Review: A Priori Justification

Understanding, Justification and the a Priori

What I wish to consider here is how understanding something is related to the justification of beliefs about what it means. Suppose, for instance, that S understands the name “Clinton” and has a justified belief that it names Clinton. How is S’s understanding related to that belief’s justification? Or suppose that S understands the sentence “Clinton is President”, or Jones’ assertive utterance ...

Defeasible a Priori Justification: a Reply to Thurow

His defence, which focuses on premise (), consists in ‘arguing in § directly for premise () and responding to Casullo’s objections, and secondly by arguing in § for the contrapositive of ()’.2 I shall argue that Thurow’s response misconstrues my objection and that his positive arguments fall short of their goal. Since the objection which he considers is taken out of its original dialectica...

Is there a justification for differential a priori weighting in coding sequences? A case study from rbcL and Apocynaceae s.l.

Functional constraints are often assumed to influence the performance of nucleotide characters in phylogenetic analysis: First and second codon positions and sites of structural importance are considered to show less homoplasy. We investigate the performance of rbcL characters with differential functional constraints in a cladistic analysis of the plant family Apocynaceae s.l. (Sennblad and Bre...

Kant on the "A priori" Toward an Interpretation

A Priori / a Posteriori

DATA TYPE See DATA ABSTRACTION ABSTRACTION (The result of) a process of simplification, to describe something at a more general level than the level of detail seen from another point of view. This is often achieved by omitting details specific to individual cases or to methods of implementation. For example, a realtor’s description of a house may leave out architectural detail so that it is an ...