Understanding and the A Priori
Final Report Abstract
One of the main research results our group has achieved so far is the development of a new theory of the nature of linguistic understanding. There is a long tradition among philosophers of thinking of one’s understanding of language as a matter of having knowledge of a theory of meaning for the language. The view developed in our group challenges this orthodoxy: to understand a language is to be able to reason in certain distinctive ways about the linguistic inputs one receives, rather than just to have standing knowledge about their meanings. This is a genuinely novel approach to linguistic understanding, one that promises to help answer many questions about the ways we use language to acquire and share knowledge. A second important result concerns the epistemology of reasoning processes in general. A widespread assumption among philosophers is that reasoning serves only to transmit justification one already has to further beliefs arrived at by reasoning. But we have uncovered good grounds for thinking that reasoning can actually serve as a source of justification that generates new justification for belief, rather than merely passing on justification already in one’s possession. Language understanding involves one sort of reasoning process that can serve as a source of justification. But there are many others: the possession of logical concepts, for example, brings with it certain ways of reasoning that can serve as a source of justification; and visual imagination can be employed in further sorts of reasoning processes that can also serve as sources of justification. This is a radically new way of thinking about the epistemological role of reasoning. A third crucial result of our work is that reasoning, broadly conceived, is best seen as the application of many different cognitive capacities, all of which have the potential to contribute to the rational formation of new beliefs, and in some cases even to provide a priori epistemic justification. This means that a priori justification need not be grounded in a single privileged source, such as understanding or rational insight. Rather, it is the result of certain ways of employing reasoning capacities of many sorts: we can put those capacities to use in order to generate justification for new beliefs, without the need for empirical input. Perhaps most surprisingly, this is true even of the cognitive capacity to engage in sensory imagination – our work has made it plausible that imagination is in fact a central source of a priori justification. Many of these results have been published in top-ranked peer-reviewed philosophy journals and in collections from top-ranked publishers, and they have been presented at workshops and conferences both in Germany and abroad. Several of the ideas and methods developed within our group have led to further innovative research projects for which additional independent funding was able to be secured from various agencies. Over the course of the project we have also been extremely active in bringing researchers from all around the world to Germany, in order to help foster the exchange of ideas between our group and the international research community. And we have done much to establish a flourishing network of researchers working at the intersection of the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and epistemology both within Germany and abroad.
Publications
- “Understanding and Semantic Structure: Reply to Timothy Williamson”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2009, 109: 337-343
Brendan Balcerak Jackson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9264.2009.00272.x) - “Understanding and Philosophical Methodology”, Philosophical Studies, 2012, 161, 2: 185-205
Brendan Balcerak Jackson (with M. Balcerak Jackson)
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9729-y) - Book Review of: "Reference and Referring, by William P. Kabasenche, Michael O’Rourke and Matthew H. Slater (eds.), MIT Press, 2013, Topics in Contemporary Philosophy" (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2013)
Brendan Balcerak Jackson
- “Defusing Easy Arguments for Numbers”, Linguistics & Philosophy, 2013, 36: 447-461
Brendan Balcerak Jackson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-013-9142-4) - “Metaphysics, Verbal Disputes, and the Limits of Charity”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2013, 86: 412-434
Brendan Balcerak Jackson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2011.00569.x) - “Reasoning as a Source of Justification”, Philosophical Studies, 2013, 136: 113-126
Brendan Balcerak Jackson (with M. Balcerak Jackson)
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0098-6) - What Does Displacement Explain, and What Do Congruence Effects Show? A Response to Hofweber”, Linguistics & Philosophy, 2014, 37: 269-274
Brendan Balcerak Jackson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-014-9152-x) - “Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness”, Erkenntnis, 2014, 79: 31-54
Brendan Balcerak Jackson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9444-5) - “Number Word Constructions, Degree Semantics and the Metaphysics of Degrees”. Linguistics & Philosophy, August 2017, Volume 40, Issue 4, pp 347–372
Brendan Balcerak Jackson (with Doris Penka)
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-017-9213-z) - “Structural Entailment and Semantic Natural Kinds”. Linguistics and Philosophy, June 2017, Volume 40, Issue 3, pp 207–237
Brendan Balcerak Jackson
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-017-9204-0)
