Abstract

Does empirical knowledge of contingent matters presuppose knowledge of necessity? According to many contemporary epistemologists, the answer is 'no'; indeed, many are skeptical that there is such a thing as knowledge of necessity at all. Some would argue that there simply is no such thing as necessity; others would argue that our awareness of necessity should not count as knowledge because necessity is not something we discover in the world, but something we project onto it. My dissertation, however, aims to defend a version of the Kantian notion that knowledge of necessity is required for empirical knowledge: I argue that we must be able to recognize the necessary truth of a certain set of principles---principles of the kind Evans identifies as belonging to our "theory of perception"---in order to gain knowledge from experience. These principles enable us to recognize our perceptions as experience of an objective world, a world in which objects can exist whether or not we perceive them. I argue that knowledge of these principles is not itself gained from experience, in part because we need it to distinguish experience from other modes of thought, such as dreaming or imagination. ;After examining the relation between skepticism and the problem of knowledge of necessity, the central chapters discuss the ways in which empiricism and naturalism aim to account for our awareness of the world without positing this kind of a priori knowledge. Insofar as these programs avoid skepticism, I argue, they posit a kind of self-consciousness about experience on the part of the subject that cannot be explained without reference to exactly this sort of a priori principle. A further chapter argues that projectivist treatments of necessity leave us without a coherent account of empirical knowledge. The final chapter aims to lay some preliminary groundwork for an epistemology of necessity and in particular to indicate what is special about the kind of account we should seek here