Is Verbal Communication a Purely Preservative Process?

In a recent paper titled Content Preservation (1993), Tyler Burge argues that certain psychological processes play a purely preservative role, and not a justificatory role. Burge's claim is that the justificatory force of the beliefs sustained by these processes is independent of features of these processes, such as their reliability. The function of these psychological processes is merely to preserve the beliefs (or rather, the propositional contents of these beliefs) in order to assure the proper working of other cognitive capacities over time (464). In particular, Burge claims that the memory processes underlying deductive reasoning and the psychological processes underlying verbal communication are purely preservative. Burge uses these claims about memory and verbal communication to argue for the conclusion that mathematical beliefs and beliefs based on the testimony of others can be warranted a priori.' With respect to memory, Burge wants to argue against philosophers such as Chisholm, who claim that in order to know a mathematical theorem the subject has to rule out the possibility that the memory processes used in the course of proving the theorem are unreliable. Since this possibility cannot be ruled out a priori, it appears that our mathematical knowledge is not a priori. Burge on the other hand uses his claim that memory processes are purely