Abstract
In the first part of this paper I outline briefly what is included under “logical truth” in Arthur Burks’ Chance, Cause, Reason 1 and locate my topic under this heading as it is used by Professor Burks. In part II I indicate the sort of approach I believe has to be followed and the sort of issues that have to be faced if logical truths are to be explicated as a priori. I argue that in order to explicate them a priori one needs “unnaturalized” as opposed to a Quinean “naturalized” epistemology. I end this part of the paper by noting a difficulty that confronts any such explication. In part III I examine the possibility of escaping the difficulty by following Burks’ proposal that we explicate the notion of an a priori concept “in terms of ideas from automata theory.” In conclusion I urge that this proposal hardly offers an escape but rather a flight to naturalized epistemology.
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References
Burks, A. W.: 1977, Chance, Cause, Reason, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Quine, W. V.: 1981, Theories and Things, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Thompson, Manley: 1981, ‘On a priori truth’, The Journal of Philosophy 78, pp. 458–82.
Wittgenstein, L.: 1963, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. Mc-Guinness, The Humanities Press, New York.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Thompson, M. (1990). Some Reflections on Logical Truth As a Priori. In: Salmon, M.H. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism. Synthese Library, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_4
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