David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
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Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 75 (75):141-156 (2001)
[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the statement relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them
|Keywords||Actual Epistemology Knowledge Possible World Kripke, S|
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Citations of this work BETA
Øystein Linnebo (2006). Epistemological Challenges to Mathematical Platonism. Philosophical Studies 129 (3):545-574.
Hamid Vahid (2006). Conceivability and Possibility: Chalmers on Modal Epistemology. Philosophical Explorations 9 (3):243-260.
Jussi Haukioja (2006). Semantic Externalism and A Priori Self-Knowledge. Ratio 19 (2):149-159.
Simon Prosser (2007). The Two-Dimensional Content of Consciousness. Philosophical Studies 136 (3):319 - 349.
Edward Kanterian (2009). Puzzles About Descriptive Names. Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (4):409-428.
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