I spent a chunk of this morning sitting in a small alcove outside St Andrews castle, gazing over the rocks to the North Sea, listening alternately to the gentle sounds of the water or to Paul Kelly on the iPod singing about other wonderful bodies of water, and, just to top it off, reading Christopher Peacocke’s _The Realm of Reason_. A more aesthetically sensitive man might have been lulled by the gentle beauty of the place into a charitable reading of Peacocke’s book. But not I! There are nits to pick, and pick them I must, for what is a blog if not a device for point-scoring against the great and the good?

Here’s his preliminary definition of a priori.

bq. A content is a priori if a thinker can be entitled to accept it without that entitlement being constitutively dependent upon the content of her perceptual experiences of other conscious states.

This seems to include too much by way of introspective knowledge. I know right now that most of my major organs are basically functioning properly. I know this not because of anything one would ordinary call perception, let alone the _contents_ of those perceptions, nor because of any conscious state I’m in, but because I’m not getting any warning signals from those organs, and usually they do tell me if they are not working well. I wish the warnings would come in the form of 8 inch letters splashed across my visual field, e.g. “LEFT LEG BROKEN – DON’T WALK ON IT” rather than via annoying pains, but the warning system is mostly functional. Nevertheless, that my major organs are not working is something I’m entitled right now to believe on the basis largely of sub-conscious introspection, but it’s not something to which I’m entitled a priori.

More generally, Peacocke’s definition overlooks just how big a role sub-conscious introspection plays in our day-to-day, and more particularly second-to-second, self-monitoring and self-adjustment. I think the process of doing this monitoring and adjustment gives us entitlement to all sorts of _de se_ contents, but I don’t think any of it is a priori. Maybe this is all meant to count as perception in Peacocke’s book, but I think it’s a misleading (at best) to call all of this perception if that’s the intent.

Much more Peacocke marginalia to come I fear.