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EPR As A Priori Science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Contemporary empiricism is closely allied with naturalism. Not only do empiricists hold that all our knowledge is based upon sensory experience, but they also tend to offer some sort of causal account of how this experience comes about. The causal ingredient in knowledge seems very plausible — after all, my knowing that there is a tea cup on my desk is based on sense impressions which are caused by the cup itself. Photons come from the cup to my eye; a signal is then sent down the optic nerve into the visual part of the brain, and so on. And without that causal process, I likely wouldn't have the knowledge that I do have.
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- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 18: Return of the a priori , 1992 , pp. 253 - 272
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1992
References
1 A representative example can be found in the volume edited by Kornblith, HilaryNaturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1985).Google Scholar
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3 An earlier version of the argument to follow was first briefly given in my ‘π in the sky’ in Irvine, A. ed., Physicalism in Mathematics (Dordrecht: Kluwer 1989) and repeated in my book, The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences (London & New York: Routledge 1991).Google Scholar I have changed my view on some key aspects of the argument, and in some respects I present the whole in greater detail here.
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9 It’s tempting to appeal to Aristotle’s notion of a formal cause -but I will resist, since it is not at all clear how an Aristotelian form could cause a knower to know that some particular has the relevant property which it does have in virtue of the formal cause.
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14 For a detailed defense of the a priori character of this thought experiment, and for a discussion of thought experiments in general, see my The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences (London: Routledge 1991).
15 The editors, B. Hunter and P. Hanson and one of their readers, provided me with extensive useful comments, for which I am very grateful; I wish to thank SSHRC for its generous support.
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