23. “A Priori: A Brief Critical Survey”
by Tibor R. Machan
Abstract: The issue of whether logic has an ontological base—rests, ultimately, on the principles or nature of reality—is constantly with us. In this paper I revisit it, drawing on a piece I wrote back in 1969, for the early incarnation of Reason magazine. I conclude that the Aristotelian idea that logic tracks reality is sound and those opposed—conventionalists, pragmatists, conceptualists, Kantians, et al.—have it wrong.
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I have always taken the view that we know nothing whatsoever anterior to observation, experience, and experimentation. It has always seemed to me that an assertion that I might know anything in the absence of evidence is nonsense. If we were capable of ‘a priori’ knowledge, and if it were the foundation of everything we know, nature itself would not have endowed us with the myriad of senses which we now possess.
The ‘law of identity or contradiction’ is not ‘a priori.’ It is evident in a whole panoply of everyday events, objects, and persons. Even the rules of mathematics are based on our observations of the physical universe. We make these generalizations based on our observations. After a period of time in which these generalizations are sustained by the evidence of the physical universe we begin to call them ‘laws.’
The generalizations or ‘laws’ which we formulate may be said to be ‘true’ to the extent that they describe the universe accurately as it is.
‘Logic’ is nothing more than our attempt to reason from what is believed to be established to what is apparently mysterious or unknown. How else have the rules of ‘logic’ been established if not by trial and error (experimentation)?
Some things we know before we have experienced them. Others only afterwards. The two notions are not mutually exclusive.
You do not need to observe, experience, or have evidence of the fact that there is no such thing as a square circle. This you know a priori.
The reality of the existence of the laws of logic is not subject to how one comes to know these laws (i.e. through our observations of them). These laws have not been invented, but discovered.
I possess within me the power to name and to define things. This is a part of our latent natural power of vocalization, i.e. communication through language. This power which we possess is somehow related to brain size, but it does not rise to the task until we learn how to use it. We learn these skills in the first instance from parents and subsequently from teachers.
One of the things which we learn is the definition of a circle and the definition of a square. That the circle and square are different things has been established by definition. The definitions themselves are the product of some earlier person’s disciplined observations.
I might be able at an early stage of life to distinguish a circle from a square simply because they look different, even though I may not know the technical definitions until my first course in geometry. In any case the differentiation of a circle and a square is not a priori but the result of observation…..at first someone else’s observation and later confirmed by my own observations.