The Human A Priori: Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics by A. W. Moore;

Author:A. W. Moore; [Moore, A. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192699213
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Human A Priori: Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics. A. W. Moore, Oxford University Press. © A. W. Moore 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871411.003.0011

1 Wiggins (1984).

2 Wiggins (1987e), p. 348, emphasis removed.

3 Wiggins (1990–1), p. 66. Cf. Wiggins (1987c), §7; Wiggins (1987d), §10; and Wiggins (1991), §9.

4 Wittgenstein (1961), 3.02; cf. 5.4731.

5 Quine (1970), p. 81.

6 Wittgenstein (1961), 2.225–3.001.

7 Quine (1970), p. 9.

8 See e.g. Wiggins (1990–1), p. 68 n. 7.

9 Supplementary note: In the volume in which this essay originally appears, Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth and Value (Lovibond and Williams (1996)), there is a response by David Wiggins in which he explains that this is a misinterpretation and that he does not intend the formula indexically: see p. 272. Fortunately, however, for reasons that Wiggins himself indicates, this does not have a significant bearing on anything I say in this essay.

10 Cf. Wiggins (1990–1), §12.

11 …which is not to say that ‘a price’ has wider scope than ‘whenever’, as I hope will become clear.

12 See e.g. Wiggins (1990–1), pp. 64–5.

13 See e.g. Wiggins (1990–1), pp. 65 ff.

14 Henceforth this qualification will be taken for granted.

15 Here and hereafter I use standard logical notation.

16 One might think that there were two ways in which the left-hand side of an instance of this schema could be false: as a result of ‘p’ being replaced by something false; and as a result of ‘p’ being replaced by something neither true nor false. The latter, at least if we prescind from issues of grammaticality, would raise some fascinating questions about how far (and how) there might be alternative things to think when truth was not involved, questions that are certainly pertinent to Wiggins’s concerns. However, I am simply going to bypass those questions by stipulating that ‘p’ must be replaced by a proposition, or by something that stands for a proposition; and I shall understand by a proposition something that is true or false.

17 Cf. where Wiggins distances himself from a certain kind of relativism in Wiggins (1987e), p. 348.

18 This is not, of course, to embrace the kind of relativism from which Wiggins wants to distance himself (see previous note), nor to disregard the difference upon which he thereby insists between saying that there is nothing else to think and saying that there is nothing else for us (or for me) to think.

19 But we should beware here of a hasty drive to formalization. It would be natural to cast ‘T(p)’ as follows:(2*) ∀S ∀t [X(S, t, p) → S thinks at t that p],where ‘S’ ranges over thinkers, ‘t’ ranges over times, and ‘X(S, t, p)’ picks out the relevant condition. Cf. the formula in Wright (1988), p. 18. (Not that I intend any criticism of Wright in what I am about to say. He is certainly sensitive to the kind of problem that I raise in this footnote: see Wright (1988), p. 14, n. 26.) (2*), however, lacks the element of necessity in (2)’s ‘bound to’—in a way that matters.

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