The fifth lesson took as its starting point the new issues that had emerged from the previous analysis, illustrating the project's challenge of the relationship between metaphysics and science by examining the situation facing the philosophy of knowledge (supposedly a priori) in the face of the sciences of cognition (judged a posteriori). We recalled the requirements to be met: distinguishing between knowing and understanding; rehabilitating thea priori after quine; clarifying the meaning to be given to the concept of "naturalism"; rethinking the epistemic value of intuition; redefining the domain of thea priori ; rethink the forms of normativity, and in particular whether some of these forms are not already present in nature - in other words, to see whether we can revive the third way envisaged by Kant, but rejected by him because of his model of science as apodictic, and the absence of universality and necessity that the categories would then have had, thus rediscovering the inspiration of the way of a "pre-formation system of pure reason".
In particular, the session clarified the various meanings at work in the concepts of "normativity" and "norms", and distinguished norms: (1) as rules of signification; (2) as proper to concepts; (3) as normative commitments or prerequisites of rationality; (4) as justifications or reasons; (5) finally, general norms of knowledge and inquiry (P. Engel). Having indicated the precautions to be taken according to the use that can be made of these concepts, we then turned to the question of whether we can speak of "norms in nature". Several conclusions have been drawn from this examination: knowledge is not cognition; the cognitive sciences generally allow us to distinguish two axes of complexity in the "normativity" we can assign to the mind, depending on whether we place ourselves at the representational or the metacognitive level (J. Proust). But it seems necessary to maintain a "hierarchy" between mental states. A further delimitation of the mental can be drawn from the readings we can draw from recent developments in the philosophy of knowledge (discussed last year) which, in some respects, come to the "rescue" of the cognitive sciences. Four important changes in the recent history of this field have been identified: the questions raised by certain limits of reliability (A. Goldman); the rise of virtue epistemology; the rise of the conception of knowledge as a mental state (T. Williamson); the transversality of many questions, concluding with one of today's most fruitful avenues for "saving"a priori and redefining its contours, namely, the analysis carried out in epistemology on the concept of "epistemicentitlement", which, from the threshold of perception, would already constitute a form (albeit undeveloped) of justification.
