Oh don't worry about this lot. I'll handle them if they get out of line.
Now, your statement here confuses me more than somewhat. After all, chimpanzees are also social beings, and yet they clearly do not have a priori concepts. And once again, the a priori cannot, by definition, arise out of a "shared social history." But perhaps that's not what you're claiming?
Is the a priori "evidence of the divine?" I suppose it depends on how one defined the latter term. But it is certainly evidence of non-empirical knowledge that cannot be accounted for biologically. It is hard to see where else it might come from if not from something closely approximating what philosophers call the "soul."
I'm interested that you choose not to dispute the existence of the a priori, which is the line usually taken by atheists (insofar as they understand, or indeed have heard of, the term at all). It seems to me that by doing so you have virtually conceded the battle without a fight. But anyway.
Ok I will try and keep this short so as not to disrupt the thread too much.
Yes I accept the existence of a priori knowledge. Indeed I have often been critical of traditional cartesian ideals that posit man as an individual gaining all knowledge from experience. I agree here with the psychologist RD laing who posited the idea of the "recognition of the other" as a priori. Or Wittgenstein when he argued his "automaton" analogy.
I paraphrase but he said something like, If I point to a person in the street and make the statement " He is not an automaton" This statement has no meaning. Because, we are not relating to others (or to the world) as if to a hypothesis, ie is he real or not? We simply don't behave like that. We know (a priori) that the other is a person, not an automaton). We relate to people as people, we inherantly recognise the other and that recognition is a priori knowledge.
My disagreement with you is what I consider the huge leap in logic from postulating the existence of a priori knowledge to the claim that this must some how be divine or spriritual in source. This I think doesn't follow.
For me the source of a priori knowledge is consciousness. I would argue that consciousness itself, by its very nature (ie awareness of self and of existance) requires a priori knowledge in order to
be consciousness.
Further,that consciousnessm indeed individualism itself, is a state of affairs pertaining to beings who have historically evolved as social beings and this, for me is the secular source of the inate a priori recognition of the other as other. We are conscious because we are social. We are individuals because we are collective. We are private because we are public.
But, for the sake of argument let us say that I remain agnostic on the question of the source of a priori knowledge, and I concede that I simply do not know the source of such a priori concepts. Does it follow that you do? No, I don't think that follows at all. This reminds me a lot of the old Bertrand Russell argument. ("why I am not a Christian"). If,the argument goes, man is so complex and nature so organised that there must be a god to create it (ie a divine source) then that begs the question, who made god? And if, the defender of God says this is unknowable, then we can simply delete the part about god and say our source is unknowable.
I know you are not arguing anything so crass, however, in a similar way your argument begs the question. If the existance of a priori knowledge can only be concieved as having a divine source, then what is the source of this divinity? And if this is unknowable, why not simply preclude the divine and say that the source of a priori knowledge is unknowable?
Phil this is a great argument and one I enjoy but I really think we should take it to the philosophy section, before we piss people off. What do you think?
Oh, as you have probably worked out, I have a masters in Political philosophy)
