Revisiting Quine’s argument on a priori knowledge & Going a step further than the relativized a priori

Abstract

In this paper I revisited Quine’s argument against Carnap’s notion of analytic a priori knowledge and offers an explanation on why Carnap—holding his logical positivist ground—can not make a convincing reply against Quine. However, I argue that if Quine succeeds in the sense that we can make no convincing reply against his argument, then a priori knowledge will have to be abandoned, so that we will have to retreat to where Quine calls the “pragmatic grounds”. I then evaluate Friedman’s notion of the relativised a priori knowledge as an argument to reply to Quine, and claim that Friedman’s notion is a strong reply against Quine. That being said, Friedman’s notion itself, along with Friedman’s arguments that attempts to justify the notion, is limited, as it only concerns some aspects of natural science (naturwissenchaften) and not the human science (geistwissenchaften): Friedman is thus missing out important ideas from figures such as Hegel and Husserl. I claim that in order to give a priori knowledge its proper place, we should simultaneously consider arguments from both the natural sciences and from the human sciences.