Dear Jeff, lists, You are certainly right these concepts come in variants. That was why I attempted to present the early 20C Austrian roots of my objective conception as against the subjective Kantian one. Peirce seemingly changed views on the a priori over time - or used the notion with different meanings. In 1909 he wrote "it would seem proper that in the present state [of] our knowledge logic should be regarded as coëxtensive with General Semeiotic, the a priori theory of signs." Best F
Den 21/04/2015 kl. 17.55 skrev Jeffrey Brian Downard <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: Lists, Peirce provides us with a definition of the distinction between what is a priori and what is a posteriori in the Century Dictionary. Here it is: from the former, from that which precedes; hence from antecedent to consequent, from condition to conditioned, or from cause to effect. Peirce took himself to be working from an account that traces its roots back to Albert of Saxony in the late Medieval period. He distinguishes between demonstratio a priori, which is reasoning from causes or first principles to effects, and demonstratio a posteriori, which is reasoning from effects to causes, which merely proves the fact without showing why it must be as it is. It is clear that this Latin terminology is being used to characterize an important Aristotelian division between two ways in which we might claim to know things. Peirce adds that, in the 18th century, demonstratio a priori was applied to reasoning from a given notion back to the conditions which such a notion involves. He goes on to distinguish between this modern use of the distinction and Kant's particular use of it--which is to employ it as an adjective in cases where there are disparate elements that are combined in cognition. So, in cases where our knowledge might be based, in part, on empirical evidence, there might also be a priori elements supplied by the power of the understanding that are necessary for the possibility of such experiential cognition. The forms of space and time, for example, are held to be a priori elements in our experiential cognition. As a person who was trained in an analytically oriented department, my early sense as a graduate student who was working on Kant was that a rather marked rupture occurred in the early 20th century as logical positivists and analytically minded philosophers started using the distinction in rather novel ways. The novelties they introduced only confused matters further when they tried to draw on these concepts in order to reconfigure the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. It would be good, I think, to be clear about where we are using 20th century versions of these terms to make our points and where we are trying to use the terms in the ways that Albert of Saxony, Leibniz, Kant, Hamilton--or Peirce--was using them. --Jeff Jeff Downard Associate Professor
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