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Summary The debate on content externalism and self-knowledge concerns the supposed incompatibility between externalism and armchair knowledge of one's own thought contents. Following Putnam 1975 and Burge 1979, many philosophers accept that mental contents are individuated partly by the social and/or physical environment. But in a Cartesian vein, many are also convinced that we enjoy especially secure armchair knowledge of our own occurrent thought contents. Yet if those contents are partly determined by the environment, it seems we could not know our thought contents just from the armchair. Whether I am having a water-thought vs. a twin-water-thought would depend on factors which are known only empirically. The debate turns on whether this apparent conflict is real.
Key works Millikan 1984's argument against "meaning rationalism" was the earliest articulation of how externalist semantics precludes Cartesian self-knowledge. But most see the externalism/self-knowledge debate as beginning with an exchange between Davidson 1987 and Burge 1988 (though both authors denied the incompatibility). However, Boghossian 1989 offered an incompatibilist reply, and other incompatibilists soon followed; see McKinsey 1991 and Brown 1995. Early compatibilist counter-replies are from Falvey & Owens 1994 and Macdonald 1995. Boghossian 1997 was a further contribution to the incompatibilist side, and the compatibilists McLaughlin & Tye 1998 and Sawyer 1998 followed soon after. From there, the literature truly began to explode.
Introductions Ludlow & Martin 1998 contains a useful introductory essay, besides anthologizing most of the key papers listed above. McLaughlin et al 2007 contains a selection by Jessica Brown that is also useful. See the relevant chapters in Kallestrup 2011 as well. For a longer, more detailed introduction, and for a lengthy bibliography, see Parent 2013 in the Stanford Encyclopedia.
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  1. As origens da interioridade: autoconhecimento e externalismo (The Origins of Interiority: Self-knowledge and Externalism).Claudia Passos-Ferreira - 2006 - Dissertation, Rio de Janeiro State University
    This thesis aims to study the origins of interiority from an externalist perspective. The process by which self-knowledge is formed is considered in relation to the development of the first-person perspective. From a first-person perspective, one is capable of self-referring and knowing one's own mental and physical states. Self-consciousness and self-knowledge are discussed in relation to Descartes' idea of first-person authority. The Cartesian idea contends that the first-person perspective has privileged and non-empirical access to one's own mental state. On the (...)
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  2. The transparency of mental vehicles.Michael Murez - 2023 - Noûs:1-28.
    Modes of presentation (MOPs) are often said to have to be transparent, usually in the sense that thinkers can know solely via introspection whether or not they are deploying the same one. While there has been much discussion of threats to transparency stemming from externalism, another threat to transparency has gar- nered less attention. This novel threat arises if MOPs are robust, as I argue they should be according to internalist views of MOPs which identify them with represen- tational vehicles, (...)
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  3. La Paradoja de la Racionalidad.Juan Vila - 2016 - Buenos Aires: Teseo Press.
    ¿Qué es la mente humana? ¿Es un aspecto de la naturaleza? ¿O acaso la trasciende? ¿Se puede explicar enteramente al hombre en un lenguaje científico-natural? Desde que Aristóteles definió al hombre como un "animal racional", el pensamiento occidental ha erigido una distinción ontológica entre hombre y naturaleza. Sin embargo, el darwinismo nos ha legado una verdad ineludible: que somos organismos animales, cuyas capacidades conceptuales no escapan a los procesos propios de la naturaleza. ¿Se puede, entonces, pensar al hombre como un (...)
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  4. Intelligent Anarchy.Ilexa Yardley - 2021 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.
    'Pi' in mathematics is the technical term for 'mind' in philosophy. This creates Intelligent anarchy. Or, in more conventional 'language' the whole idea that there is only 'one' person in, what humans label, 'the universe.' This means, technically, then, there are always 'two' people in any 'universe.' Where all of these terms (words) are meaningless, because the conservation of a circle controls, again, what humans label, 'reality.' (Self, anti-self, other-self, relative self.) Again, meaning, every human (any unit) (in any discipline) (...)
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  5. African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation.[author unknown] - 2020
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  6. Quine, Naturalism and First-Person Epistemology (In Persian).Ali Hossein Khani - forthcoming - Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP) Publishing.
    The book will discuss and criticize the objections from Blackburn, Searle and Glock to Quine's arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, i.e., that these arguments result in a denial of first-person authority, as well as Hylton’s solution to these objections. The book argues that these objections, as well as Hylton's solution, all rely on a misconstrual of Quine, among other things, that there can be a distinction between meaning and translation for Quine. I will then offer a Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian account of (...)
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  7. Personal Information as Symmetry Breaker in Disagreements.Diego E. Machuca - 2022 - Philosophy 97 (1):51-70.
    When involved in a disagreement, a common reaction is to tell oneself that, given that the information about one’s own epistemic standing is clearly superior in both amount and quality to the information about one’s opponent’s epistemic standing, one is justified in one’s confidence that one’s view is correct. In line with this natural reaction to disagreement, some contributors to the debate on its epistemic significance have claimed that one can stick to one’s guns by relying in part on information (...)
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  8. Davidson on Self‐Knowledge: A Transcendental Explanation.Ali Hossein Khani - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (2):153-184.
    Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self-knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson’s account stems from his remarks on disquotational specifications of self-ascriptions of meaning and mental content, the account which I will call the “Disquotational Explanation”. It has also been claimed that Davidson’s account rather rests on his version of content externalism, which I will call the “Externalist Explanation”. I will (...)
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  9. El conocimiento de la propia mente: Donald Davidson sobre autoridad de la primera persona, externalismo y racionalidad.Marc Jiménez Rolland - 2012 - Dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
    In this thesis, I elaborate and defend Donald Davidson's account of knowing one's own mental states that exhibit first-person authority. To that end, I place Davidson's account among others in the philosophical landscape concerning self-knowledge. Next, I examine his response to philosophical challenges that arise from mental content externalism and self-deception. Finally, I draw some insights froms Davidson's account to the broader aims of epsitemology.
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  10. Graph of Socratic Elenchos.John Bova - manuscript
    From my ongoing "Metalogical Plato" project. The aim of the diagram is to make reasonably intuitive how the Socratic elenchos (the logic of refutation applied to candidate formulations of virtues or ruling knowledges) looks and works as a whole structure. This is my starting point in the project, in part because of its great familiarity and arguable claim to being the inauguration of western philosophy; getting this point less wrong would have broad and deep consequences, including for philosophy’s self-understanding. -/- (...)
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  11. I. Jané. Reflections on Skolem's relativity of set-theoretical concepts. The Philosopher's Annual, edited by Patrick Grim, Peter Ludlow, and Gary Mar, vol. XXIV. CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2003, pp. 95–121 - C. Wright. On being in a quandary: relativism, vagueness, logical revisionism. The Philosopher's Annual, edited by Patrick Grim, Peter Ludlow, and Gary Mar, vol. XXIV. CSLI Publications, Stanford, 2003, pp. 273–325. [REVIEW]Peter Schotch - 2005 - Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 11 (1):84-89.
  12. Debating Self-Knowledge, by Anthony Brueckner and Gary Ebbs: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. ix + 233, £62. [REVIEW]Cristina Borgoni - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1):204-204.
  13. Reply to Brueckner.Joseph Keim Campbell - 2008 - Analysis 68 (3):264-269.
  14. Ordinary Language, Conventionalism and a priori Knowledge.Henry Jackman - 2001 - Dialectica 55 (4):315-325.
    This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to (...)
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  15. Externalism and A Priori Knowledge of the World: Why Privileged Access is Not the Issue.Maria Lasonen-Aarnio - 2006 - Dialectica 60 (4):433-445.
    I look at incompatibilist arguments aimed at showing that the conjunction of the thesis that a subject has privileged, a priori access to the contents of her own thoughts, on the one hand, and of semantic externalism, on the other, lead to a putatively absurd conclusion, namely, a priori knowledge of the external world. I focus on arguments involving a variety of externalism resulting from the singularity or object‐dependence of certain terms such as the demonstrative ‘that’. McKinsey argues that incompatibilist (...)
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  16. Blind reasoning.Paul A. Boghossian - 2003 - Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (1):225-248.
    The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of 'blind but blameless' reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible.
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  17. Comments on Mark Brown’s “Why Individualism Matters”.James K. Swindler - 1990 - Southwest Philosophy Review 6 (2):115-118.
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  18. Self-Knowledge and Externalism.Bill Brewer - 2000 - The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5:39-47.
    A person’s authoritative self-knowledge about the contents of his or her own beliefs is thought to cause problems for content externalism, for it appears to yield arguments constituting a wholly non-empirical source of empirical knowledge: knowledge that certain particular objects or kinds exist in the environment. I set out this objection to externalism, and present a new reply. Possession of an externalist concept is an epistemological skill: it depends upon the subject’s possession of demonstratively-based knowledge about the object or kind (...)
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  19. XI*—Externalist Explanation1.Christopher Peacocke - 1993 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1):203-230.
    Christopher Peacocke; XI*—Externalist Explanation1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 203–230, https://doi.org/10.
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  20. VII*—Formal and Substantial Individualism.Bernard Williams - 1985 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 85 (1):119-132.
    Bernard Williams; VII*—Formal and Substantial Individualism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 119–132, https://do.
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  21. A theory of the measurement of knowledge content, access, and learning.Peter Pirolli & Mark Wilson - 1998 - Psychological Review 105 (1):58-82.
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  22. Replies to Boghossian and Smithies.Hilary Kornblith - 2016 - Analysis 76 (1):69-80.
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  23. McKinsey on Kripke's Assault on Cluster Theories.Rod Bertolet - 1980 - Philosophy Research Archives 6:466-473.
    This paper attempts to undermine Michael McKinsey’s Important objections to Kripke’s attempts to refute cluster versions of description theories of name reference. McKinsey argues that Kripke Ignores descriptions to which a clustser theorist might appeal In constructing his counterexamples, but that these same descriptions are what guide our intuitions In evaluating the examples. I argue that the descriptions McKinsey offers are question-begging, and thus of no help to a cluster theorist. In a second brief section, I offer an argument designed (...)
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  24. Difficulties in generating scepticism about knowledge of content.A. Brueckner - 1999 - Analysis 59 (1):59-62.
  25. What anti-individualists cannot know a priori.Susana Nuccetelli - 1999 - Analysis 59 (1):48-51.
    Note first that knowledge of one's own thought-contents would not count as a priori according to the usual criteria for knowledge of this kind. Surely, then, incompatibilists are using this term to refer to some other, stipulatively defined, epistemic property. But could this be, as suggested by McKinsey { 1 99 1: 9), the property of being knowable 'just by thinking' or 'from the armchair'? Certainly not if these were metaphors for knowledge attainable on the basis of reason alone, since (...)
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  26. McKinsey-Brown survives.H. W. Noonan - 2000 - Analysis 60 (4):353-356.
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  27. Ambiguity and knowledge of content.A. Brueckner - 2000 - Analysis 60 (3):257-260.
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  28. Externalism and the a prioricity of Self-knowledge.A. Brueckner - 2000 - Analysis 60 (1):132-136.
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  29. The Compatibility of Anti-individualism and Privileged Access.Kevin Falvey - 2000 - Analysis 60 (1):137-142.
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  30. Word-ambiguity, world-switching, and knowledge of content: reply to Brueckner.S. C. Goldberg - 1999 - Analysis 59 (3):212-217.
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  31. Externalism, privileged self-knowledge, and the irrelevance of slow switching.Ted A. Warfield - 1997 - Analysis 57 (4):282-284.
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  32. Outsmarting the McKinsey-Brown argument?P. Noordhof - 2004 - Analysis 64 (1):48-56.
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  33. Noordhof on McKinsey-Brown.A. Brueckner - 2005 - Analysis 65 (1):86-88.
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  34. On our alleged a priori knowledge that water exists.S. C. Goldberg - 2003 - Analysis 63 (1):38-41.
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  35. Anti-individualism and analyticity.A. Brueckner - 2002 - Analysis 62 (1):87-91.
  36. Recent Work on McKinsey's Paradox.J. Kallestrup - 2011 - Analysis 71 (1):157-171.
    (No abstract is available for this citation).
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  37. Forms Of Externalism And Privileged Access.Michael McKinsey - 2002 - Noûs 36 (s16):199-224.
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  38. Cogency and Question-Begging: Some Reflections on McKinsey’s Paradox and Putnam’s Proof.Crispin Wright - 2000 - Noûs 34 (s1):140-163.
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  39. Cogency and Question‐Begging: Some Reflections on McKinsey's Paradox and Putnam's Proof.Crispin Wright - 2000 - Philosophical Issues 10 (1):140-163.
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  40. Self-Knowledge and the Bounds of Authenticity.Sven Bernecker - 2009 - Erkenntnis 71 (1):107-121.
    This paper criticizes the widespread view whereby a second-order judgment of the form ‘I believe that p ’ qualifies as self-knowledge only if the embedded content, p , is of the same type as the content of the intentional state reflected upon and the self-ascribed attitude, belief, is of the same type as the attitude the subject takes towards p . Rather than requiring identity of contents across levels of cognition self-knowledge requires only that the embedded content of the second-order (...)
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  41. Language Selection and Switching in Strasbourg.Penelope Gardner-Chloros - 1991 - Oxford University Press UK.
    The term `code-switching' is used to describe the mixing of different language varieties which often results from language contact. This book is the first full-length study of code-switching in a European context.
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  42. Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects.Robert Stern (ed.) - 1999 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK.
    Fourteen new essays by a distinguished team of authors offer a broad and stimulating re-examination of transcendental arguments. This is the philosophical method of arguing that what is doubted or denied by the opponent must be the case, as a condition for the possibility of experience, language, or thought.The line-up of contributors features leading figures in the field from both sides of the Atlantic; they discuss the nature of transcendental arguments, and consider their role and value. In particular, they consider (...)
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  43. Externalism, self-knowledge and explanation.Richard Flockemann - unknown
    In recent years, much attention has been given to the question of whether content externalism is compatible with an account of self-knowledge maintaining that we have an epistemically privileged access to the content of our propositional mental states. Philosophers who maintain the two are incompatible have put forward two majors types of challenge, which I call - following Martin Davies - the Achievement and Consequence Problems, which aim to demonstrate that self-knowledge cannot be reconciled with externalism. These challenges have spawned (...)
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  44. 5. Authoritative Self-Knowledge.Wolfgang Carl - 2014 - In The First-Person Point of View. De Gruyter. pp. 121-150.
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  45. The McKinsey–Lemmon logic is barely canonical.Robert Goldblatt & Ian Hodkinson - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Logic 5:1-19.
    We study a canonical modal logic introduced by Lemmon, and axiomatised by an infinite sequence of axioms generalising McKinsey’s formula. We prove that the class of all frames for this logic is not closed under elementary equivalence, and so is non-elementary. We also show that any axiomatisation of the logic involves infinitely many non-canonical formulas.
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  46. Boghossian’s Inference Argument against Content Externalism Reversed.Manuel Pérez Otero - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1):159-181.
    I deal here with one of Boghossian’s arguments against content externalism, related to our inferential rationality (to use his term). According to his reasoning, the apriority of our logical abilities is inconsistent with certain externalist assumptions. Nevertheless, the problem constitutes an important challenge for any theory of content, not just for externalism. Furthermore, when we examine what internalists may propose to solve the problem, we see that externalists have at their disposal a more promising repertoire of possible replies than internalists. (...)
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  47. Privileged Access and Externalism.Ted Alan Warfield - 1995 - Dissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick
    It is widely held that individuals have some sort of special access to their own minds. In recent philosophy of mind, the view that thought content depends on extra-mental environmental factors has become the dominant view. Many philosophers have argued and are convinced that this externalism about thought content is incompatible with the thesis that individuals have special access to their own minds. ;In this thesis I refute the case for the inconsistency of privileged access and externalism and offer a (...)
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  48. Skepticism and Externalist Theories of Thought Content.Kirk Alan Ludwig - 1990 - Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
    This dissertation addresses the question whether externalist theories of thought content provide a satisfactory response to the traditional problem of skepticism about the external world. I address two questions. If externalist theories of thought content are true, do they provide a satisfactory response to skepticism about the external world? Are externalist theories of thought content true? My answer to the first question is yes, and to the second no. The argument of the dissertation is divided into three parts. In the (...)
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  49. Jessica Brown, Anti-Individualism and Knowledge. [REVIEW]Jussi Haukioja - 2005 - Philosophy in Review 25:12-14.
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  50. Our Knowledge About Our Own Mental States: An Externalist Account.Keya Maitra - 2000 - Dissertation, The University of Connecticut
    The "incompatibility charge" argues that externalism fails to explain "self-knowledge" or the privileged knowledge that we ordinarily take ourselves to enjoy in relation to at least some of our own mental states. This dissertation attempts to provide an externalist reply to this charge. First, I suggest that the "compatibility debate" needs to be reoriented. This is because the mere internality or externality of determining factors cannot by itself explain how one can know the content determined by those factors. Thus the (...)
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