Philosophy of Mind > Intentionality > Content Internalism and Externalism > Content Internalism and Externalism, Misc > Externalism and Mental Causation
Externalism and Mental Causation
Edited by Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa)
About this topic
| Summary | One of the problems of mental causation involves showing how a popular theory of how mental content is individuated can be compatible with the claim that mental states are causally efficacious in virtue of their content. For example, if your belief that the water in the bucket is frozen is part of what causes you to put the bucket over a fire, it does so in virtue of the fact that it has that content (and not, say, the content that the water in the bucket is steaming hot). Semantic externalism is the idea that mental contents are individuated partly in terms of thinkers' relations to the environment: for example, you think about water because you're in a world that has water, but a physically identical twin on a planet with a similar-seeming substance (but not H2O) would think about that substance. Putnam 1975 expressed this as the idea that contents "ain't in the head". The problem is to reconcile this fact about content individuation with the idea that causal relationships are in some sense "local" or "in the head". |
| Key works | Putnam 1975 and Burge 1979 are seminal defenses of the ideas that the individuation of mental content depends at least in part on relations between thinkers and (respectively) their physical and social environments. |
Related categories
Jobs in this area
- Narrow Content (115)
- Two-Dimensionalism about Content (17)
- Content Internalism and Externalism, Miscellaneous (5)
- Mental Causation (363 | 226)
- Externalism and Psychological Explanation (85)
- Externalism and Computation (19)
|
48 found
|
(import / add options) Sort by: |
|
Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access. Monitor this page
Be alerted of all new items appearing on this page. Choose how you want to monitor it:
About PhilPapers
General Editors: David Bourget (London) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: Anthony Beavers David Bourget Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers Gabriele Contessa Rafael De Clercq Catarina Dutilh Novaes Pablo Gilabert Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Jonathan Kvanvig Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Gualtiero Piccinini Darrell Rowbottom Constantine Sandis Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Robert Sparrow Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell John Simpson Wilkins Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers |

