What is the position of the empiricist consensus regarding the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge?
Those who belong to the empiricist consensus commonly reject this possibility. For them all justified belief which is not restricted to the meanings of terms, that is, which “escapes the circle of language” and refers to “the world,” is only justified by appeal to experience. In other words, we may say that our rational warrant for holding scientific beliefs must always be a certain body of empirical evidence expressed in certain “observation statement” or “basic statements” which are considered to be directly verified by experience. Thus another element of the consensus was its commitment to empiricism against the rationalist view that some things about the world could be known by pure reasoning.
