I am really tempted to question the analytic a priori as well. I know it sounds like a crazy proposition, and likely is, but I think it's valid. It is hard to verify my thoughts without any contemporary philosophers sharing the view (that I could find) but here it is anyway: It is already properly understood among evolutionary psychologists, neurologists and others, that the human brain is a pattern recognizing machine. It evolved to see patterns in its environment to further its survival and evolutionary fitness. If principles of causality weren't true of the world, our mind would likely not think in terms of causes and effects, but in an entirely different manner. Of course it is hard for us to imagine what "sound" reasoning would look like without appealing to causes and effects, if; then statements, law of identity, contradiction and excluded middle axioms and so on. But my claim is that while all of these axioms might be true (and I say might deliberately, for I do not believe them to be **necessarily** true) our knowledge of their truth is in some sense directly correlated with our experience of the world. Or put another way, our gene's "experience" of the world. The world's stimuli is what ultimately resulted in a human brain that favors one set of axioms and logic over another, for it is relevant to our world. So to claim we can have a priori knowledge that is entirely detached from experience, makes little sense to me under this framework. Think about what it would mean if we lived in an entirely different universe. Different laws of nature, fundamental principles like causality and linear time, property permanence and consistency and so on. Would it be true to say that you have a priori knowledge of unmarried bachelors? In what sense can that be called knowledge, if in this other universe unmarried men *can* be bachelors in experience? I recognize this is an a a posteriori claim, but the implication is that our analytic knowledge contradicts our synthetic. This strikes me as absurd. You might argue such a world cannot exist, but the justification of such an argument, whatever its content, relies itself on the very axioms of rationality in question.
@@rl7012I'm not sure why human instinct would require an explanation if there's no a priori knowledge? Human instincts are just behaviours, they're not knowledge. Traditionally knowledge is defined as "justified true belief". So the first problem is that instincts are innate behaviours inherited from your genetic make-up, they're not beliefs. There might be instinctual emotional states, but that's still not really a belief about the world, that's an internal feeling. And then there's the "justified" and "true" part of knowledge. If you say you know something because your mom told you so, is that justification solid enough? Maybe for trivial matters, but not for more serious ones, like if she told you she saw a ghost. Then you would need more than her say-so, you would synthetic evidence. Similarly, even if you did have beliefs innately, from your instincts, whose to say they are correct beliefs? They are based on genetic composition afterall, genetics which have formed over millions of years. Whatever information they contain is bound to be outdated, or based on conditions of the environment your ancestors were in, which may not apply to your current environment. Without experience to supplement and verify your instincts, you simply have no grounding to call it knowledge. But again, I question that instincts are any kind of belief altogether, I only think of them as behaviours. Response to stimuli. Think of instincts like a child following a very detailed instruction manual of say, how to build a camp fire. They don't actually have any knowledge of what they're doing. What wood is, what fire is, how to start a fire, why fires burn, why they're hot, why they even should build a camp fire to begin with, all they're doing is simply following instructions, without thinking. Now if you came across this child as an outside observer, I would not fault you for assuming the child has knowledge of camp fires. That they're some kind of genius prodigy with innate knowledge of the world. But it is ultimately a mistake to assume so. Finally, one could even question the a priori nature of instincts to begin with. We start experiencing the world through our senses the moment we're born. Heck, probably even before we're born, prior to conscious experience when our cells are swimming in all kind of chemicals in the womb, and after consciousness arises and our senses start picking up stimuli. Whose to say we aren't forming our instincts from an early age based on our environment as we develop? We are only capable of reflecting on our instincts once we're older, afterall. So there's really no way to tell.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter ' Human instincts are just behaviours, they're not knowledge.' They are not just behaviours. You can have any type of behaviour you like, but only certain types will be instinctual. It is why you can't blame wild animals who escape from a zoo and kill people, they are only doing as their nature dictates. But you can blame a person who kills someone else because they want their car. The person knows better, the wild animal does not. Instincts are an innate knowledge. Babies innately know to cry to get attention and get their needs met. Neglected babies often stop crying as they have learned that it doesn't work. 'Finally, one could even question the a priori nature of instincts to begin with.' Yes, but you put it down to evolution. Where did a blind mindless process get instincts from? How did bacteria develop into such complex conscious life? We are born with our instincts already, it is just that different life situations brings them out or doesn't bring them out. The instincts are not something that form after birth, they just get developed after birth or not. So there is inherent a priori knowledge. Instincts are a form of knowledge and for all we know they are there from conception.
@@rl7012 I'm sorry but you don't sound like you know what you're talking about. I told you I think instincts are not knowledge, they are behaviour, and then you give me an example of a baby's instinctual behaviour to cry to get attention. Where's the knowledge part in that, exactly? Are you actually the suggesting the baby is purposefully crying to get attention, as if it understands what attention is? Babies that young literally do not even have a proper understanding of self, let alone the existence of other people. They are great at reading faces, but that is about it. Don't overestimate the cognitive abilities of babies. They don't even know why they are crying 90% of the time. Then you ask how the "blind mindless process" of evolution forms instincts, which tells me you know absolutely nothing about evolution. It's called evolution by natural selection for a reason. Please, I beg you, study evolution before you reply. Thoroughly. But I'll give you a brief explanation of the baby crying: When cells divide and multiply, they have to copy their dna. But because biology is messy, the copies are rarely perfect, they have errors. This is what we call a mutation. This is why humans (and all other species) have genetic variation. It's why your siblings aren't identical to you, even though you share the same mother and father dna. Some babies, by pure chance, have mutations in the "weep excessively" gene. Others do not. The ones that do get more attention by their mothers and have a larger probability of surviving. Over a large enough timescale, babies with the "weep excessively" gene will be *naturally selected* for. They will survive, grow up, and have babies of their own to propogate the weeping gene. Voila, now you have the instinct for babies to cry excessively when they aren't looked and cared for constantly. But this is not knowledge whatsoever. It's not even intentful. How can you have knowledge without being conscious of it? I won't repeat what else I've said about knowledge, so I'll refer you to my previous comment.
Good question. He thinks of himself as giving an empirical, psychological theory. So, he thinks of empiricism as resting on an empirical foundation. I tend to think he's right about that; it's a still unresolved empirical question whether we have innate cognitive abilities of a kind that would help to decide the rationalism v. empiricism issue.
@@PhiloofAlexandria Do you think Hume's point about using philosophical terms that are absent from impressions is almost hitting a Wittgensteinian mark regarding language in his investigations?
1+1=2 ??? What is 1 ? Where did 1 start, and where did 1 end and the other 1 starts ? We don't know, do we ? 1+1= 1+1. Period. There is no such thing as 2, or 3,4..... May the love and the peace of Jesus be with us.
