Difficulties in defining a priori truths
Kant has seen necessity and strict universality as the marks of a priori truth. Contemporary epistemologists have weakened this exigence. For many, the a priori knowledge can be fallible.[5] This failure can occur, not only because it can be mistakenly accessed, but also because it can be defeated, either by the emergence of other a priori knowledge or by the cumulation of recalcitrant experience.
    We saw Kants negative definition of a priori knowledge. Necessity and strict generality would be positive traits, but we have abandoned them. In the case of experience, we can give a positive characterization by saying that the access is experiential and speak of external or internal spatiotemporal entities that cause it. But there is no analog concerning the a priori. Instead of experience, we can recur to terms like ‘apprehension’, ‘insight’, ‘intuition and reason’. Terminologically, it is helpful to distinguish two kinds of a priori access: intuition, when it seems to be directly given to us, and reason, when it demands a reasoning process beginning with intuitions. Consider, for instance, the two following examples of a priori knowledge: “1 + 1 = 2”, and “29,324 + 18,916 = 48,240”. The first is intuitively reached since we do not need to use reasoning in order to apprehend its truth. The second one, however, demands reasoning in order to be seen as true, at least in the case of normal human beings. An important point to be noted is that the distinction between both cases is variable according to the epistemic agent and to a certain extent to her training. God would have only intuitive knowledge of the a priori, since he would not need to use reasoning to know the results of what we inferentially know. It is useful to preserve this understanding of the word ‘intuition’.
   Traditional rationalist philosophers tried to furnish a corresponding simile to the perceptual experience appealing to mystic-religiose explanations.  Thus, Plato suggested that we acquire knowledge of ideas through reminiscence. Hence, if I see a triangular object, it contains an imperfect copy of the idea of tringle; this makes me remember the abstract idea of the tringle, with which my soul has been in contact when it was hovering in the world of ideas, before its incorporation in a human body (notice that interpreters doubt to what extent Plato’s resource to this wat not an elucidative resource). Hence, knowledge results from recollection (anamnesis). Anticipating the opposition between rationalism and empiricism, he classified the former as “friends of ideas” and the latter as “earth-born giants”, Augustin defended the doctrine of divine illumination. We learn the truths of mathematics, of aesthetics and morality because God illuminates us, making us to remember them when we look at the interior of our souls. For Descartes things could not be much different. We have the idea of God as the being that has all the perfections. As we are imperfect, this idea cannot be originated from ourselves. Hence, God exists, and he placed since the beginning his idea in us as an innate idea. As an infinitely good being, he allows that we have access to a priori truths that possess the marks of clarity and distinction that we find in the (a priori) ideas of mathematics. Although very few today accept this kind of explanation, it is important to see that it always appeals to innatism. Leibniz was well-known by regarding innate ideas as dispositional. According to him, the experience is like a sculptor chiseling away at a block of marble to expose the sculpture already present inside it, namely, the innate ideas[6]
         
1. Different methodological sources
It is worth to notice that rationalist philosophers have historically assigned great value to formal sciences. They tried to import the kind of deductive reasoning used in mathematics into philosophy itself, insofar as they could infer knowledge deductively from adequate intuitions. Plato required knowledge of geometry as a condition for admission to his academy. Descartes was a great mathematician who invented analytic geometry. Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus. Spinoza was not a mathematician, but he tried to give an axiomatic structure to his Ethica.
   Empiricist philosophers didn’t have great difficulty with the epistemological access to the empirical world since it seems to be natural. Their view was that experience is the source of all (or almost all) our substantive knowledge. Real knowledge should be a posteriori. Above the mathematics, they tended to praise the inductive reasoning of empirical sciences, as Locke, who lauded the incomparable scientific work of Newton at the beginning of his Essay. Locke can be seen as a kind of prototype of an empiricist philosopher. His metaphor of the newborn child’s mind was a blank sheet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled by experience. This metaphor illustrates as much the force as also the weakness of the empiricist view. The force lies in its openness: nothing is warranted beforehand. The weakness lies in the fact that it gives us no idea of how it is possible that a whole edifice of knowledge can be constructed from nothing beyond random experience. (As Karl Popper once wrote, if someone asks us simply “to observe…”, this question will make no sense until the person tells us what to observe, giving us in this way some direction.) Empiricism also does not explain how these resulting contents can contain enough similar grounds to allow interpersonal agreement. As a defender of rationalism, Popper ridiculed empiricism, suggesting that it is a theory of the mental bucket. Empiricists, he wrote, believe the mind of a newborn is like an empty bucket. In time this bucket is slowly filled with material coming from our senses, this material accumulates and becomes digested as knowledge, though no one would be able to tell how.[7] Against this naïve theory of the empty bucket, Popper proposed his own view: the spotlight theory of knowledge. We are predisposed to inquire about the world in determinate ways, and by allowing our ideas to be refuted by experience, we make ourselves able to create new and better ways to understand it.
   Against rationalism, it makes sense to point out the religious or mystical ingredient that is often – though not necessarily – involved. Nietzsche was the philosopher who identified in Socrates-Plato what he called the negation of life, an attempt to escape from the hard vicissitudes of human existence into a transcendent world outside space and time.[8] Philosophers, as persons used to the life of thought much more than to the life of action, are particularly prone to this form of escapism.
   Nonetheless, this susceptibility alone is certainly not what sustains rationalism. For some problems, it was rather the only explanatory way available before the Darwinian revolution. The mystical ingredient can be false and rationalism true, and many contemporary friends of rationalism (Carl Jung, Karl Popper, Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, to name just a few) have nothing mystical in their worldviews. In what follows, I intend to show that we can capture the important element of truth in the rationalist persuasion without having to necessarily embrace any form of mysticism.

2. Evolutionary induction
It is not difficult to agree with the empiricist when he says that much of our knowledge is a posteriori. But the thesis that all our knowledge is a posteriori has always been seriously questioned, at least for the reason that the mind must in some way construct and organize the empirical experience in order to achieve knowledge. However, one cannot today explain the origin of the a priori intuition appealing to the world of ideas, where the soul lived before being incarnated, like Plato, or to God’s will to insert innate concepts in our minds in the form of clear and distinct ideas, like Descartes. It is at this point that the theory of evolution comes into play.
   Daniel Dennett has often noticed that the pre-Darwinian explanations of the origin of species were of the kind “Top-Down”.[9] For instance: God created the man and all other species once and for all. On the other hand, post-Darwinian explanations of the origin of species are of the kind “Bottom-up”. According to them, the human being is the result of more than a million years of a blind process of trial and error called natural selection. Now, the same idea can be applied to our propensions to cognitively build a priori knowledge, or, to be more careful, a priori beliefs. A priori truths can be originated from our innate capacities and dispositions.
    In our times the most plausible way to defend rationalism, even if in a modified form, consists in the appeal to natural evolution. Carl Jung posed the idea of an inherited collective unconscious, built by archetypical structures that work as innate trigger mechanisms, even if later speculatively exaggerating the role of these structures.[10] Popper has called our attention to the philosophical relevance of filial imprinting in animals.[11] As Konrad Lorenz observed, in the critical period between 13 to 16 hours after hatching greylag geese develop the disposition to follow the first object that moves before them, which normally is their own mother. However, it can be any unexpected moving object, such as Lorenz’s moving boots. After imprinting, they followed Lorenz wherever he went. Popper noticed that we also have innate dispositions to form some primitive “theories” about the world. But unlike Lorenz’s geese, we are able to correct them. This is a kind of flexibility that has proved very helpful to our survival. In fact, something near to imprinting in human beings might be reverse sexual imprinting, which would be the tendency of children born and raised together not to feel sexual attraction to one another.[12] In human beings, there are, however, many other manifest inborn dispositional traits, like the disposition of small children to look to the eyes of their mothers when called, which makes possible the also innately determined capacity of reading facial expressions, which plays a crucial role in the socialization process.[13] Another interesting case is that of a rare deficiency called prosopagnosia (face blindness). People with severe prosopagnosia are unable to identify the faces of other people, including their own image in a mirror. This means that the ability to construct images of many different faces and retain them in memory is innate[14].  More theoretically, Jean Piaget’s well-known four stages of children’s cognitive development must to a great extent be genetically programmed[15]. Furthermore, we need to explain how children are able to learn their mother tongue rapidly from the ages 2 to 5 years. It seems necessary to posit some kind of what Noam Chomsky called a language acquisition device in order to explain this ability[16], particularly when we consider that those children later lose this ability.
   Doubtless, we have a multiplicity of complex innate dispositions and capacities that lead us to react in this or that way, and may cause us to develop cognitive responses that might correspond to what rationalist philosophers understood as innate ideas and thoughts, insofar as we are adequately stimulated. Since the first goal of natural selection is not truth, but mere survival, we cannot expect that all these selected dispositions and capacities are of the kind that helps us find the truth. But some of them must-do precisely this, since knowing the truth is a key to survival. As Michael Devitt noted[17], if a belief is beneficial to survival, it is to expect that the process of natural selection makes with the time innate disposition to entertain it. This does not mean that the belief must be true. Devitt’s example is that of religion; it may be that we have a predisposition to adopt a religious belief, which can help us to collectively survive, without this religious belief being the truth. Another example could be the defense mechanisms considered by the psychoanalysis, as the negation, the projection, the repression, the rationalization and the sublimation. These mechanisms might have nothing to do with the search of truth, but they are necessary to protect the psychological structure of a person. However, as Devitt also noted, it may be that the disposition to form a belief is beneficial precisely because it is true, being by this reason selected. Devitt considers this argument as complementary to his view that there is no a priori belief.[18] I take a different stand; I think this argument shows the empirical origin of our priori beliefs.
   If we apply this kind of reasoning to the concepts and thoughts prized by rationalist philosophers like Plato, Descartes or Kant, we would have an evolutionary explanation for the role they give to a priori knowledge. This knowledge would not be the result of some intellectual intuition of essences, or of the soul’s grasping of eternal ideas in the Platonic realm, or something innately given to us by the Cartesian God, but simply the result of a displaced form of induction that I wish to call evolutionary induction.
   This idea of evolutionary induction must be explained and justified. In order to do this, I begin by considering a trivial case of numerical induction. It is true that our knowledge of the empirical world is often and more primarily reached by cognitive numerical induction, namely, from the experience of the frequent association of different facts in time and space, like fire with light or warmth. In order to illustrate this, suppose an imaginary case of a cognitive being not endowed with any geometric intuition, wishing to discover what kind of line covers the shortest distance between two points. His inductive reasoning would be:

Schema A
Numerical individual induction:
- [a] The line covering the shortest distance between these two points [b] is a straight line.
- [a] The line covering the shortest distance between these other two points [b] is again a straight line.
 (…)___________________________________________________
- (Consequently) [a] All the lines covering the shortest distance between two points [b] are straight lines.

Now, one can argue that our innate dispositions, prompting us to react to adequate stimuli building some kind of intuition or reason (generating a priori concepts, judgments, and reasonings) had a similar inductive source, not in epistemic subjects, but in the evolution of the species. As we have seen, at least in some cases, natural selection chose the members of a population that have phenotypical traces more adequate for survival in their surroundings, at least until the age of reproductive maturity, simply because they react by having thoughts that are true in the sense of corresponding with reality. However, it seems clear to me that in this case we also have an inductive process. It is inductive at the evolutionary level. We can suggest that this occurs in animals and particularly in human beings, even if in the latter case with results that can be further treated in much more flexible ways, since handled by the intervention of many contextually and culturally developed variables, so that instead of speaking of stimuli we should here rather speak of adequate circumstances, cultural contexts, life forms.
   I think I can give a convincing example of evolutionary induction that goes beyond a mere analogy. It concerns the well-known fate of applied Euclidian geometry. Kant considered its principles to be examples of synthetic a priori judgments, ways the mind is able to legislate on the phenomenal world of experience. For him, statements like “a straight line is the shortest distance between two points”, “through a point outside a straight line only one parallel can be drawn”, or “the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is 1800.”
   This certainty disappeared soon after Kant’s death, with the discovery of non-Euclidean elliptical and hyperbolic geometries. This has shown that there were at least logically possible worlds where the principles of Euclidean geometry do not apply. Worst of all, in 1915 the general theory of relativity showed that real physical space does not follow a Euclidian geometry, but an elliptical Riemannian geometry which changes depending on the curvature of space-time under the influence of gravitational fields.[19] This curvature, however, is too small to be perceived by us in our surroundings. It can be measured only as the result of gravitational fields in cosmological dimensions. Thus, if you draw a triangle between the Earth, Mars and Jupiter, you will see that the sum of its internal angles is greater than 1800.
   The conclusion is that natural evolution has endowed us with the intuitions of Euclidean geometry because it is not only simpler but also precise enough to allow us to deal successfully with our surroundings, and this is what mattered for our ancestors’ survival. Hence, it is easy to understand why we were selected by evolution to understand and see Euclidian geometry in a more direct and natural way as part of our genetic endowment. We have the a priori intuition that we can draw only one straight line between any two points. We see by some “natural light of reason” that we can draw only one parallel line through a point outside a straight line and that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle must always be 1800. I understand these proclivities as legitimate results of evolutionary induction in the following way. Across many generations, natural selection has eliminated those members of our species without any ability to think using Euclidean geometry, and preserved those members more or less endowed with the capacity for thinking with this geometry. Notwithstanding its own limitations, Euclidian geometry had the great advantage of furnishing us a sufficiently reliable point of departure. (Bertrand Russell wrote in his Autobiography that as he was a child, he deduced most of Euclidian theorems without having read the Elements; he had a better innate endowment to understanding Euclidian geometry than most of us.)
   At first view, ‘evolutionary induction’ might seem a strange expression for a strange form of induction. However, this impression disappears once we see that the inductive result does not need to be restricted to the psychological experience of an existing epistemic subject, or even of any collaborative community of epistemic subjects. To restrict induction to a psycho-social phenomenon is a chauvinist prejudice. Inductions are logical inferences that by chance instantiate cognitively in human epistemic agents. But this is a contingent fact. Induction can be instantiated in an adequately programmed computer. In a similar way, induction can be instantiated in the process of natural selection in order to produce shared innate propensions to reach a priori beliefs. We only displace the experience of the individuals to the “experience” of a species. The above-described result of evolutionary induction isn’t structurally different from our normal processes of induction by enumeration, except for the fact that it is coupled with a process of natural selection in which the social disposition for the inductive conclusion, which appears to us in the form of intuition or reason, can take many thousands of years to fully develop. Here is a schema regarding the shortest distance between two points provided in the long run by our evolutionary induction:

Schema B
Numerical evolutionary induction
A member of the species is able to survive [a] by seeing straight lines as [b] the shortest distance between two points.
Another member of the species is able to survive by [a] seeing straight lines as [b] the shortest distances between two points.
(…)___________________________________________________
(Consequently) In general, the selected members of the species have the intuition that [a’s] straight lines are [b’s] the shortest distances between two points.

The structure of schema B is similar to the structure of schema A, not as an individual induction but as a fragment of our own species-induction. It seems that we have good reasons to think that cognitive dispositions and capacities that at first view seem to be the result of the natural light of reason are in fact an inductively grounded end-product of natural selection. Evolutionary theory has made plausible the idea that rationalism can be understood as having, after all, an empiricist inductive basis in the general process of evolution.
   Finally, the idea of evolutionary induction – a species-induction – is supported by the view according to which species are spatiotemporally enduring individuals.[20] If it were possible to bring to the earth an animal from another galaxy that was identical to our tigers, having the same genetic layout and being able to inter-crossing with our tigers, we would resist classifying this animal as a tiger. After all, tigers are animals that have developed in Asia. Because of this, we should treat a species as an individual that develops itself during the time, in a similar way as we can treat a colony of ants as an individual. This is an additional reason to think that species are able to select their members in an inductive form.
   The final conclusion is that the theory of evolution suggests that the origin of our so-called a priori intuitions and reasonings is not a mystical one. This origin lies in inherited proclivities. It is these proclivities, along with adequate experiential stimuli, which lead us to have intuitions and reasonings that we see as a priori justified. A priori justification is the justification settled by the experience of our species.

3. Examining supposed counterexamples
One could object that this conclusion is too hasty, since most intuitions and reasonings that are important for the rationalist philosopher seem to have little, perhaps nothing at all to do with most of the dispositions and capacities initially considered. They are moral views, logical principles, arithmetical judgments and, mainly, metaphysical principles like the view according to which all events must have causes, or the libertarianist view of free will as transcending causal constraints. At first view, such abstract ideas do not seem to have as their source innate dispositions resulting from natural evolution. Moreover, we also have seemingly unavoidable metaphysical concepts, like those of substance, property, number and existence, which do not seem to be empirically explainable.
   One can answer this objection by saying that many of these intuitions have indeed an evolutionary source, some of them being of such a general kind that they must belong to any evolutionary endowment, but this does not prevent them from being illusory. In what follows, I will consider them separately.

1.    Analytical statements. There is the more trivial case of conventional definitions like “A square is a special kind of rectangle” or “Bachelors are not married”, and even stipulative trivialities like “a = a”. They are analytical because true in virtue of meaning. The kind of a priori called analytical in the Fregean sense, that is, able to be transformed into logical tautologies by substitution of terms. Thus, since “A square (Df.) = a rectangle with equal sides”, we can derive the tautology “A rectangle with equal sides is a rectangle”, and since “A Bachelor (Df) = a non-married adult male”, we can derive the tautology “A non-married adult male is non-married”. In themselves, these identities are made to be true; what might occur is that they can be eroded by changes in our conceptual system. In a society where there is no place for marriage, there will be no usefulness to the concept of bachelor. However, truth-value should not be confused with usefulness (pace Quine).

2.    Moral proclivities. Moral dispositions clearly have some evolutionary basis. People are social animals. Consider the moral rule: “Do not harm innocent people”. Even if this can be an object of critical thinking, it serves as a rule of thumb. We are endowed with moral dispositions, and if we do not follow them and we do not lack these dispositions (as in the case of psychopaths), we are damned to feel bad conscience. Moral principles like “We should act in order to increase the general well-being” or “We should not do to others what one would not like to get done to ourselves” are selected because they further the collaboration in a community and human society does not thrive without this collaborative element.
It is interesting to see that all these rules can be seen as a priori, though fallible. We can always imagine situations in which their application can be wrong. But we feel that there is something redeemable in them and that it is the task of moral philosophy the attempt to refine them in order to make them undeniable. Finally, one should pay attention to what is called epistemic overdetermination: the possibility that our a priori justification is reinforced or weakened by experience, through induction or refutation. In this sense, epistemic overdetermination can be as old as Plato’s teaching of geometry in the Phaedo, and as common as we might suspect.

3.    Mathematical Truths. An interesting case is that of mathematical truths. I already considered the case of geometry, showing that we were selected to have a priori intuitions concerning Euclidean geometry, which seems more natural to us, though physics has shown that it is not the real geometry of physical space in the universe. We could here introduce the distinction between applied and abstract geometry[21]. As an applied geometrical statement, “The sum of the internal angles of a triangle is 1800” is not a synthetic a priori truth, as Kant would like us to believe, that is, an informative necessary truth concerning objective physical space achieved independently of experience. It is synthetic a posteriori and in addition false. On the other hand, this same statement can be abstractly interpreted as an analytic or self-contained a priori truth, insofar as we understand it as the result of the abstract construction derived from the Euclidian system of geometry, leaving out of consideration its applicability to the real world. This abstract geometry can also be considered necessary in the sense that it cannot be false within the abstractly considered Euclidian system.
Although some would disagree, I do not see much difficulty in applying a similar kind of reasoning to arithmetic. Consider the sentence “2 + 3 = 5”, which is usually considered an a priori truth. We do not learn it directly. We must first have the experience of counting objects like two pears and three apples in order to get five fruits. Later, we learn to think that 2 + 3 = 5 is the abstraction of any empirical counting. It is clear that the first capacity is innately determined, allowing us to establish a later convention abstractly considering 2 + 3 = 5. In this way, 2 + 3 = 5 not only finds support in our everyday usage, but if considered as an abstract convention (only conceived and never applied) it can be seen as true by definition.
  Now, suppose that we are in a possible world called Omega, where when making any applied sum, a similar additional object suddenly appears before us. For example, in the process of adding two pears and three apples, what I see before me are six pieces of fruit: two pears and, say, four apples, two of them exactly identical.[22] In this world, the applied sum 2 + 3 = 5 would be false. In fact, 2 + 3 = 6 would be the right result, the same occurring with the result of 7 + 5, which would be 13... The difficulty we have to accept this conclusion rests in the fact that we guess that this possible world would contradict all our physical laws and it would be barely conceivable. Anyway, it remains, at any rate, a logical possibility. In such a logically possible world, we would probably need to produce an abstract conventional concept of a sum that would need to be a different one, supported by changes in applied arithmetic.
Like us, a mathematician from the world Omega could make the mistake of supposing that this form of applied addition is necessary and universal, so that it could be extended to all possible worlds based on his mathematical intuition. However, as we know from our own world, this would be faulty. And this suggests that although he remains free to conclude, based on conventions, that 2 + 3 = 6 and 7 + 5 = 13, he cannot say that he can generalize this result as necessarily applicable in all possible worlds, unless he interprets these sums independently of their applications, as abstract arithmetic. In this case, he could say that these results are necessary in the sense that they could not be different in any possible world within his assumed abstract system of rules.

4.    Logical Principles. The cases of fundamental logical principles seem different. Think about the principle of non-contradiction: ~(p & ~p). Ontologically formulated, it means that it is impossible that something is the case and isn’t the case at the same time and from the same perspective. Logically formulated it says that a thought (a Fregean proposition) cannot be true and false at the same time and under the same interpretation. This principle can be seen as a priori and analytic (in the sense that it cannot be denied without contradiction): it is too fundamental to be falsified.[23] Locke was of the opinion that we learn the principle of non-contradiction from experience. For reasons already given, this cannot be true. In fact, we must be evolutionarily so constituted that we cannot do anything, except to follow the principle of non-contradiction inevitably inbuilt in our cognitive mechanisms, since without this principle he would be unable to have any cognitive experience. As Aristotle wrote, a person who denies this principle would be mute like a tree. One cannot simultaneously affirm something and its proper denial and claim to have said something. This applies to any cognitive being. A cat cannot catch a mouse if it sees a mouse and a non-mouse at the same time. A zebra that sees a lion and a non-lion at the same time will soon have a difficult time. Hence, the necessity of the principle of non-contradiction isn’t based on something like its intuition, but on its universality. If we are not wild metaphysicians, we will feel our cognitive inability to find an exception. Generally spoken, in cases as fundamental as the principles of thought or the modus ponens, we cannot make a distinction between applied and non-applied logics. And the reason is that logic, in its fundamentals, is ubiquitous. This remembers us Wittgenstein’s thesis according to which the possibility of representation is indebted to what is ultimately common between representation and world, which for him was the logical form or structure.[24] The principle of non-contradiction cannot be contradicted because as well our thought as what it represents must be in accordance with it, the community between both being justified by the natural selection. (Our capacity to apply the principle needs to be distinguished from the kind of introspective act of recognizing the principle in the thought. This act isn’t a priori. This act of recognition was instantiated for the first time, it seems, by Aristotle in his Metaphysics.)

5.    Inductive Principles. Evolutionary induction has also taught us inductive logic. It seems that we have intuitive belief in principles like those saying that the future will preserve sufficient likeness to its past to allow inductive inferences, because we are disposed to form inductive habits, and this disposition cannot be other than a result of evolutionary induction.[25] The same applies regarding something more sophisticated but equally important, abduction, the inference of the best explanation. In order to make this inference, we need a fact or set of facts leading us to infer the best explanation for something. For instance, the best explanation for the different phases of the moon, after considering different positions of the moon relative to the earth and the sun – the sun always seen on the opposite side – was that different angles of illumination through the sun were the cause. This kind of inference must assume a multitude of previous numerical inductive inferences in order to be possible. But the more sophisticated ability to make inferences about the best explanation could also be the result of a selected disposition. Those individuals able to associate several inductive evidences and see the common explanation had better chances of survival and passing this ability on to their offspring.

6.    Metaphysical Principles. Concerning legitimate metaphysical concepts like those of properties, numbers, existence, external reality, it is plausible that we also have inborn capacities to form them, consciously or not. They are framework metaphysical concepts, and their necessity is justified by their universality. We are not able to conceive any possible world in which they would not be applicable. Consider, for instance, the concept of external reality: we could say that the observance of natural laws belongs to it in an aprioristic way.
More on the opposite side, there are conventions that doubtless aim to reflect metaphysical properties of empirical reality: “Red is a color”, “Everything red is colored”, “Red is not green”, “The same surface cannot be red and green at the same time”, “A physical body must have some extension”, “If A is taller than B, and B is taller than C, then A is taller than C”... Although these statements all seem to be true by convention, these conventions are more solidly anchored in our grasp of the ways the world is constituted (the ways the world has selected us to divide it up). Because of this, we feel the ease with which we can apply the correspondence view of truth in order to warrant these statements: “Red is a color” corresponds to the fact that all reds are colors, “A physical body must have some extension” corresponds to the fact that all physical bodies have some extension.[26]
There is also a pragmatic point to be considered. These a priori statements, like the linguistic systems to which they belong, must be useful insofar as they are applicable to reality. The conceptual relations in these statements can be seen as necessarily true, insofar as the corresponding systems apply to the world, otherwise, they will be unmasked as false and not necessarily true. But there is no crucial difference between these cases and a statement like ‘Bachelors are unmarried men”, since it could lose its point in a society in which bachelors cannot be factually distinguished from married people. The only difference is that statements like “Everything red is colored” or “Things that are red are not blue” require the acceptance of a more sophisticated system of rules that in their cases define red patches as colors and different colors as mutually exclusive. A provisional conclusion is that we do not need to consider conceptual truths as detached from reality only because of their usually conventional character. Their conventions are not arbitrary; they can often be seen as reflecting the metaphysical structure of reality as we are able to conceive.
There are also metaphysical principles cherished by philosophers as “The future will be like the past” (Hume) and “All events have a cause” (Kant). They would be easily called synthetic a priori judgments. We can suspect overdetermination at work in them: they can be learned through experience and at the same time be the result of inherited proclivities. As stated above they are clearly wrong. Why cannot an event occur without any cause? Why must the future be like the past? Anyway, this does not mean that they cannot be refined in ways that make difficult to deny them without incoherence. Since I will discuss the first principle in the last chapter, I will try to refine the second one here. We can first consider a minimalist form of it: “At least one event must be caused”. Since our own experience is causal, this principle is verified by experience. This is, obviously, a too weak principle to sustain causality. But we can reformulate it as follows:

Causal relations must be at least sufficiently common to justify our expectative that, given one event, we might expect to find its causes.

Although we can reject this version, we do it with a heavy heart. We see that its rejection makes natural laws impossible, making them impossible even concerning the causal relationship between objects and their perception. Could we conceive a world in which this causal relationship could not be a law like one?

7.    Illusory philosophical beliefs. Finally, there is a lot of illusory philosophical knowledge. As hopelessly illusory, I would choose the concept of substance as a kind of “I don’t know what” support for the sensible qualities of material things that lie beyond any experience[27]. We can replace it with the material things themselves, maybe understood as bundles of spatiotemporally located tropical properties, including what physicists call ‘rest mass’[28]. Another hopeless case is the synthetic a priori principle that all events must have causes[29]. We don’t need the appeal to Hume’s authority to say that this view has no intuitive support. It is not difficult to imagine events without any cause and the generalization to all events seems to be a philosophical fancy. (However, if you say that at least some event must have a cause, I will tend to agree, since it seems impossible to conceive the world without this assumption.) Consider, finally, the “feeling of freedom”. Libertarians have appealed to this feeling as evidence that we are able to transcend causal determinism in our decisions: we feel that we could decide to do otherwise. However, plausible compatibilist theories of free will, by explaining our freedom of decision as constituted by the lack of restrictions on human decisions, justify this feeling of freedom as caused by the intrinsic incapacity of our conscious minds to become aware of all the causal factors involved in the decision process.[30]

Evolution shows that cognitive beings that were selected as able to make the right kind of association are able not only to protect their lives but also to form ideas that are often true. In the last case, we have the process of evolutionary induction. The evolutionarily selected cognitive beings have learned to correlate their representations with the facts, reaching truths in the sense of correspondence to the way things really are, at least to a relevant extent, even if abstracting them in the form of analytical truths. This is the real source of all our a priori intuitions and reasoning. Plato’s anamnesis was a “Top-Down” foreshadowing of the end-product of evolutionary induction, which is, in fact, a “Bottom-Up” process.

4. Conclusion
What should we conclude from all these considerations? One could conclude with Devitt, that in the end empiricism wins since it seems that the ultimate source of our knowledge is in one way or another inductively originated from the interaction between the senses and empirical reality. However, I am afraid that this conclusion does not do justice to rationalism. Rationalism, like any philosophical position, should be evaluated not by its errors, but by its insights. Plato was in error by appealing to mythological explanations, but he was not to blame regarding this since they were the only that his time could reach. But Plato was also prescient in believing that there is something innate informing our experience. On the other hand, a rationalist system like that of Spinoza, which is a naturalist and treats the extended physical world as a different way of presentation of the mental world, both of them belonging to the infinite attributes of God or Nature or Substance, is compatible with evolutionary theory. A proponent of evolutionary induction could reinterpret this system without falling into contradiction.
   Moreover, we can accept a considerable amount of innately determined intuitive or rational a priori knowledge, insofar as we admit, against old fashioned rationalists, that what we are assuming to be knowledge is fallible. The belief in infallible a priori truths belonged to a time when philosophers didn’t have any Darwinian option. Furthermore, there is nothing in rationalism forcing us to reject induction. These would be naïve and committed forms of rationalism. What really distinguishes rationalism in its modern form seems to be its emphasis on the role of innate dispositions and capacities in the construction of knowledge. And what distinguishes empiricism is the emphasis on our minds’ ability to react before the accumulation of empirical evidence, making use of the different forms of inductive reasoning in order to develop or challenge our original dispositions and capacities. Traditional empiricism, by rejecting innate knowledge also rejects Darwinian answers, like the products of evolutionary induction, falling into the exceeding poverty of mental buckets theory. More plausibly the two elements, inborn propensities and inductive experiential procedures, must have a complementary role to play in the development of human knowledge. In the same way, as psychology has overcome the opposition between inborn influences and influences of the external world by admitting the unavoidable interaction between the two, epistemology informed by evolutionary theory overcomes the opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Insufficiently aware of the evolutionary link, traditional rationalism and empiricism have respectively over-emphasized either one or the other, according to the inclinations of philosophers and philosophical movements. So considered is a dichotomy fated to disappear.






[1] Susan Haack, Reintegrating Philosophy.
[2] Laurence Bonjour: 2011: 284
[3] Kant defined them as judgements in which the concept of the predicate does belong to the concept of the subject. Consequently, the analytic judgement only unpacks the meaning of the subject term. The deficiency of this definition is that it applies only to subject-predicate statements.
[4] Kant defined them as judgments in which the concept of the predicate does not belong to the concept of the subject. Thus, in the statement “All events are caused causes”, the concept of cause does not belong to the concept of the event. Hence, it is synthetic, though according to him is known a priori.
[5] See Bonjour, 1998.
[6] Leibniz, 1981, 153.
[7] Popper, 1974, 61 f.
[8] Nietzsche 1999
[9] Daniel Dennett 2018
[10] Anthony Stevens: On Jung, Ch. 2.
[11] Popper 1992, 6
[12] This tendency, called the Westermark effect, though probable, is however disputable. It contradicts Sigmund Freud’s suggestion of the universality of the Oedipus complex. See Shor, Eran, Simchai, Dalit (2009), 1803-1842.
[13] Autistic children lack this disposition, along with the absence of the innate ability to read social behavior (See Attwood 2007).
[14] Sacks, 2010.
[15] Piaget 1977.
[16] Chomsky 1965.
[17] Michael Devitt, 2010, 272
[18] Michael Devitt, 2005.
[19] There are challenges to this view, but they are not the most convincing. (e.g., Bonjour 1998, Appendix).
[20] David Hull: “Are Species really Individuals?” Systematic Biology, 1976, 25, 174-191.
[21] Pappineau, 2012: 4.6.
[22] C. I. Lewis (1995: 288) noted that this would be a physical, not a mathematical phenomenon. But the increase of the internal angles of a given triangle is also a physical phenomenon. Applied arithmetic isn’t abstract, precisely because it includes physical objects as its subject matter. Therefore, concerning applied arithmetic, there is nothing wrong in this kind of mental experiment, originally conceived by J. S. Mill. See also Casullo, 2010, p. 47.
[23] There is, obviously, objections against this conclusion. A contemporary example is dialetheism. But this kind of paraconsistent logic seems to be less plausible always that we try to pass from the mere manipulation of symbols to its application in supposedly real cases.
[24] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2.2.
[25] For a discussion and refinement of this assumption, see Costa, 2018, Appendix to Chapter V.
[26] A curious point is that our innate predispositions seem to be able to influence the chosen metaphilosophy. If you are an empiricist or a rationalist is something that might be in part determined by your gens and in part, of course, by the external determinants of your intellectual growing.

[27] Locke, 1975: I, iv, 18.
[28] Costa 2018: 169-172.
[29] Kant 1929, Second Analogy.
[30] Dennett 1984, p. 112.

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