Epistemic Norms, A Priority, and Self-Knowledge

Abstract

This thesis is primarily focussed on developing a novel characterisation of the distinction between a priori and a posteriori justification. My working hypothesis is that we can make a surprising amount of progress in this field by paying attention to the structure of epistemic norms. I argue that direct a priori beliefs are governed by a structurally different kind of epistemic norm to the one that governs perceptual beliefs. That, I argue, is where the fundamental epistemological difference between the two categories lies. I call this view ‘Seeming-Independence’. Seeming-Independence holds that while a posteriori beliefs depend epistemically on how it perceptually seems to us, there is no corresponding dependence relation between a priori beliefs and how it intellectually seems to us. Intellectual seemings, or intuitions, simply do not play the kind of epistemological role that perceptual experiences play. The central contention of this thesis is that Seeming-Independence is a theoretically fruitful view of the a priori. The arguments I marshal in favour of Seeming-Independence are in this way primarily focussed on the explanatory power and flexibility of the view. In effect, what I suggest is that Seeming-Independence, unlike some of its rivals, is a particularly clear way of dividing the a priori from the a posteriori, and it allows us to neatly bypass some of influential criticisms of a priority.