Apriority and Colour Inclusion

• Autores: Stefan Reining
• Directores de la Tesis: Genoveva Martí Campillo (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat de Barcelona ( España ) en 2014
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Timothy Williamson (presid.), Manuel García-Carpintero (secret.), Kathrin Glüer-Pagin (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Filosofía
    • Filosofía del conocimiento
      • Epistemología
      • Teoría del concepto
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en:  TDX  Dipòsit Digital de la UB 
• Resumen

  • My central aim in this dissertation is to propose a new version of local scepticism regarding the a priori, namely, a version of scepticism regarding the apriority of (knowledge of) truths about certain relations between colours. The kind of relation in question is, for instance, expressed by sentences like ‘All ultramarine things are blue’ and ‘Nothing is both red all over and green all over’ – sentences that have, among defenders of the a priori, commonly been regarded as expressing paradigm examples of a priori truths. In the course of my argumentation for this kind of local scepticism regarding the a priori, I employ a relatively permissive notion of linguistic understanding (inspired by Timothy Williamson’s recent work on the a priori), according to which it is possible to obtain the relevant kind of understanding of colour terms in a certain non-standard way. The relatively permissive notion of linguistic understanding in question is, in turn, based on considerations in favour of a relatively coarse-grained conception of the primary objects of truth. Furthermore, my argumentation for the kind of local scepticism in question is based on considerations in favour of a certain conception of evidentiality, according to which a single experience-token can play both an enabling and an evidential role in the same instance of knowledge, and according to which some of the experience involved in alleged instances of a priori knowledge of the relations among colours in question plays this kind of double-role. Finally, I consider certain empirical phenomena apparently threatening the possibility of coming to understand colour terms in the non-standard way in question, and I argue that the threat posed by these phenomena is more widespread than hitherto acknowledged, and that all available ways of accommodating these phenomena are compatible with my local scepticism regarding the a priori.