A Priori Knowledge

Epistemology is he study of our right to the beliefs we have. In a broader sense, we start from what we call our cognitive stances, and ask whether we are justified to have these stances. When discussing cognitive stances, we must include both our beliefs as well as what we take to be our knowing. At an even deeper level we examine our attitudes towards the various strategies and methods we use to get new beliefs and filter out old ones. Epistemology is concerned then with whether we have acted responsibly or irresponsibly in forming the beliefs we have. Based on this process, we ultimately want to find true knowledge or justified belief. Traditionally, there are four sources of knowledge; sensation, memory, introspection, and reason.

The one source of knowledge that I am particularly interested in discussing and examining is reason. The activities of reason are dualistic in nature. First, there is inference, in which we move from old knowledge to new knowledge. The strongest form of this is valid deductive inference, which occurs when it is not possible that our premises are true of our conclusion is false, but I will deal with this more clearly later. The second activity of reason is the discovery of new truths. Such a truth that can be discovered by the activity of reason alone is called an a priori truth, and knowledge of it is a priori knowledge. One of the most alluring and great questions in epistemology is how a priori knowledge is possible, and what sorts of truth can be known in this way. Some propositions are true in virtue of their meaning alone. For example, look at the proposition; all bachelors are people. We know this truth to introspection and/or to memory. So, we know it by reason, but such analytic propositions are trivial and give us

substantial knowledge. “Can reason give us substantial knowledge of anything, or is all a priori knowledge analytic and therefore trivial.” In examining knowledge, the general consensus by philosophers and theorists is that true belief is a necessary condition for knowledge, and it was once thought that justification, when added to true belief, yields a necessary and sufficient condition for knowledge. Its sufficiency however, was disproved by Edmund Gettier.

My purpose of this paper, is two look at the dualistic relationship, if any, of these two aspects (A Priori Knowledge and Gettier