A Priority and Externalism

If an epistemological distinction fails to carve at the epistemological joints, then it is not worthy of serious and protracted discussion. The residual issue of whether the putative distinction is incoherent or merely gerrymandered ought not to strike anyone as especially important. My own externalist commitments – epistemological and semantic -lead me to think that the a priori-a posteriori distinction is not a particularly natural one, and hence that its importance to epistemology has been grossly overestimated. I shall be defending that perspective in what follows. Discussions of a priority typically assume that there is a distinguished subclass of beliefs whose epistemic status does not depend upon experiential encounter with the world. Yet the project of delimiting such a class in a non-gerrymandered fashion turns out to be surprisingly difficult. As an organizing theme, I shall examine the bearing of a safety based account of knowledge on the traditional conception of a priori knowledge.