INTRODUCTION

The argument of the previous chapters leads to the striking or perhaps even startling conclusion that empiricist positions on a priori justification and knowledge, despite their apparent dominance throughout most of the twentieth century, are epistemological dead ends: the moderate empiricist attempt to reconcile a priori justification with empiricism by invoking the concept of analyticity does not succeed, indeed does not really get off the ground; and the radical empiricist attempt to dispense entirely with such justification ends in a nearly total skepticism. The indicated conclusion is that a viable non-skeptical epistemology, rather than downgrading or rejecting a priori insight, must accept it more or less at face value as a genuine and autonomous source of epistemic justification and knowledge. This is the main thesis of epistemological rationalism and also the central thesis of the present book.

Obviously, however, such a result can be no more than tentative until the rationalist view has been explored more fully and shown to be defensible. For even if the objections to the two positive empiricist views are indeed decisive, as claimed here, the possibility remains that the negative empiricist claim is correct: that a priori justification as understood by the rationalist simply does not exist.