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The Human A Priori
The Human A Priori
Essays on How We Make Sense in
Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics
A. W. MOORE
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© A. W. Moore 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023930736
ISBN 978–0–19–287141–1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871411.001.0001
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For Andrew
Contents
Preface ix
Publisher’s Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
P A R T I I . H O W WE M A K E S E N S E I N P H I L O S O P H Y
5. Sense-Making from a Human Point of View (2017) 107
6. Not to be Taken at Face Value (2009) 117
7. Carving at the Joints (2012) 127
8. The Concern with Truth, Sense, et al.—Androcentric or
Anthropocentric? (2020) 135
P A RT I V . HO W W E M A K E S E N S E I N M A T HEM A T I C S
16. On the Right Track (2003) 259
17. Wittgenstein and Infinity (2011) 273
18. Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy of Mathematics (2017) 291
19. A Problem for Intuitionism: The Apparent Possibility of
Performing Infinitely Many Tasks in a Finite Time (1989–90) 306
20. More on ‘The Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s
Theorem’ (1999) 320
Bibliography 337
Index 353
Preface
These essays are reprinted with relatively minor amendments. Many of the
amendments are purely cosmetic. Some, such as the addition of some cross-
references and the introduction of some standardization, are for the sake of the
volume. In a few cases I have corrected what I now see as simple philosophical or
exegetical mistakes. I have made no attempt to eliminate repetition from one essay
to another: this is partly to accentuate interconnections between the essays, partly
to ensure that each essay remains self-contained. As far as the interconnections
are concerned, I shall try to elucidate these in the Introduction.
Three cases deserve special comment. Essay 2 is co-authored. It arose from an
exegetical disagreement about Kant that I found I had with two friends and former
students, Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson. The disagreement came to light
during a course on Kant that Anil and I gave at the Oxford University Department
for Continuing Education. Not only had each of us previously been unaware of
this disagreement; each of us would previously have been inclined to regard the
matter as uncontentious. Anil discussed our disagreement with Andrew, whose
position was the same as his, and before long the three of us became embroiled in a
fascinating trialogue in which we came to appreciate that the matter was both
exegetically and philosophically much less straightforward than any of us had
previously thought. Anil and Andrew were prompted to write a joint essay in
defence of their position. After I had read their essay, and after we had engaged in
further discussion of the issues, it evolved into what appears here, which is to say
an essay by all three of us in which we moot an intermediate position that had not
originally been on any of our radars—a real case of thesis, antithesis, and synthe-
sis. I am very grateful to Anil and Andrew both for the stimulation provided by
working on this essay together and for their permission to reproduce it in this
volume. For reasons that I shall try to clarify in the Introduction, it very nicely
captures one of the main threads that links the whole volume together.
Essay 3 has a new postscript. This essay was originally written for a conference
to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Jim Conant’s wonderful
essay ‘The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the
Tractatus’. It engages with Jim’s discussion in that essay of Descartes. In the
volume that grew out of the conference, which is where my own essay first
appeared, there is a response by Jim. The purpose of my postscript is to correct
a basic misunderstanding of my position on Jim’s part (albeit a misunderstanding
that occurs within the context of yet further wonderful work in which he both
develops and disrupts some of the main contentions of his own original essay).
x
As it happens, for reasons that I shall again try to clarify in the Introduction, this
material too very nicely captures the thread that I mentioned above that links this
volume together.
Finally, Essay 10 is the essay that has undergone the greatest revision. When
I returned to it to consider it for inclusion in this volume I found much to
dissatisfy me. Its imperfections were due partly to the fact that it ended with a
statement of ideas which, though I had already defended them and would go on to
develop them elsewhere, I did no more than state in this context. The result was
hurried and—I now realize—bemusing. The revised version is a little less hurried,
and I hope a little less bemusing. This was not however the only source of Essay
10’s imperfections. Another was that, so far from capturing the thread to which
I have referred, it cut across it. This too is something that I shall try to clarify in the
Introduction. But I have made no attempt to remove this imperfection since, in its
own way, it helps to draw attention to that thread. In fact I shall use some of what
is at issue here to structure the Introduction and to indicate what the thread is.
I thank Peter Momtchiloff, philosophy editor at Oxford University Press, for
his advice, encouragement, and support. I also thank the editors and publishers of
the volumes in which these essays first appeared for permission to reprint them.
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Essay 2, ‘The Necessity of the Categories’, written jointly with Anil Gomes and Andrew
Stephenson, was originally published in The Philosophical Review, 131 (2022): 129–68.
Essay 3, ‘What Descartes Ought to Have Thought About Modality’, was originally pub-
lished in Sofia Miguens (ed.), The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics (Harvard UP 2019).
Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All
rights reserved.
Essay 4, ‘Varieties of Sense-Making’, was originally published in Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, 37 (2013): 1–10.
Essay 6, ‘Not to be Taken at Face Value’, was originally published in Analysis, 69/1 (2009):
116–125.
Essay 7, ‘Carving at The Joints’, was originally published in the London Review of Books,
34/16 (30 August 2012): 21–23.
Essay 8, ‘The Concern With Truth, Sense, et al.—Androcentric or Anthropocentric?’, was
originally published in Angelaki 25/1–2 (2020).
Essay 9, ‘A Kantian View of Moral Luck’, was originally published in Philosophy, Vol. 65,
no. 253 (1990): 297–321.
Essay 10, ‘On There Being Nothing Else to Think, or Want, or Do’, was originally published
in Sabina Lovibond and S. G. Williams (eds), Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth and
Value (Blackwell 1996): 165–84.
Essay 11, ‘Conative Transcendental Arguments and the Question Whether There Can Be
External Reasons’, was originally published in Robert Stern (ed.), Transcendental
Arguments: Problems and Prospects (OUP 1999): 271–92.
Essay 12, ‘Maxims and Thick Ethical Concepts’, was originally published in Ratio,
19 (2006): 129–147.
Essay 13, ‘Quasi-Realism and Relativism’, was originally published in Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, Vol. 65, No. 1 (2002): 150–56.
Essay 14, ‘From a Point of View’, was originally published in Philosophical Quarterly,
Vol. 62, No. 247 (April 2012): 392–8.
xii ’
Essay 15, ‘Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality’, was originally
published in Mind, Volume 115, Issue 458 (2006): 311–30.
Essay 16, ‘On the Right Track’, was originally published in Mind, Volume 112, Issue 446
(2003): 307–22.
Essay 17, ‘Wittgenstein and Infinity’, was originally published in Oskari Kuusela and Marie
McGinn (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (Oxford UP 2011): 105–21.
Essay 18, ‘Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy of Mathematics’, was originally published in
Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman (eds), A Companion to Wittgenstein (Blackwell
2017): 319–31.
Essay 19, ‘A Problem for Intuitionism: The Apparent Possibility of Performing Infinitely
Many Tasks in a Finite Time’, was originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 90/1 (1989‒90): 17–34.
Essay 20, ‘More on “The Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s Theorem”’, was originally
published in Grazer Philosophische Studien, 55/1 (1999): 103–126.
Part of the rationale for collecting these essays together is that they are all
concerned, in one way or another, with the a priori. But there is a more funda-
mental and more distinctive unifying theme: the essays all reckon, again in one
way or another, with what I see as something ineliminably anthropocentric in our
systematic pursuit of a priori sense-making.
I shall not try to provide a precise definition of the a priori. Given the range of
these essays, and given the extent to which their concern with the a priori is a
matter of unspoken background presupposition rather than direct engagement, it
suits my purposes to allow as much latitude as possible in how the term is to be
understood. This includes latitude in how its very domain is to be understood:
does the term apply to truths? to states of knowledge? to concepts? to modes of
investigation? to justifications for what is believed? possibly even to features of
reality? It is largely to accommodate this latitude that I have elected, in this
Introduction, to use the blanket term ‘sense-making’ as the complement of ‘a
priori’. For ‘sense-making’ can itself be understood in a suitably wide variety of
ways. And even if it does not capture all of what has been classified by philo-
sophers as ‘a priori’, its own classification as ‘a priori’ allows for extension to other
cases: for instance, a truth may be said to be a priori if it can be known as a result
of a priori sense-making. All that really matters, for current purposes, is that
if something can be classified as ‘sense-making’, and if it manages to do whatever
it is intended to do independently of experience, then it can also be classified as
‘a priori’.
Just as I shall refrain from trying to provide a precise definition of the a priori,
so too I shall refrain from trying to provide a precise definition of the anthropo-
centric. Again all that really matters, for current purposes, is that the term
indicates what is from a human point of view, and that ‘human’ in turn is to be
understood in relation to Homo sapiens. This reference to Homo sapiens might
have been thought to go without saying. But it deserves to be made explicit, if only
because of a non-biological understanding of the term ‘human’ that we find, at
least arguably, and at least sometimes, in Kant. On that understanding the term
denotes finite rationality.¹ Interestingly, this makes the concept of the human itself
a priori—though, more interestingly still, there is an argument due to Michael
¹ See e.g. Kant (1996a), 4: 428 ff. and Kant (1996d), 6: 26 ff.
The Human A Priori: Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and Mathematics. A. W. Moore,
Oxford University Press. © A. W. Moore 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871411.003.0001
2
Thompson that the concept of the human is a priori anyway, even when it is
understood biologically.² This raises some fascinating issues that are clearly
pertinent to what I have identified as the unifying theme of these essays. Even
so, I mention them principally to set them aside. For the question whether or not
the concept of the human is itself a priori is strictly orthogonal to the question
whether or not what is a priori is bound up with the human in the way I am
claiming. Either answer to the first question is compatible with either answer to
the second.
In order to give an initial indication of why I see the connection that I do
between the a priori and the human, I am going to present something that I will
call ‘the Basic Model’. In the Basic Model, there is some subject S who is in
possession of some concept c which is integral to some a priori sense-making that
S achieves, but there is also something radically parochial about S’s possession of c.
A simple example would be a subject who, by virtue of possessing the concept of a
wife, deduces a priori that there are at least as many women and girls as there are
wives. The a priority of S’s deduction is in no way compromised by the fact that
there is a complicated network of highly contingent social structures and values
that support the institution of marriage and that serve as a precondition of any
subject’s possessing any such concept in the first place. The Basic Model is therefore
already enough to indicate how the a priori can be grounded in the parochial. It is
not a huge leap from there to the thought that the a priori can be grounded in
peculiarities of an entire species; nor from there to the thought that there can be a
priori sense-making that may appropriately be said to be from the point of view of
that species; nor from there to the thought that we humans and what accrues from
our systematic pursuit of a priori sense-making are a case in point.
I mentioned in the Preface that Essay 10 has what I now see as an important
imperfection whereby it cuts across one of the main threads that links together
this volume as a whole. In the bulk of what follows in this Introduction I shall say a
little about each of the essays in the order in which they occur; but first I want to
amplify on what I had in mind when I made that comment about Essay 10, and
to draw on some related material in Essay 12, since this will help to clarify the
Basic Model.
Essay 10 is concerned with an idea that occurs in David Wiggins’s work: the
idea of there being nothing else to think.³ In that essay I explore a way of
construing this idea whereby the claim that there is nothing else to think but
that p is equivalent to the claim that it is true that p. This in turn involves the
following subsidiary idea: if it is true that p, then anyone who does not think that p
pays a price. But what is it not to think that p? It is easy to assume, and in the essay
I in effect did assume, that not thinking that p must take one of three forms:
² Thompson (2004).
³ For a fascinating discussion of this idea, and of other related ideas, see Diamond (2019).
3
thinking the opposite; being self-consciously agnostic about the matter; or not
even considering the matter, possibly not even being in a position to consider it.
But even at the time of writing the essay I was aware of what many people, Bernard
Williams in particular, would regard as an important fourth possibility. I gesture
towards this possibility in footnote 29 of the essay, albeit only to register my
disagreement with Williams. However, as I indicate in a parenthesis within that
footnote added for the reprint, I have subsequently arrived at a more sympathetic
view of what Williams has in mind.
To understand what Williams does have in mind we can exploit some of the
material that I present in Essay 12. I there offer a distinction between what I call a
‘disengaged’ grasp of a concept and an ‘engaged’ grasp of it—a distinction which
I fudge in footnote 29 of Essay 10 when I talk of ‘having’ a thought, and which for
that matter I fudge in Essay 10 as a whole when I talk of ‘thinking’ that something
is the case. This distinction applies when a concept is what Williams would call a
‘thick’ concept, that is a concept with both a factual aspect and an evaluative
aspect. An example is the concept of infidelity: if I claim that you have been
unfaithful, then I say something straightforwardly false if you have not in fact gone
back on any relevant agreement; but I also thereby censure you. Another example,
albeit one in which the evaluative aspect is somewhat subtler, is that which I used
to illustrate the Basic Model: the concept of a wife. To grasp a thick concept in the
disengaged way is to be able to recognize when the concept would correctly be
applied, to be able to understand others when they apply it, and so forth. To grasp
such a concept in the engaged way is not only to be able to do these things but also
to be prepared to apply it oneself and hence to share whatever beliefs, concerns,
and values give application of the concept its point. Talk of ‘having’ a thought, or
even of ‘thinking’ something, and other related talk, can then be understood in
two corresponding ways: in the engaged way whereby it requires having an
engaged grasp of all the relevant concepts; and in the disengaged way whereby it
does not. And if ‘thinking’ that p is understood in the engaged way, then there is
indeed a fourth form that not thinking that p can take: namely, ‘considering’ the
matter, where this is understood in the disengaged way, and possibly even
‘recognizing’ that it is true that p, where this too is understood in the disengaged
way, but not oneself being prepared to apply one of the relevant concepts
and thus not oneself thinking that p. Moreover, all of this may be completely
self-conscious. One may not think that p because one repudiates the concept in
question as somehow pernicious. The reason why this poses a particular threat to
my project in Essay 10 is that, if the concept is somehow pernicious, then the idea
that one pays a price for not thinking that p when it is true that p is clearly
compromised: the very perniciousness of the concept may mean that one is better
off not thinking that p, because one is better off not thinking in such terms at all.
The relevance of all of this to the Basic Model should be clear. I couched the
Basic Model in terms of ‘sense-making’, a term whose versatility I have already
4
Given what I have said so far, Kant might be expected to figure in these essays as a
hero. Is he not the great champion of the human a priori? One of his primary
metaphysical projects is, after all, to account for a certain kind of a priori sense-
making; and the way in which he does so is by appeal to experience-independent
cognitive resources which we humans have and which, for all we know, only we
humans have. Not only are these integral to the a priori sense-making in question,
they are integral to it in a way that makes it entirely appropriate to say that such
sense-making is from a human point of view—possibly even from a peculiarly
human point of view.⁴
In many ways Kant does figure in these essays as a hero. He is the focus of each
of the first two essays. Nevertheless, the principal lesson of Essay 1 is that there is
something badly wrong with Kant’s own vision of the human a priori. This vision
has three critical components:
(Necessity) When we make a priori sense of things from our human point of
view, we make sense of them as necessarily being a certain way.⁵
(Dependence) Things’ being that way is dependent on that point of view.
(Inescapability) We cannot make sense of things except from that point of view.
know. We cannot, in Kant’s view, know whether they are part of the point of view
of other finite sense-makers (if such there be) nor for that matter whether they are
part of the point of view of all possible finite sense-makers.⁷ The issue is whether
he adopts an analogous circumspection concerning the resources that are opera-
tive in how we think, or whether, in their case, he reckons that we can know more:
specifically, that they are part of the point of view of all possible finite sense-
makers. This is the issue that Anil Gomes, Andrew Stephenson, and I address in
Essay 2.⁸ We end up mooting a second-order circumspection on Kant’s part
whereby the answer is neither—although there are reasons of principle why
Kant had better not explicitly endorse this position.⁹
In Essay 3 attention shifts to Kant’s predecessor Descartes. Descartes likewise
sees an anthropocentrism in our a priori sense-making. And he likewise embraces
a version of Necessity. Both of these are manifest when, in making a priori sense of
things, we at the same time make sense of them as necessarily being a certain way.
For, on Descartes’s conception, for things necessarily to be a certain way is for the
denial that things are that way to ‘conflict with our human concepts’.¹⁰
Not only is there a version of Necessity at work here, though. There is also what
appears to be a Kantian predicament in the offing, as we see when Descartes pits
his conception of necessity against his conception of God. For he is reluctant
to say that any necessity in how things are is necessity even for God. This is in
large part because he believes that ‘every basis of truth . . . depends on [God’s]
omnipotence’,¹¹ from which it follows that even those things that are necessarily a
certain way are ultimately that way only because God decrees that they are. From
this in turn it follows, or rather it seems to follow—I shall return to the signifi-
cance of this qualification shortly—that the necessity in question is at most a
necessity for us, a necessity resting on a deeper contingency about our human
point of view and the play of our concepts there. This is not the contingency of
Dependence: the link here is between our human point of view and the necessity
itself, not between our human point of view and what the necessity attaches to. But
it makes for similar trouble. And it does mean that, if an analogue of Inescapability
is at work in Descartes, as it plausibly is, then the apparent Kantian predicament
to which I have referred is a real one.
In fact, however, it is the burden of Essay 3 to argue that it is merely apparent.
Descartes is at perfect liberty to deny that what I said seems to follow does follow;
and he is at perfect liberty to insist that the necessity in question is indeed
necessity even for God. He can do these things by doing what his a priori
reflections on these issues mean that he should only ever have been doing—
albeit, for reasons that I have indicated, he is sometimes diffident about doing—
namely, heeding the analogue of Inescapability and resting content with making
sense of things from our human point of view. This makes any claim that the
necessity in question is necessity even for God harmlessly anthropocentric. It does
nothing to gainsay the fact that even those things that are necessarily a certain way
are ultimately that way only because God decrees that they are. In saying that they
are necessarily that way we are saying only that it would conflict with our human
concepts to deny that that is how they are. (We are also alluding to our means of
coming to know that that is how they are.) In its own way, then, Essay 3 clearly
develops the theme of the human a priori. In a brief postscript to the essay
I correct a misunderstanding of the essay due to James Conant that precisely
fails to recognize this.
Of the four essays in Part I, Essay 4 is the one that is least obviously about the a
priori. It is targeted at what is commonly dubbed ‘the new atheism’. I use the essay
to explore a conception of theistic sense-making for which the new atheism makes
no allowance. As it happens I believe that this conception significantly overlaps
with my broad conception of a priori sense-making; I also believe that, where it
does, there is something fundamentally anthropocentric about it. So, although
none of this is explicit in Essay 4, it does mean that the essay is not the incongruity
which it may appear to be. Even so, the significance of the essay for the volume as a
whole lies elsewhere. I have included it because of the way in which it draws
attention to kinds of sense-making that are not characteristic of the natural
sciences. My hope is that it thereby serves as a helpful prelude to Parts II, III,
and IV. For I do not believe that we can properly grasp the anthropocentric
element in philosophy, ethics, or mathematics until we have come to appreciate
how deeply the sense-making involved in each of these differs from that involved
in the natural sciences (whose systematic pursuit can reasonably include the
aspiration to abandon the human point of view¹²). Part of the force of what is
to come in the remaining essays, therefore—as of Essay 4 itself—is an anti-
scientism.
Such anti-scientism is to the fore in Part II. Of the three disciplines around which
the essays in this volume are structured—philosophy, ethics, and mathematics—it
is philosophy that is in greatest danger of falling prey to scientism. In Essay 5