A Priori Principles of Reason

Basically, A is a reason for B, if A speaks in favor of B, or makes B more plausible, or is positively relevant to B. And basically, a doxastic feature is a priori, if all rational doxastic states have that feature. The paper will unfold these notions. And it will argue, partially in a deductive way, for a series of a priori principles about the structure of reasons, starting with a basic empiricist principle (capturing the gist of the positivists’ verifiability principle) and ending up with a weak principle of causality (which thus turns out to be a priori, after all).