Concepts, Skills and the Distinction Between A Priori and A Posteriori A part of Timothy Williamsons recent campaign against

the view that philosophy is conceptual analysis is an assault on the a priori - a posteriori distinction. Philosophers may work in an armchair and need not go into a lab, which they routinely explain by saying that the knowledge they seek is a priori. Williamson believes that they can keep the armchair but must drop the explanation, because the notion of a priori does not help to clarify the nature of philosophical knowledge. He does not dispute that one may draw a distinction between a priori and a posteriori that would get the paradigmatic cases right, he disputes that the distinction is helpful. I will argue that he is wrong. In particular, his objection relies on separating concepts and the skills manifested in their application in a way that cannot be sustained. 1. Williamsons objection Williamsons objection (2007: 165169, 189191) is best viewed as consisting of two steps. First he contends that the a priori - a posteriori distinction fails to illuminate the knowledge of counterfactuals, then he generalizes this to propositions of other form which are of philosophical interest. A priori and a posteriori knowledge is usually distinguished on grounds of what role experience is allowed to play in it. If the role of experience is merely enabling, i.e. it is only needed so that we can entertain the proposition we know, then the knowledge is a priori; if it plays evidential role, we have a posteriori knowledge. Thus our knowledge that all bachelors are male is a priori, because we need experience only to acquire the concepts bachelor and male, and not to justify our belief, whereas our knowledge that the prime minister is male is a posteriori, since it depends for its justification upon experience. In the case of counterfactuals, however, says Williamson the role of evidence is more than enabling but less then evidential. Here is his example. Consider someone who is familiar with the units of measurement centimetre and inch, is adept in estimating sizes in both, but who has never learned the conversion ratio between the two. Such a person could easily come to know that If two marks had been nine inches apart, they would have been at least nineteen centimetres apart

without making the marks and estimating their distance in centimetre. In this kind of knowledge experience does not play an evidential role: the person in question does not look at the distances, and is not making an inference from premises which are in turn justified by experience.1 Nevertheless, experience seems to be doing more here than merely permitting one to apprehend the proposition. Many of us possess the concepts in question but are unable to come to know the proposition in the way the person in the example, i.e. without calculation. Williamson believes that the feat is accomplished by running an offline simulation. The person imagines two marks nines inches from each other and then estimates their distance in centimetre. This procedure may yield justification, but only if it is appropriately connected to ones past experience. Whether I am justified in believing [the proposition] likewise depends on how skilful I am in making such judgments. My possession of the appropriate skills depends constitutively, not just causally, on past experience for the calibration of my judgments of length in those units. If the calibration is correct by a lucky accident, despite massive errors in the relevant past beliefs about length, I lack the required skill. (2007: 166) If this is right so far, and counterfactual knowledge eludes the a priori - a posteriori distinction, the same goes for most of philosophical knowledge, for the following reasons. First, philosophical theorizing relies very heavily on thought experiments, which invoke counterfactuals (2007: 185186). Second, philosophers are concerned mainly with necessary truths, and Williamson argues that modal knowledge is just a special case of counterfactual knowledge (2007: 155165).2 Third, certain disagreements between philosophers can be explained by differences in the skills rooted in past experience. For example, most of us are convinced that knowledge implies belief, but there are some who disagree. This difference cannot be accounted for in terms of difference in empirical evidence, since it is unlikely that the two groups were exposed to relevantly different empirical data. Nor can it be accounted for in terms of some conceptual difference, for those who deny that knowledge implies belief possess the same concepts. So, Williamson asks,

I am not convinced that it is generally implausible to construe the evidence for counterfactuals as inferential. It seems to me that Williamson applies an unduly narrow conception of inferential justification (2007: 143147). 2 C.S. Jenkins does not find Williamsons argument convincing because the fact that necessity and possibility can be defined in terms of counterfactuals does not imply that the way of knowing the former reduces to the way of knowing of the letter (2009: 696698). I share her misgivings.

[w]hy should not subtle differences between two courses of experience, each of which sufficed for coming to understand know and believe, make for differences in how test cases are processed, just large enough to tip honest judgments in opposite directions? Whether knowledge of [the claim that knowledge implies belief] is available to one may thus be highly sensitive to personal circumstances. Such individual differences in the skill with which concepts are applied depend constitutively, not just causally, on past experience, for the skilfulness of a performance depends constitutively on its causal origins. (2007: 168) 2. Concepts and skills Williamsons key idea is to identify a special role for experience, which is neither enabling, nor evidential, but something between the two, and that role is to develop skills.3 His argument requires that the skill pertaining to the application of a particular concept should be different from the concept itself: if it were not, if developing the appropriate skill were simply an aspect of the acquisition of the concept, then the role of experience in grounding the skill would only be enabling, and thus the argument would not go through. I want to show that concepts and the skills cannot be divorced in this way. I am not denying that one can distinguish the concept and skill to use it, I am denying that the distinction can support the argument. To make this clear, here are two examples similar to the ones in the preceding section. Suppose John and Mary both endorse a sentence, which is of the sort we are interested in, a counterfactual or modal sentence, or something in that neighbourhood, which is indeed true. Suppose further that John is a novice to the field and his belief is just a lucky guess, whereas Mary is highly experienced and her belief flows from her expertise. No doubt, Mary has knowledge, but John does not, which we may explain in two ways: (1) Only Mary is sufficiently skilled in the application of the relevant concepts. (2) Only Marys concepts are sufficiently sophisticated. Williamson would prefer (1). I do not find (1) objectionable, but I want to insist that (2) is just as good.
3

Compare: [P]ast experience of spatial and temporal properties may play a role in skilful mathematical intuition that is not directly evidential but far exceeds what is needed to acquire the relevant mathematical concepts. The role may be more than heuristic, concerning the context of justification as well as the context of discovery. Even the combinatorial skills required for competent assessment of standard set-theoretic axioms may involve offline applications of perceptual and motor skills, whose capacity to generate knowledge constitutively depends on their honing through past experience that plays no evidential role in the assessment of the axioms. (2007: 168169)

Or take a situation in which two experts disagree whether given a sentence is true. The sentence is again counterfactual, modal or something like that, but now it does not matter whether it is true. We would like to explain why the experts views diverge, and we have two options again: (3) The skills they rely on in the application of the relevant concepts are somewhat different. (4) Their relevant concepts are somewhat different. Williamson would prefer (3), which I accept, but I submit that (4) is just as good. In other words, the explanations in terms of skills can always be replaced by explanations in terms of concepts, the two ways of speaking are equivalent. A description couched in terms of concept possession is true if and only if the corresponding description on terms of skills is true. Two caveats must be entered here to avoid misunderstanding. First, the equivalence is not meant to rule out that in a given situation one idiom may be more appropriate for pragmatic reasons; the claim is that they are equivalent with respect to truth not with respect to appropriateness. Second, the term skill is used here throughout in the sense of ability to use a given concept. This being said, there are two reasons for disallowing that concepts and the corresponding skills may part company. The first is that we make use of the same criteria in judging whether someone possesses a concept as in determining how skilfully he applies it. The tests consists of applying the concept to various instances or cases, and seeing the connections between the concept in question and other concepts. Since the criteria are the same, one cannot score differently in the possession and in the skilful application of concepts. There is one case, perhaps, in which one might be tempted to say that someone possesses a concept without being skilled in its application, namely, when one knows the definition. But this temptation should be resisted. Imagine a student who can write the definition of validity, but when tested on some elementary examples he marks those arguments as valid, in which the premises and the conclusion are true, and the premises seem to give some reason to believe the conclusion. Soft graders might give points for the definition, but it is fair to say that the definition was learned by rote. If the student understood the definition, that would have guided his answers in the applications and he would have scored better. The second reason is that the best currently available empirical theory of how concepts are mentally represented, connectionism, does not allow discrepancy between concept and skill

in its application. Connectionist models may be imperfect, and connectionism may not be capable of delivering all we want of cognitive science, but it is eminently suitable for reproducing those characteristics which experimental psychology has found our concepts to have. A connectionist model is a network comprising a large number of interconnected units, with one layer of units representing the input, typically very simple, empirically detectable features, and one layer of units representing the output, e.g. the networks decision as to which concept the specimen presented to the input layer belongs to. The network is just a mechanism for associating input and output, e.g. telling whether an object is an apple, a pear, or a peach. Saying which is which may be regarded as a skill, but then there is no distinction between the skill and the concept, because the network cannot do anything apart from saying which is which. It does not contain one set of items for storing concepts and another set for applying them, and there is no computational distinction between performing these tasks either. It appears that both folk practice and scientific theory militate against divorcing concepts and skills in the way Williamson suggests. Is there then a principled way of thinking of concepts which allows separating them from the corresponding skills? One type of response which clearly fails would be to point out the ontological differences between concepts and skills, like saying that concepts are abstract objects whereas skills are patterns of behaviour. This will not work because the objection was not that concepts are identical with skills, it was that concepts whatever they may be are possessed to the same extent as it is manifested in skilful applications. What Williamson needs is being allowed to say that different people have the same concept accompanied by different skills. 3. More tolerant criteria for concept possession? In his attack on the epistemic conception of analyticity Williamson introduces an idea which might be put to work here. According to the epistemic conception of analyticity there are propositions such that grasping them suffices to assent to them, because assenting to them is a necessary condition of understanding them. For instance, the proposition that every vixen is a female fox is supposed to be epistemically analytic, because rejecting it reveals that ones failure to grasp the concept vixen. One of Williamsons charges against this conception is that even in the case of propositions like this we find dissenters who have mastered the concept yet do not endorse the proposition. E. g. someone may believe that the concept vixen also applies to immature male foxes and thus disbelieve the proposition endorsing which is supposedly necessary for possessing the concept vixen. Such dissenters can be credited with sharing our concept is because they fall well within the range of permissible variation. (2007: 118)

This kind of tolerance is grounded in the view that concepts can be shared even if there is no uniformity in their application. Suppose a, b c are members of a community, and each has his idiosyncratic way of applying a concept of his own Ca, Cb, Cc There might not even be a common core of applications of Ca, Cb, Cc, because even in the case of the most widely shared applications there is someone who misbehaves. But assume there is a network of similarities and the variations are constrained, so that none of the Cs is radically different from all the others, even though it may be quite different from some of the others. In this case (allowing that further conditions must also be met) there emerges a social norm defining the concept C. It is this socially shared concept that people attribute to one another rather than the idiosyncratic Ca, Cb, Cc, So one who denies that all vixens are female foxes is taken to have false belief about vixens rather than having a possibly true belief involving a different concept. It needs to be said that Williamson develops this idea primarily with respect to the meanings of words, i.e. he would talk about the meaning of vixen and not the concept vixen (2007: 118130). Nevertheless, since he criticizes the epistemic conception of analyticity both on the level of sentences and meanings and on the level of propositions and concepts, it does not seem gratuitous to take him to think along these lines, especially because this would not invite additional objections. At any rate, Williamsons approval is not needed to attempt to save the separation of concepts and skills by deploying this account of concept attribution. The attempt would go as follows. One may attribute someone a given concept if the way he employs it does not deviate too much from the social norm. Once we adopt this way of attributing concepts this opens the room for individual variation which can be accounted for by differences in individual skills. Returning to the cases considered in the previous section, we may now say that Mary, the expert, and John, the novice, apply the same concept, but Mary is sufficiently skilled, therefore she knows the proposition in question, John, on the other hand, lacks the necessarily skills, so his belief is just a lucky guess, not knowledge. Hence, (1) is right and (2) is wrong. In the other case the two experts have the same concepts and their disagreement originates in the difference of skills; consequently (3) is right and (4) is wrong. Notice, that this way of thinking does not cut concepts completely loose from applications. If John keeps floundering all the time, we will judge that he does not after all possess the concept; if the experts cannot agree on a single thing, well, then their concepts are different. But there is a gap between concepts and applications which can be filled by skills. Can Williamsons objection to the a priori - a posteriori distinction be defended in this way? Note that it is not enough if this way of identifying concepts is permissible. A friend of the distinction may answer that permissible this way of talking is, it is not helpful in matters

epistemological. So this way of identifying concepts can only vindicate the objection if it is clearly preferable to other ways. But that is not the case. First, there is a usual objection to this way of attributing concepts which was raised in discussion of Tyler Burges social externalism. Our disagreements with unorthodox speakers, like one denying that all vixens are female foxes, one may say, is not an object-level disagreement but a meta-level disagreement about words. The speakers unorthodoxy consists not in his outrageous beliefs about vixens, but in his beliefs as to what the word vixen means or what concept it expresses. I do not want two resolve this controversy now, but I would like to remark something in favour of the legitimacy of attributing unorthodox concepts. This is the strategy we normally employ in rational debate when we seek to find common ground and localise very clearly where our disagreements lie. In such a debate we need to ward off misunderstandings, and assuming that the concepts the other party uses is the socially shared concept rather than an idiosyncratic may be a recipe for disaster. Here is an example. Leibniz begins his critique of Lockes repudiation of innatism by pointing out that Lockes examples are unsuitable. The innatist, he says, would not maintain that a proposition like white is not black is innate, because only necessary truths are innate, and this proposition is not a necessary truth. If we decide at this point that Leibnizs concept of necessity is just the usual concept of necessity or, better, the standard 17th century concept of necessity, we will never understand what is going on. Second, the way of attributing concepts Williamson would need is at odds with all the three of major current philosophical accounts of concepts. Followers of Wittgenstein and Dummett who maintain that concepts are abilities would reject it, since they deny there is anything to concepts over above abilities to discriminate, infer, etc. Those who identify concepts with mental representation in the spirit of cognitive science would not see much merit in it either. On the proposed picture people applying the same concepts may discriminate, judge and infer differently from one another, which suggests exactly that they have different mental representations. Finally, those who identify concepts with Fregean senses, like Christopher Peacocke, see the possession of concepts as standing in appropriate relation to abstract items, and do not make it a function of social norms. Summary. I have argued that Williamsons objection to the distinction between a priori and a posteriori presupposes that concepts can be divorced from the skills to apply them, but there are good reasons to deny that. And even if one may develop a picture of concept possession which allows for the required separation, there are good reasons for not being fascinated with it.

References Jenkins, C. S. 2008. Modal Knowledge, Counterfactual Knowledge and the Role of Experience. The Philosophical Quarterly 58: 693701. Williamson, T. 2007. The Philosophy of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.