5 Naturalism and the A Priori Penelope Maddy

place this naturalism in what I hope to be an illuminating historical context, to trace the status of the a priori through its various twists and turns, and eventually to draw some tentative conclusions about the naturalistic status of the a priori. To do this, I first return to Kant. While it's surely no surprise that an examination of the a priori should start from Kant, perhaps his relevance to naturalism is less obvious. Let me begin, then, with an introductory word on that connection. Though my naturalism differs from Quine's in a couple of significant ways, these disagreements won't matter until the very end. so we can begin with Quine's leading idea: the 'abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy' (Quine 1975: 72). The interconnections between Quine and Carnap will take centre stage later, but for now we need only note that the bare rejection of first philosophy can be seen as evolving out of Carnap's classification of many traditional metaphysical claims as 'pseudo-statement[s] without cognitive content' (Carnap 1950: 250). Carnap's idea is that legitimate scientific questions, 'theoretical questions', are asked within the linguistic framework of scientific language, with its associated principles of evidence; in contrast, metaphysical pseudo-questions are posed outside of all linguistic frameworks; perhaps as preamble to the adoption of a linguistic framework, as such, they are asked without the backing of associated evidential rules that would make them answerable, and indeed, that would give them sense. Now Kant also had a keen nose for the pseudo-question: