Abstract
The contemporary popularity of semantic externalism has arisen from so-called Twin Earth thought experiments which suggest that the representational content of a natural kind term cannot be wholly determined by processes within a speaker's body. Such arguments depend on the intuition that the extensions of natural kind terms cannot have changed as the result of the scientific investigation of natural kinds' constitutions. I demonstrate that this externalist intuition depends on an assumption about the mentality of isomorphic doppelgangers which has never been questioned but which is nonetheless arguably false. I develop an alternative view of the instantiation of mind which entails a revision of our understanding of the constitution of environmental objects. The picture seems to be fully coherent despite its oddity and I can find no good reason to reject it. The conclusion must be that the case for semantic externalism is thus less compelling than is often supposed.
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Notes
There is currently a discussion of an idea known as extended cognition, distinct from semantic externalism, which holds that some mental representations are not cerebral but include elements of an organism's environment. But that is controversial and anyway would still confine the locus of representations to the vicinity of an organism and so does not threaten the ensuing argument. For a selection of papers from both camps see (Menary 2010).
It's 1099 lightyears. For more details see (Tegmark 2007, p.104).
The problem of making rational provision for the future in a world involving incessant personal fission has been a major challenge for the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I have proposed a solution to that problem which involves a subject adopting an attitude to fission as if it were a probabilistic process (Tappenden 2011b). I have also applied a version of this analysis to the classic philosophical thought experiments on personal fission (Tappenden 2011a).
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to Victor Durà-Vilà, David Papineau and Sarah Sawyer for comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Tappenden, P. A Metaphysics for Semantic Internalism. Int Ontology Metaphysics 12, 125–136 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-011-0081-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-011-0081-7