Is it possible to argue for the possibility that there is no a priori knowledge?

Thanks for the reply.

'Water is necessarily H20 [...]

Yeah, I should have mentioned those. Here we might appeal to two-dimensionalism to explain the difference between those and the (more-central-to-philosophy) necessity claims I was referring to.

They too get verified in the same way everything else does, by being part of a body of claims that gets verified. [...] However, [induction is] a live problem for the Quinean and the non-Quinean alike [...] This is of course terrifically circular [...] but a Quinean might argue this is unavoidable and not actually so bad.

I think the main reason that I and most of the commentators I've read (friend and foe to Quine alike: BonJour, Bealer, Devitt) identify Quine as an empiricist (other than his valorization of science above all else) is still present here.

Quinean holism, I think, is most obviously a non-foundationalism. Rationalists take themselves to be able to justify fundamental epistemological principles a priori, including principles that license our uses of various methods. Quine, of course, would insist that it's a mistake to look for big, fundamental justifications of our most basic methods, such as science. In turn, if those justifications exist, then as I've noted, they have to be a priori. So maybe a reason he gets commonly placed in the 'empiricist' camp is because he denies that we can do the thing that the rationalist advertises herself to be able to do: use a priori methods to (non-viciously-circularly) justify certain (sometimes foundational) epistemological principles. (In this case it would include induction, trusting our senses, trusting science, even trusting logic and intuition.)

One can also ask, here, about the microscope with which empiricists claim to observe epistemological facts. I.e., what fully-empirical reason is there for believing this principle?
The following reason: 'Microscopes are reliable instruments' is part of the current going most verified body of claims.

I think I was too quick here. What I meant is that there are no empirical methods (such as microscopes) to justify epistemological facts, i.e. about who is justified in believing what, what counts as evidence, etc.

a good argument is one where the premises are all contained in the body of claims and the conclusion follows from them by the consequence relation.

Yeah, here I still wonder what empirical observation is the observation of the goodness of that argument. Why is the consequence relation (epistemologically) "better" than other relations between premises and conclusions?

/r/askphilosophy Thread