1. The primary evidence and motivation for externalism in the philosophy of mind is provided by the semantic facts that support direct reference theories of names, indexi- cal pronouns, and natural kind terms. But many externalists have forgotten their sem- antic roots, or so I shall contend here. I have become convinced of this by a common reaction among externalists to the main argument of my 1991 paper AAnti-Individual- ism and Privileged Access.@ In that argument, I concluded that externalism is (...) incompat- ible with the principle that we can have privileged, non-empirical knowledge of the contents of our own thoughts. The reaction in question amounts to a dismissive denial of one of my argument=s main premises. This premise, which I defended at length in the paper, is that an externalist thesis regarding a cognitive property should hold that possession of the property by a person _logically_, or _conceptually_, implies the existence of objects external to that person. (shrink)

The question of whether content externalism poses a threat to the traditional view of self-knowledge has been much debated. Compatibilists have tried to diffuse the threat by appealing to the self-verifying character of reflexive judgments about our own thoughts, while incompatibilists have strenuously objected that this does not suffice. In my paper I argue that this debate is fundamentally misconceived since it is based, on both sides, on the problematic notion of ‘knowledge of content’. What this shows, I argue, is (...) not that content externalism is unobjectionable, but that the real challenge to content externalism is not an epistemological one. The real difficulty concerns the content externalist’s seemingly necessary commitment to the idea that individuals have an incomplete grasp of the concepts that go into their own thoughts. This idea poses a threat not to self-knowledge, I argue, but rather to our first- and second-order reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for philosophy (...) of mind, whereas the more radical and interesting versions of externalism are quite difficult to support. (shrink)

The conclusion of the McKinsey paradox is that certain contingent claims about the external world are knowable a priori. Almost all of the literature on the paradox assumes that this conclusion is unacceptable, and focuses on finding a way of avoiding it. However, there is no consensus that any of these responses work. In this paper I take a different approach, arguing that the conclusion is acceptable. First, I develop our understanding of what Evans calls merely superficially contingent a priori (...) knowledge, and explain why there is no reason to deny that merely superficially contingent a priori knowledge of the external world is possible. I then argue that, properly understood, the conclusion of the McKinsey paradox is that merely superficially contingent knowledge of certain claims about the external world is possible, and so the conclusion is acceptable. Finally, I respond to the two main arguments that the conclusion of the paradox is unacceptable. (shrink)

This paper concerns content externalism and privileged access. I argue that externally-individuated concepts are not just subject to a causal constraint, but are also subject t an epistemic constraint. Their possession requires not merely that certain background presuppositions be true but, further, that the subject be in possession of true justified beliefs concerning their referents.

In this paper, I argue that content externalism and privileged access are compatible, but that one can, in a sense, have privileged access to the world. The supposedly absurd conclusion should be embraced.

Burge's thesis is the thesis that certain second-order self-ascriptionsare self-verifying in virtue of their self-referential form. The thesis hasrecently come under attack on the grounds that it does not yield a theory ofself-knowledge consistent with semantic externalism, and also on the groundsthat it is false. In this paper I defend Burge's thesis against both charges,in particular against the arguments of Bernecker, Gallois and Goldberg. Thealleged counterexamples they provide are merely apparent counterexamples, andthe thesis is adequate to its proper task. To (...) think otherwise is simply tomisunderstand the thesis. (shrink)

At the very least, externalists about content will accept something like the following claim.

A great deal of discussion in the recent literature has been devoted to the so-called 'McKinsey' paradox which purports to show that semantic externalism is incompatible with the sort of authoritative knowledge that we take ourselves to have of our own thought contents. In this paper I examine one influential epistemological response to this paradox which is due to Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. I argue that it fails to meet the challenge posed by McKinsey but that, if it is (...) set within an externalist epistemology, it may have application to a related paradox that concerns the problem of radical scepticism. (shrink)

Several authors have argued that, assuming we have apriori knowledge of our own thought-contents, semantic externalism implies that we can know apriori contingent facts about the empirical world. After presenting the argument, I shall respond by resisting the premise that an externalist can know apriori: If s/he has the concept water, then water exists. In particular, Boghossian's Dry Earth example suggests that such thought-experiments do not provide such apriori knowledge. Boghossian himself rejects the Dry Earth experiment, however, since it would (...) imply that externalism is true of empty concepts as well as non-empty concepts. Yet in this paper I respond by defending empty-concept externalism, from criticisms suggested by Boghossian and Brown, and recently developed further by Besson. My contention is that an externalist can give a non-ad hoc descriptivist account of empty concepts. Accordingly, apriori self-knowledge does not enable an externalist to know contingent features of the external world. (shrink)

Several lines of reasoning have been proposed to show the incompatibility of content externalism with justification internalism. In this paper I examine two such lines of reasoning, which both rely on the general idea that since content externalism is incompatible with certain aspects of the alleged privileged character of self-knowledge, it would tend to undermine justification internalism as well. I shall argue that both lines of reasoning, as they stand, lack plausibility, though the core idea of the second line can (...) be reconstructed into a new argument which shows considerable promise. In particular, relying upon the reliability constraint on knowledge, I shall argue that the so-called ‘two-concept’ version of content externalism is incompatible with ‘the transparency of sameness of content’, and thereby would also undermine justification internalism. (shrink)

We think that certain of our mental states represent the world around us, and represent it in determinate ways. My perception that there is salt in the pot before me, for example, represents my immediate environment as containing a certain object, a pot, with a certain kind of substance, salt, in it. My belief that salt dissolves in water represents something in the world around me, namely salt, as having a certain observational property, that of dissolving. But what exactly is (...) the relation between such states and the world beyond the surfaces of our skins? Specifically, what exactly is the relation between thecontentsof those states, and the world beyond our bodies? (shrink)

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 (...) arguments employing such externalist theses are at their strongest, and conclusively show that privileged access must be rejected. While I agree on the truth of the relevant externalist theses, I show that all plausible versions of the incompatibilist reductio argument as applied to such theses are fundamentally flawed, for these versions of the argument must make assumptions that lead to putatively absurd knowledge of the external world independently of the thesis of privileged access. (shrink)

The argument known as the 'McKinsey Recipe' tries to establish the incompatibility of semantic externalism (about natural kind concepts in particular) and _a priori _self- knowledge about thoughts and concepts by deriving from the conjunction of these theses an absurd conclusion, such as that we could know _a priori _that water exists. One reply to this argument is to distinguish two different readings of 'natural kind concept': (i) a concept which _in fact _denotes a natural kind, and (ii) a concept (...) which _aims_ to denote a natural kind. Paul Boghossian has argued, using a _Dry Earth _scenario, that this response fails, claiming that the externalist cannot make sense of a concept aiming, but failing, to denote a natural kind. In this paper I argue that Boghossian's argument is flawed. Borrowing machinery from two-dimensional semantics, using the notion of 'considering a possible world as actual', I claim that we can give a determinate answer to Boghossian's question: which concept would 'water' express on Dry Earth? (shrink)

Given anti-individualism, a subject might have a priori (non-empirical)knowledge that she herself is thinking that p, have complete and exhaustive explicational knowledge of all of the concepts composing the content that p, and yet still need empirical information (e.g. regarding her embedding conditions and history) prior to being in a position to apply her exhaustive conceptual knowledge in a knowledgeable way to the thought that p. This result should be welcomed by anti-individualists: it squares with everything that compatibilist-minded anti-individualists have (...) said regarding e.g. the compatibility of anti-individualism and basic self-knowledge; and more importantly it contains the crux of a response to McKinsey-style arguments against anti-individualism. (shrink)

I present two short arguments concerning the views named in the title. First, I argue that the Doctrine of Propositions, according to which the contents of our psychological attitudes are always propositions, is incompatible with Internalism, understood as a doctrine endorsing the intrinsic character of mental content. Second, I try to show that the Doctrine of Propositions is also incompatible with the claim that psychological properties supervene globally on physical properties (i.e., that there can be no mental difference without some (...) physical difference). The upshot is that the Doctrine of Propositions is inconsistent with each of two important supervenience principles. (shrink)

This should be fairly close to the text of this paper as it appears in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000), Spindel Conference Supplement: 121-148.

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome (...) prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.). (shrink)

SummaryA familiar sort of argument for skepticism about the external world appeals to the evidential similarity between what is presumed to be the normal case and the case where one is a brain in a vat . An argument from Putnam has been taken by many to provide an a priori refutation of this sort of skeptical argument. The question I propose to address in this paper is whether Putnam's argument affords us an a priori refutation of skeptical arguments that (...) appeal to the claim that one does not know that one is not a BIV. I will develop a negative answer to this question along two related fronts. Along the first front I defend against new criticisms the common position that the externalism on which Putnam's argument is based entails skepticism about the meanings of sentences in our language and the contents of our thoughts. I do not take this to be a refutation of externalism or externalist arguments; rather, I see this as a motivation to locate the difficulty with arguments for externalism. But if externalism is abandoned, of course, the anti‐skeptical argument it has widely been taken to support must be abandoned along with it. I will argue, however, that this is not a significant loss, because along a second front I will argue that externalism cannot be given a priori justification; it is therefore ill‐suited to ground an a priori refutation of BIV skepticism anyway. (shrink)

SummaryA familiar sort of argument for skepticism about the external world appeals to the evidential similarity between what is presumed to be the normal case and the case where one is a brain in a vat. An argument from Putnam has been taken by many to provide an a priori refutation of this sort of skeptical argument. The question I propose to address in this paper is whether Putnam's argument affords us an a priori refutation of skeptical arguments that appeal (...) to the claim that one does not know that one is not a BIV. I will develop a negative answer to this question along two related fronts. Along the first front I defend against new criticisms the common position that the externalism on which Putnam's argument is based entails skepticism about the meanings of sentences in our language and the contents of our thoughts. I do not take this to be a refutation of externalism or externalist arguments; rather, I see this as a motivation to locate the difficulty with arguments for externalism. But if externalism is abandoned, of course, the anti‐skeptical argument it has widely been taken to support must be abandoned along with it. I will argue, however, that this is not a significant loss, because along a second front I will argue that externalism cannot be given a priori justification; it is therefore ill‐suited to ground an a priori refutation of BIV skepticism anyway. (shrink)

The argument that has inspired much of the recent discussion of the logical relationship between these views is found in Putnam : If externalism is true, then if S were a brain in a vat, S’s utterances of the sentence “I am a brain in a vat” would not express the proposition that S is a brain in a vat. S’s use of the words “brain” and “vat” would not refer to a real brain or vat, just as, in a (...) Twin Earth-style thought experiment, the Twin Earthling cannot refer to water with his use of the term “water.” If we accept that generally we have knowledge of the contents of our utterances, then, if S knows that her utterances of “brain” and “vat” mean brain and vat, it will be possible for S to know that she is not a brain in a vat. For if S has authority with respect to the contents of her utterances, then she can know that her utterance, “I am not a brain in a vat,” refers to brains and vats. On externalism, since S would not refer to brains and vats if she were a brain in a vat, she could know by mere introspection that she is not a brain in a vat. In fact, S can come to know many arbitrary propositions about the external world simply by attending to the contents of her thoughts. For if externalism is true, she can argue, then certain empirical conditions must be satisfied if she is even to have the thoughts about the external world that she does; since she knows what she is thinking, she knows these empirical conditions are satisfied. Thus, if S knows that she is thinking about brains and vats, then she can know that she is not a brain in a vat ; for if she was a BIV, then she would not be thinking about brains and vats, but instead about electrical impulses or some such thing. The standard BIV argument against scepticism, therefore, cannot be correct. This line of argument can then be used to conclude more generally that scepticism is false; for the argument can be run with virtually any utterance or thought with empirical content. If S knows that she is thinking about trees, for example, then she can know that there are trees. (shrink)

The role of content in computational accounts of cognition is a matter of some controversy. An early prominent view held that the explanatory relevance of content consists in its supervenience on the the formal properties of computational states (see, e.g., Fodor 1980). For reasons that derive from the familiar Twin Earth thought experiments, it is usually thought that if content is to supervene on formal properties, it must be narrow; that is, it must not be the sort of content that (...) determines reference and truth-conditions. An interesting alternative to this view has recently been proposed by Egan (1995). According to Egan, the explanatory role of content is such that contents must in general be broad to be explanatorily relevant. But Egan’s view involves a non-realist interpretation of content assignments. I will argue here that this non-realism about contents is undermotivated. A realist variation on her view of the explanatory role of content, however, would survive this criticism. This realist variation, I suggest, shares with the views of other commentators on Marr’s theory (e.g., Burge 1986; Shapiro 1993; forthcoming) certain commitments concerning the supervenience base of visual contents and processes. I will argue, however, that these commitments beg important questions regarding the individuation of cognitive states and processes. I conclude, contrary to Burge and Shapiro, that Marr’s theory does not favor anti-individualism. (shrink)

The McKinsey Problem concerns a puzzling implication of the doctrines of Content Externalism and Privileged Access. I provide a categorization of possible solutions to the problem. Then I discuss Crispin Wright’s work on the problem. I argue that Wright has misconceived the status of his own proferred solution to the problem.

This is a response to an argument (by Michael McKinsey) purporting to show that anti-individualism is trivially true. I show that this argument rests upon a misconception of the basic claim of anti-individualism.

In this paper, I defend McKinsey's argument (Analysis 1991) that Burge's antiindividualist position is incompatible with privileged access, viz. the claim that each subject can know his own thought contents just by reflection and without having undertaken an empirical investigation. I argue that Burge thinks that there are certain necessary conditions for a subject to have thoughts involving certain sorts of concepts; these conditions are appropriately different for thoughts involving natural kind concepts and thoughts involving non-natural kind concepts. I use (...) Burge's commitment to these entailments to show that his antiindividualist position is incompatible with privileged access. (shrink)

Boghossian has argued that Putnam's externalism is incompatible with privileged access, i.e., the claim that a subject can have nonempirical knowledge of her thought contents ('What the externalist can know a priori', PAS 1997). Boghossian's argument assumes that Oscar can know a priori that (1) 'water' aims to name a natural kind; and (2) 'water' expresses an atomic concept. However, I show that if Burge's externalism is correct, then these assumptions may well be false. This leaves Boghossian with two options: (...) (a) (heroically) to show that Burge's externalism is false; or (b) to reformulate the argument such that it does not require the two assumptions in question. I suggest one way of reformulating the argument. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whether introspection plus externalism about mental content warrant an a priori refutation of external-world skepticism and ontological solipsism. The suggestion is that if thought content is partly determined by affairs in the environment and if we can have non-empirical knowledge of our current thought contents, we can, just by reflection, know about the world around us -- we can know that our environment is populated with content-determining entities. After examining this type of transcendental argument and (...) discussing various objections found in the literature, I argue that the notion of privileged self-knowledge underlying this argument presupposes that we can learn, via introspection, that our so-called thoughts are propositional attitudes rather than contentless states. If, however, externalism is correct and thought content consists in the systematic dependency of internal states on relational properties, we cannot know non-empirically whether or not we have propositional attitudes. Self-knowledge (apropositional attitude) is consistent with us lacking the ability to rule out, via introspection, the possibility that we don't have any propositional attitudes. Self-knowledge provides us with knowledge of what is in our minds, but not that we have minds. Hence, the combination of externalism with the doctrine of privileged self-knowledge does not allow for an a priori refutation of skepticism and is therefore unproblematic. (shrink)

Suppose, as I stare at a glass in front of me, I say or think: There.

The argument that has inspired much of the recent discussion of the logical relationship between these views is found in Putnam : If externalism is true, then if S were a brain in a vat, S’s utterances of the sentence “I am a brain in a vat” would not express the proposition that S is a brain in a vat. S’s use of the words “brain” and “vat” would not refer to a real brain or vat, just as, in a (...) Twin Earth-style thought experiment, the Twin Earthling cannot refer to water with his use of the term “water.” If we accept that generally we have knowledge of the contents of our utterances, then, if S knows that her utterances of “brain” and “vat” mean brain and vat, it will be possible for S to know that she is not a brain in a vat. For if S has authority with respect to the contents of her utterances, then she can know that her utterance, “I am not a brain in a vat,” refers to brains and vats. On externalism, since S would not refer to brains and vats if she were a brain in a vat, she could know by mere introspection that she is not a brain in a vat. In fact, S can come to know many arbitrary propositions about the external world simply by attending to the contents of her thoughts. For if externalism is true, she can argue, then certain empirical conditions must be satisfied if she is even to have the thoughts about the external world that she does; since she knows what she is thinking, she knows these empirical conditions are satisfied. Thus, if S knows that she is thinking about brains and vats, then she can know that she is not a brain in a vat ; for if she was a BIV, then she would not be thinking about brains and vats, but instead about electrical impulses or some such thing. The standard BIV argument against scepticism, therefore, cannot be correct. This line of argument can then be used to conclude more generally that scepticism is false; for the argument can be run with virtually any utterance or thought with empirical content. If S knows that she is thinking about trees, for example, then she can know that there are trees. (shrink)

(revisions posted 12/5/2006) to appear in Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology, ed. by Sanford Goldberg (to be published by Oxford in 2006 or 2007) Michael McKinsey formulated an argument that raises a puzzle about the relation between externalism about content and our introspective awareness of content. The puzzle goes like this: it seems like I can know the contents of my thoughts by introspection alone; but philosophical reflection tells me that the contents of those thoughts are externalist, and (...) so I couldn. (shrink)

It is widely believed that we have immediate, introspective access to the content of our own thoughts. This access is assumed to be privileged in a way that our access to the thought content of others is not. It is also widely believed that, in many cases, thought content is individuated according to properties that are external to the thinker's head. I will refer to these theses as privileged access and content externalism, respectively. Though both are widely held to be (...) true, various arguments have been put forth to the effect that they are incompatible. This charge of incompatibilism has been met with a variety of compatibilist responses, each of which has received its own share of criticism. In this thesis, I will argue that a contrastive account of self-knowledge is a novel compatibilist response that shows significant promise. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of evidence have been on offer, but they are mostly evaluated in terms of all-or-none desiderata — if they fail to meet one of the desiderata, they are not a satisfactory theory. In this thesis, I aim to accomplish three missions. Firstly, I construct a new way of evaluating theories of evidence, which I call a tool-based view. Secondly, I analyse the nature of what I will call the various relevance-mediating vehicles that each theory of evidence employs. Thirdly, (...) I articulate the comparative core of evidential reasoning in the historical sciences, one which is overlooked in major theories of evidence. On the first mission, I endorse a meta-thesis of pluralism on theories of evidence, namely a tool-based view. I regard a theory of evidence as a purpose-specific and setting-sensitive tool which has its own strengths, difficulties and limitations. Among the major theories of evidence I have reviewed, I focus on Achinstein’s explanationist theory, Cartwright’s argument theory and Reiss’s inferentialist account, scrutinising and evaluating them against the purposes they set out and the scope of their applications. On the second mission, I note that there is no such thing as intrinsically ‘being evidence’. Rather, I hold that relevance-mediating vehicles configure data, materials or claims in such ways that some of them are labelled evidence. I identify the relevance-mediating vehicles that the theories of evidence employ. On the final mission, I argue that the likelihoodist account is an appropriate tool for explaining the evidential reasoning in poorly specified settings where likelihoods can be only imprecisely compared. Such settings, I believe, are typical in the historical sciences. Using the reconstruction of proto-sounds in historical linguistics as a case study, I formalise the rationale behind it by means of the law of likelihood. (shrink)

In my 1991 paper, AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access,@ I argued that externalism in the philosophy of mind is incompatible with the thesis that we have privileged , nonempirical access to the contents of our own thoughts.¹ One of the most interesting responses to my argument has been that of Martin Davies (1998, 2000, and Chapter _ above) and Crispin Wright (2000 and Chapter _ above), who describe several types of cases to show that warrant for a premise does not always (...) transmit to a known deductive consequence of that premise, and who contend that this fact under-mines my argument for incompatibilism. I will try to show here that the Davies/Wright point about transmission of warrant does not adversely affect my argument. (shrink)

En este artículo abordo uno de los problemas que pone de manifiesto la presunta incompatibilidad entre el externismo y el conocimiento que posee un sujeto sobre el contenido de sus pensamientos. El problema se basa en algunas supuestas consecuencias del externismo concernientes a la existencia de sustancias u objetos externos al sujeto pensante: si el externismo es a priori, entonces un sujeto puede saber a priori que existe el agua, meramente conociendo a priori su pensamiento sobre el agua. Las dos (...) respuestas compatibilistas principales que desarrollo explotan el papel desempeñado por la experiencia en el conocimiento a priori. Una vez se tiene en cuenta la experiencia requerida para poder tener los pensamientos relevantes resulta menos sorprendente que un sujeto pueda adquirir conocimiento a priori sobre la existencia del agua, o sobre una condición similar pero más débil que efectivamente se seguiría del externismo. I approach in this article one of the problems which purportedly would show the incompatibility of externalism and authoritative self-knowledge. The problem is based on some alleged consequences of externalism regarding the existence of substances or objects external to the thinker: if externalism is a priori, then a subject can know a priori that water exists by knowing a priori his thought about water. The two main compatibilist responses I work out exploit the role played by experience in a priori knowledge. Taking into account the experience required to entertain the relevant thoughts makes less puzzling that a subject could acquire a priori knowledge about water's existence, or about a weaker related condition which is the real commitment of externalism. (shrink)