New Essays on the A Priori by Paul Boghossian

Author:Paul Boghossian [Boghossian, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0199241279

end p.239

promise. There may be beliefs that are such that, having those beliefs is a condition for having one of the concepts ingredient in them. Any such belief, it seems to me could plausibly be claimed to be default reasonable. For if it really were part of the possession condition for a given concept that to possess it one had to believe a certain proposition containing it, then that would explain why belief in that proposition is at least presumptively (though defeasibly) justified. It would certainly not make sense to insist—in the way that it would with the belief that all swans are white—that one justify the proposition before one came to believe it.

Unfortunately for the problem that concerns us, it is not remotely plausible that anyone possessing the concept of conditional would have to have the belief that MPP is a valid rule of inference. Surely, one can have and reason with conditional without so much as having the concept of validity or of logical implication. At most what the theory of concept possession would license is that inferring according to MPP is part of the possession condition for conditional, not the belief that MPP is valid. But what we are after now is the justification for the belief.10

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