Diversity Reading List

Abstract: I argue that a thoroughgoing naturalized epistemology can easily underestimate the extent to which certain background assumptions will infl uence arguments. Instead, then, I suggest that we can borrow a conceptual tool from neo-Kantian philosophy of science, namely the constitutive a priori. This idea originates in neo-Kantian philosophers who understood, in light of Einsteinian physics, that Kantian views about the a priority of space were untenable. Frameworks that adopt some version of a constitutive a priori take certain propositions to play the role of a priori principles, without granting them the universality or necessity that such principles traditionally hold. I will argue that thinking of certain views or values as having the status of constitutive a priori principles can help us understand what would be required for an epistemic agent to change them, and thus illustrate the extent to which they are resistant to being dislodged by evidence.