Christopher Peacocke

New essays on the a priori

I want to discuss the possibility of combining a so-called ‘externalist’ theory of empirical content, on which the contents of a person’s beliefs are determined in part by the nature of his extra-bodily environmental embedding, with a plausible account of selfknowledge, in particular, of a person’s knowledge of the contents of his own beliefs. A difficulty for this combination is thought to be that it leads to the availability of a kind non-empirical, a priori knowledge about the mind-independent physical world which is intuitively intolerable.1 The inference which is held to create this difficulty can be put like this.

Implicit Conceptions, Understanding, and Rationality

*Earlier versions of this material were presented as an Invited Lecture at the 1996 Barcelona meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and as seminars at the Universities of Hamburg and St. Andrews, and at New York University. At a presentation at the Pittsburgh meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1997, my commentator was Tyler Burge; and at a presentation at the 1997 meeting of the Conference on Methods in New York, my commentators were Georges Rey and Gideon Rosen. I am very grateful for all their comments, from which I have learned much. It will soon be apparent to those who have followed my earlier efforts that the present paper involves a significant change of view. In grappling with these issues, I have been helped too by the comments and advice of Paul Boghossian, Ned Block, Bill Brewer, John Campbell, Martin Davies, Hartry Field, Wolfgang Kiinne, Barry Loewer, Stephen Schiffer, Stewart Shapiro, John Skorupski and Crispin Wright. I have also taken the opportunity to correct a mistake pointed out to me by Eric Margolis in private discussion at the SOFIA meeting. Once again, I acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Leverhulme Trust. Without one of their Research Professorships, none of this work would have been possible. ? Copyright C. Peacocke 1998.

The mirror of the world : subjects, consciousness, and self-consciousness

I. Introduction II. Primitive Self-Representation III. The Metaphysics of Conscious Subjects IV. The First Person Concept and Its Nonconceptual Parent V. Explaining First Person Phenomena VI. Descartes Defended VII. Paralogisms and First Person Illusions VIII. Perspectival Self-Consciousness IX. Reflective Self-Consciousness X. Interpersonal Self-Consciousness XI. Open Conclusion: The Place of Metaphysics References Index

The Limits of Intelligibility: A Post-Verificationist Proposal

A nyone who is not a verificationist faces a dilemma. When we I X are presented with certain distinctions, we are inclined to say they are spurious. Yet the only principles which initially come to mind to justify such a verdict of spuriousness are verificationist principles; and, for the non-verificationist, verificationist principles rule out far too much. This dilemma is of a general form which allows it to arise in several diverse areas. My aim in this paper is to suggest a way out. The way out I will be suggesting does not require acceptance of verificationism. It rather appeals to a general constraint on genuine contents. The core of this paper will consist of an attempt to show that the constraint does indeed dissolve the dilemma. Later I will turn to some other ramifications of the constraint. But first, we need to have before us some of the familiar examples which pose the dilemma.

Three Principles of Rationalism

It is just over fifty years since the publication of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951). That paper expresses a broad vision of the system of relations between meaning, experience, and the rational formation of belief. The deepest challenges the paper poses come not from the detailed argument of its first four sections – formidable though that is – but from the visionary material in its last two sections.1 It is this visionary material that is likely to force the reader to revise, to deepen, or to rethink her position on fundamental issues about the relations between meaning, experience, rationality, and, above all, the a priori. Does what is right in Quine’s argument exclude any rationalist view of these relations? How should a rationalist view be formulated? Those are the questions I will be addressing. I start with the critical part of this task, a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of Quine’s vision. Drawing on the constraints emerging from that critical discussion, I will then turn to the positive task of articulating and defending a rival conception. The rival conception can be described as a Generalized Rationalism.

The theory of meaning in analytical philosophy

This survey will be restricted in scope not only in the respects indicated in the title and by a limitation to fewer than thirty pages, but also by the inevitable omission of discussion of the semantics of particular expressions — proper names, demonstratives, natural kind words, predicate and sentential operators, and so forth — the upshot of which cannot fail to have some effect on our conception of a semantic theory. But even within these restrictions, the field is a vast one; and it will help to structure our discussion if we impose a division corresponding to the following questions: (I) What form should a theory that specifies the meaning of all the sentences of a particular language take? I will follow the convention of calling such a theory for a particular language a ‘meaning theory’ (MT) for that language, and will reserve the phrase ‘theory of meaning’ for a theory (together with the arguments for it) about the correct form for a MT. (II) In virtue of what is one rather than another MT applicable to a particular language in use in a community of speakers? (III) What are the various constraints upon and infirmities of the relations between our answers in questions (I) and (II)? Though a theorist’s motivation for answering any one of these questions in a particular way can hardly be independent of the views he holds about the others, it is possible for different theorists to agree on the answers to some (notably (I)) and to disagree on others.

Anchoring Conceptual Content: Scenarios and Perception

I will be developing a suggestion about the way in which perceptual experience represents the world. I want to explore the consequences of this suggestion, and to apply it in addressing various questions about the relations between perception and the conceptual content of thought. These concerns set the itinerary for this paper. But there are also intriguing regions adjacent to the main route. I will indicate these as we go, especially in the later sections of this paper. It seems to me that our understanding of these issues is still extraordinarily primitive. I hope the suggestion I will be developing will lead to new routes into this still largely unmapped territory.

Sense and Content@@@Sense and Content: Experience, Thought and Their Relations.

The topics of this book lie in the intersection of three areas: the philosophy of mind, the theory of meaning and content, and the philosophy of psychology. The book grew out of a desire to treat the nature of the content of psychological states in much greater detail than was attempted in Holistic Explanation. The present work is based on material presented in classes at Oxford University in the years 1979 to 1982.

The Modality of Freedom

The classical problem of free will is one instance of the Integration Challenge. The Integration Challenge in its general form is that of reconciling our metaphysics of any given area with our epistemology for that same area. In the case of free will, the challenge is that of reconciling our seeming first-person knowledge of our exercise of free thought, deliberation, choice and action with a description of what is really going on in the world as characterized in terms of causation, determination, explanation and causal possibility.

The Origins of the A Priori

I will be discussing not Kant, but a Kantian issue. The issue is the classical question of how a priori truths are possible. I will outline an approach to this issue, an approach the availability of which seems to me to have been overlooked in the discussion of these matters in our century. The account I have to offer does, though, bear on several Kantian concerns and Kantian projects, and I will try to indicate these links.