Social externalism must allow that subjects can misunderstand the content of their own thoughts. I argue that we can exploit this commitment to create a dilemma for the view’s account of communication. To arrive at the first horn of the dilemma, I argue that, on social externalism, it is understanding which is the measure of communicative success. This would be a highly revisionary account of communication. The only way that the social externalist can salvage the (...) claim that mental content is central to explaining communicative success is by adopting an account which gives unacceptable diagnoses as to the success of communicative exchanges. This is the second horn of the dilemma. Contrastingly, certain internalist views of content, which deny that subjects share thought content, do not face the dilemma. I argue that, as such, we should prefer accounts of communication which deny that subjects speak the same language. (shrink)

According to social externalism, it is possible to possess a concept not solely in virtue of one’s intrinsic properties but also in virtue of relations to one’s linguistic community. Derek Ball (2009) argues, in effect, that (i) social externalism extends to our concepts of colour experience and (ii) this fact undermines both the knowledge argument against physicalism and the most popular physicalist response to it, known as the phenomenal concept strategy. I argue that Ball is mistaken (...) about (ii) even granting (i). The knowledge argument and the phenomenal concept strategy might have to be modified to make them consistent with social externalism, but not in fundamental or detrimental ways. (shrink)

Social Externalism is the thesis that many of our thoughts are individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of the thinker’s community. After defending Social Externalism and arguing for its broad application, I turn to the kind of defeasible first-person authority that we have over our own thoughts. Then, I present and refute an argument that uses first-person authority to disprove Social Externalism. Finally, I argue briefly that Social Externalism—far (...) from being incompatible with first-person authority—provides a check on first-personal pronouncements and thus saves first-person authority from being simply a matter of social convention and from collapsing into the subjectivity of “what seems right is right.”. (shrink)

Social externalism implies that many competences are not personal assets separable from social and cultural environments but complex states of affairs involving individuals and persisting features of social reality. The paper explores the consequences for competence identity over time and across contexts, and hence for the predictive role usually accorded to competences.

Ever since Putnam and Burge launched their respective attacks on individualist accounts of meaning the individualist has felt squeezed for space.1 Very little maneuvering room, it seems, is left for the philosopher who wants to deny that meaning and mental content depend on the speaker's social environment. One option, popular amongst individualists, is to grant that reference is socially determined but argue that there is nevertheless a notion of meaning or content that can be understood individualistically. That is, the (...) individualist can opt for a. (shrink)

According to the expressive theory of communication, the primary function of language is to enable speakers to convey the content of their thoughts to hearers. According to Tyler Burge's social externalism, the content of a person's thought is relative to the way words are used in his or her surrounding linguistic community. This paper argues that Burge's social externalism refutes the expressive theory of communication.

Social externalism is a thesis about the individuation-conditions of thoughts. Actually, the thesis applies only to a special category of ‘trained’ thoughts, thoughts which issue from trained thinking. It isn't that the thinker of such a thought has to have had special training about the subject-matter. It is rather that he or she needs to have acquired certain basic linguistic skills and values. For trained thoughts are thoughts whose contents are tailored to the demands of communication. Social (...) externalism, as I understand it, says that people who are competent in a public language are equipped to have certain thoughts whose contents are fixed by the lexical semantic norms of their language. (shrink)

Social externalism implies that many competences are not personal assets separable from social and cultural environments but complex states of affairs involving individuals and persisting features of social reality. The paper explores the consequences for competence identity over time and across contexts, and hence for the predictive role usually accorded to competences.

My aim is to show that the externalist theses, "meanings are not in the head" and "thoughts are not in the head", do not necessarily imply the more extreme thesis that "the mind is not in the head". I consider this question in terms of the social externalism approach of Tyler Burge and Lynne Baker, arguing that the importance these thinkers attribute to language in questions relative to the mind does not mean either the reduction of the mind (...) to language or the elimination of the mind. My conclusion is that social externalism is not an efficient strategy for dealing with problems of the nature of the mind or the relationship between mind and body.Meu objetivo é mostrar que as teses externalistas "os significados não estão na cabeça" e "os pensamentos não estão na cabeça" não implicam, necessariamente, a tese mais radical "a mente não está na cabeça". Trato dessa questão no âmbito do Externalismo Social de Tyler Burge e Lynne Baker, argumentando que a importância que esses pensadores atribuem à linguagem nas questões relativas à mente não significa, como uma leitura apressada poderia sugerir, a redução da mente à linguagem e, muito menos, a eliminação da mente. A minha conclusão é que o externalismo social linguístico não se constitui como uma estratégia eficaz de enfrentamento dos problemas da natureza da mente e de sua relação com o corpo. (shrink)

It starts to rain and I open the umbrella or, if I don"t have one, I ask my colleague, who is walking with me, if he has an umbrella in the bag. Why do I do so? There are many ways to answer this question, but if I adopt the strategy to explain the causes of my acting or speaking by looking for the reasons that I have for doing it (for instance, I notice that it is raining and I (...) don"t want to get wet), I commit myself to an explanation of a psychological kind (Davidson 1980). The following discussion tackles an internal problem of psychological explanations concerning the taxonomy (or categorization) of intentional contents. Intentional contents define what beliefs, desires, hopes, etc., are about. One believes that something is so-and-so (for instance, one believes that it is raining); one desires that something is going to be so-and–so (that tomorrow it isn"t going to rain), etc. The content of intentional states is the object of those so-called that-clauses: "it is raining" is, for instance, the content of the belief that it is raining. (shrink)

I outline Brandom’s theory of de re and de dicto belief ascriptions, which plays a central role in Brandom’s overall theory of linguistic communication, and show that this theory offers a surprising, new response to Burge’s (Midwest Stud 6:73–121, 1979) argument for social externalism. However, while this response is in principle available from the perspective of Brandom’s theory of belief ascription in abstraction from his wider theoretical enterprise, it ceases to be available from this perspective in the wider (...) context of his inferential role semantics and his doctrines of scorekeeping and of the expressive role of belief ascriptions in discourse. In this wider context, Brandom’s theory of belief ascriptions implies that Burge’s argument trivially fails to have the disquieting implications for psychological explanations that it is widely taken to have. Yet since this is not trivially so, Brandom’s theory apparently provides a false picture of our practice of interpreting belief ascriptions. I then argue that Brandom might as well accept the alternative picture of interpreting belief ascriptions that Burge’s argument presupposes: even in the context of his overall project, Brandom’s take on our practice of interpreting them does not afford belief ascriptions with the discursive significance Brandom claims they have. (shrink)

I consider an individualist reply to Burge's well-known anti-individualist thought experiment. It is commonly assumed that the individualist has one of two options: accept that reference is socially determined and opt for a bifurcation of content ; or reject the conclusions of the thought experiment and insist that Burge's patient uttering "I have arthritis in my thigh" has her or his own "arthritis"-concept and utters a true belief. I suggest that neither of these options is very attractive and thus the (...) individualist seems faced with a dilemma. However, Burge's thought experiment rests on problematic philosophical assumptions that the individualist need not accept. One such assumption is that the speaker uttering "I have arthritis in my thigh" makes a non-empirical error. This assumption, as Burge himself makes clear, is crucial if the thought experiment is to go through. So, Burge presents an account of the notion of a "non-empirical error" which is very problematic and fails to support the conclusions of the thought experiment. Once this account is questioned, the individualist can reject the claim that meaning is determined by the speaker's social environment without falling into the dilemma. (shrink)

Åsa Maria Wikforss has proposed a response to Burge's thought-experiments in favour of social externalism, one which allows the individualist to maintain that narrow content is truth-conditional without being idiosyncratic. The narrow aim of this paper is to show that Wikforss' argument against social externalism fails, and hence that the individualist position she endorses is inadequate. The more general aim is to attain clarity on the social externalist thesis. Social externalism need not rest, (...) as is typically thought, on the possibility of incomplete linguistic understanding or conceptual error. I identify the unifying principle that underlies the various externalist thought-experiments. (shrink)

Putnam and Burge have been viewed as launching a joint attack on individualism, the view that the content of one's psychological state is determined by what is in the head . Putnam argues that meanings are not in the head while Burge argues that beliefs are not in the head either, and both have come up with convincing arguments against individualism. It is generally conceived that Putnam's view is a version of physical externalism, which argues that factors in the (...) physical environment play a role in determining the meanings of natural kind terms. Burge, on the other hand, is regarded as following up Putnam's argument to bring in factors in the social environment for the determination of belief. Burge's view has been commonly referred to as 'social externalism.' The general consensus in the field is that physical externalism and social externalism are compatible views. Furthermore, both Putnam and Burge seem to endorse each other’s position for the most part. In this paper, however, I shall argue against this general view to show that the two theories are deep down incompatible. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the foundations of physical externalism and social externalism and argue that these foundations are incompatible. Physical externalism is based on a direct reference theory of natural-kind terms, while social externalism is based on a description theory of natural-kind terms. Thus, physical externalism and social externalism are incompatible just in the same way that the direct reference theory of proper names is incompatible with the description theory of (...) proper names. My argument will proceed as follows. In Section One, I shall explain what the two theses say and spell out my suspicion. In Section Two, I shall take a look at the initial setups for physical externalism and social externalism by examining Putnam’s and Burge’s original arguments. Finally in Section Three, I shall explain that the real incompatibility comes to lie in the different assumptions on which the two theories are based. I will present some thought experiments to highlight this incompatibility. (shrink)

A central premise in Tyler Burge's argument for social externalism says that an incomplete understanding can be sufficient for concept possession. Burge claims that this premise is grounded in ordinary practices of giving psychological explanations. On the basis of an extended version of Burge's 'arthritis' case Donald Davidson has argued that this claim is false. The paper argues that Davidson's argument is unconvincing. A closer analysis of Davidson's extended 'arthritis' case shows that the belief ascriptions Davidson focuses on (...) actually support social externalism. (shrink)

Individualists and externalists about language take themselves to be disagreeing about the basic subject matter of the study of language. Are linguistic facts are really facts about individuals, or really facts about language use in a community?The right answer to this question, I argue, is ‘Yes’. Both individualistic and social facts are crucial to a complete understanding of human language. The relationship between the theories inspired by these facts is analogous to the relationship between anatomy and ecology, or between (...) micro- and macro-economics: both types of facts are important objects of study in their own right, but we need a theory that accounts for the complex relationship between the two. I argue that modern extensions of the signaling-games approach of Lewis (1969) do just this, defusing the conflict while preserving the core positive insights of both sides of this debate.The upshot is that arguments for social externalism and the normativity of meaning pose no threat to individualist explanations and can be accountedfor within a naturalistic theory of language. A good externalist theory will make crucial reference to individualistic facts, but go further by examining language users’ interactions in a systematic way. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to (...) make sense of others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to (...) make sense of others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

Are there “social kinds” the way there are “natural kinds”? Are social sciences likely to hit upon “essences” the way natural sciences do? Or are all social phenomena purely theoretical constructs? Questions about whether there are natural kinds, what exactly they are and which kinds of phenomena they cover have been the object of heated epistemological and metaphysical debates. We think the issues can be clarified within the limits of the philosophy of language: by looking into what (...) ranges of general terms are perceived by speakers as rigid designators of natural kinds. The first step to take is to ground the various kinds of semantic externalism in distinct brands of semantic deference. Our focus is on spotting the words for which speakers would defer not to the current usage of the word in the linguistic community, nor to the current experts of the field to which the word pertains, but ultimately to the very nature of the referent of the term. When speakers’ deference conforms to that pattern, we argue, that is evidence that indexical externalism provides the right metasemantic account of how the meaning of the word is determined; the word is treated like a natural-kind term. But how can patterns of deference be measured? In an ongoing survey, which shows a kinship with work by Braisby et al., Jylkkä et al., and Genone & Lombrozo, we confront participants with conditions that may prompt them to revise certain classificatory statements. Each condition makes salient one of the targets we have identified for deference: the community usage, the experts, the ‘world as it is’. In the condition that seeks to tap into the latter kind of deference, participants are presented with a scenario in which future scientific discoveries result in excluding from the extension of a term certain members currently thought to fall under that extension. Our reasoning is that, if participants significantly modify their statements in the light of that scenario, they can be taken to ‘defer’ to the nature of the referent, thus vindicating indexical externalism. We test if words not normally assumed to be natural-kind terms, including terms for social phenomena, exhibit patterns of deference similar to those for natural-kind terms. If so, speakers have something like realist intuitions with respect to words whose meaning is usually taken to be purely conventional or polemical, and there’s therefore a case for an extension of indexical externalism beyond its usual boundaries. Braisby, N., Franks, B. & Hampton, J. 1996. Essentialism, word use, and concepts. Cognition 59, 247-74./Genone, J. & Lombrozo, T. 2012. Concept possession, experimental semantics, and hybrid theories of reference. Philosophical Psychology 25, 717-742./Jylkkä, J., Railo, H. & Haukioja, J. 2009. Psychological essentialism and semantic externalism: Evidence for externalism in lay speakers’ language use. Philosophical Psychology 22, 37-60./Schwarz, S. 1983. Reply to Kornblith and Nelson. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 21, 475-481. (shrink)

Semantic externalism is the view that the meanings of referring terms, and the contents of beliefs that are expressed by those terms, are not fully determined by factors internal to the speaker but are instead bound up with the environment. The debate about semantic externalism is one of the most important but difficult topics in philosophy of mind and language, and has consequences for our understanding of the role of social institutions and the physical environment in constituting (...) language and the mind. In this long-needed book, Jesper Kallestrup provides an invaluable map of the problem. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the theories of descriptivism and referentialism and the work of Frege and Kripke, Kallestrup moves on to analyse Putnam’s Twin Earth argument, Burge’s arthritis argument and Davidson’s Swampman argument. He also discusses how semantic externalism is at the heart of important topics such as indexical thoughts, epistemological skepticism, self-knowledge, and mental causation. Including chapter summaries, a glossary of terms, and an annotated guide to further reading, _Semantic Externalism_ an ideal guide for students studying philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Psychological externalism is the thesis that the contents of many of a person's propositional mental states are determined in part by relations he bears to his natural and social environment. This thesis has recently been thrust into prominence in the philosophy of mind by a series of thought experiments due to Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. Externalism is a metaphysical thesis, but in this work I investigate its implications for the epistemology of the mental. I am primarily (...) concerned with the question whether externalism undermines the idea that a person typically knows the contents of her own thoughts, beliefs, and other propositional attitudes directly and authoritatively. I criticize arguments that have been advanced on behalf of a positive answer to this question, and argue that they rest on a faulty conception of the nature of first person authority, one which likens our access to our own minds to perception. An account of the basis of first person authority is sketched that locates our epistemic right to our self-ascriptions of propositional attitude not in our ability to discriminate among the various thought contents we might be thinking, but rather in our ability to express our thoughts, and to think with them in accordance with the norms of rationality. I consider also the question whether first person authority and externalism jointly make possible a refutation of certain forms of global skepticism, as has been famously argued by Putnam. I argue that Putnam's attempted refutation fails, because the crucial externalist claims that drive it are not knowable a priori. (shrink)

Is the nature of testimonial warrant epistemically internalist or externalist? I will argue that the question should be answered ‘yes!’ The disjunction is not exclusive. Rather, a testimonial belief may possess epistemically internalist warrant—justification—as well as epistemically externalist warrant—entitlement. I use the label ‘pluralism’ to denote the view that there are both internalist and externalist species of genuinely epistemic warrant and argue for pluralism in the epistemology of testimony.

Psychiatry widely assumes an internalist biomedical model of mental illness. I argue that many of psychiatry’s diagnostic categories involve an implicit commitment to constitutive externalism about mental illness. Some of these categories are socially externalist in nature.

This book charges that just about every philosophical theory of mind or language developed over the past 50 years in the West is systematically inaccurate. Systemic oppression has influenced the processes that theories of mind or language purport to identify; however, that same systemic oppression has also made it so that most middle-to-upper class White men (including most philosophers of mind or language) are ignorant of systemic oppression. Consequently, most theories of mind or language are systematically inaccurate because they fail (...) to account for the influences of systemic oppression. Philosopher Jeff Engelhardt argues for the de-idealization of two influential theories in the philosophy of mind and language--social externalism and objective type externalism--and considers some consequences of the de-idealization project. -/- Following the work of Charles Mills, Engelhardt argues that ideal theories adopt oppression-obscuring assumptions while nonideal theories avoid them (or at least try to). Ideal theories assume that language users are basically equal, and that social institutions and structures are basically just, but scholarship on Western social relations, institutions, and structures shows that in fact each of these is systematically influenced by oppression. Consequently, ideal theories tend to be systematically inaccurate. Moreover, since oppression systematically produces ignorance of systemic oppression, such systematically inaccurate theories are likely the norm rather than the exception. -/- Engelhardt shows that once we've shown that oppression systematically influences the processes that determine linguistic meanings (according to content externalism), then we have reason to expand our notion of hermeneutical injustice, we have evidence that hermeneutical injustice occurs systematically, and we have grounds for expanding discussions of conceptual engineering to include questions about engineering the processes that determine concepts, not just concepts themselves. (shrink)

Tyler Burge has in many writings distinguished between mental content externalism based on incorrect understanding and mental content externalism based on partial but not incorrect understanding. Both and have far-reaching implications for analyses of communication and concept possession in various expert-layperson relations, but Burge and his critics have mainly focused on . This article first argues that escapes the most influential objection to . I then raise an objection against Burge’s argument for . The objection focuses on Burge’s (...) claim that a person with a partial understanding of a term in our community expresses our standard concept because he is willing to defer to our standard understanding, while his “Putnamian” twin in a counterfactual community does not. The problem with Burge’s argument for this claim is that he does not consider the possibility that the person in our community and the twin would defer to the same understanding if they were presented with the same alternatives. Drawing from widespread dispositional assumptions about meaning, I argue that Burge must accept that they express the same concept if they would defer to the same understanding. The article closes with an examination on various ways the externalist may attempt to avoid this problem and concludes that none of them succeeds. (shrink)

Sarah Sawyer has challenged my claim that social externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of their own concepts. Sawyer denies that Burge's later sofa thought-experiment relies on this assumption: the unifying principle behind the thought-experiments supporting social externalism, she argues, is just that referents play a role in the individuation of concepts. I argue that Sawyer fails to show that social externalism need not rely on the assumption of incomplete (...) understanding. To establish the content externalist conclusions, further considerations are required, and these do commit the externalist to the assumption of incomplete understanding. (shrink)

This article presents a novel challenge to epistemic internalism. The challenge rests on a set of cases which feature subjects forming beliefs under conditions of “bad ideology”—that is, conditions in which pervasively false beliefs have the function of sustaining, and are sustained by, systems of social oppression. In such cases, the article suggests, the externalistic view that justification is in part a matter of worldly relations, rather than the internalistic view that justification is solely a matter of how things (...) stand from the agent’s individual perspective, becomes the more intuitively attractive theory. But these “bad ideology” cases do not merely yield intuitive verdicts that favor externalism over internalism. These cases are, moreover, analogous to precisely those canonical cases widely taken to be counterexamples to externalism: cases featuring brains-in-vats, clairvoyants, and dogmatists. That is, such “bad ideology” cases are, in all relevant respects, just like cases that are thought to count against externalism—except that they intuitively favor externalism. This, the author argues, is a serious worry for internalism. What is more, it bears on the debate over whether externalism is a genuinely “normative” epistemology. (shrink)

Medical assistance in dying, which includes voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, is legally permissible in a number of jurisdictions, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. Although medical assistance in dying is most commonly provided for suffering associated with terminal somatic illness, some jurisdictions have also offered it for severe and irremediable psychiatric illness. Meanwhile, recent work in the philosophy of psychiatry has led to a renewed understanding of psychiatric illness that emphasises the role of the relation between the person (...) and the external environment in the constitution of mental disorder. In this paper, I argue that this externalist approach to mental disorder highlights an ethical challenge to the practice of medical assistance in dying for psychiatric illness. At the level of the clinical assessment, externalism draws attention to potential social and environmental interventions that might have otherwise been overlooked by the standard approach to mental disorder, which may confound the judgement that there is no further reasonable alternative that could alleviate the person’s suffering. At the level of the wider society, externalism underscores how social prejudices and structural barriers that contribute to psychiatric illness constrain the affordances available to people and result in them seeking medical assistance in dying when they otherwise might not have had under better social conditions. (shrink)

Several prominent philosophers have argued that the fact that depressed agents sometimes make moral judgments without being appropriately motivated supports Humean externalism – the view that moral motivation must be explained in terms of desires that are distinct from or “external” to an agent’s motivationally inert moral judgments. This essay argues that such motivational failures do not, in fact, provide evidence for this view. I argue that, if the externalist argument from depression is to undermine a philo-sophically important version (...) of internalism, it must make use of a general assumption about motivational states. However, at a reasonable level of abstraction, the needed assumption also implies that even desires could not be effective sources of motivation. For, just as depressed agents might sometimes lack motivation to act consistently with their moral judgments, they also sometimes lack motivation to pursue their desires. Moreover, the most plausible responses that Humeans can give to this general argument undermine the externalist case against internalism. Thus, there is a deep tension between the argument from depression for externalism and a fundamental Humean commitment. (shrink)

Externalism holds, and internalism denies, that the individuation of many of an individual's mental states (e.g., thoughts about the physical world) depends necessarily on relations that individual bears to the physical and/or social environment. Many philosophers, externalists and internalists alike, believe that introspection yields knowledge of the contents of our thoughts that is direct and authoritative. It is not obvious, however, that the metaphysical claims of externalism are compatible with this epistemological thesis. Some (e.g., Burge, 1988; Falvey (...) and Owens (F&O), 1994) have sought to dispel the worry that there is a conflict, though they admit that if such a conflict exists, it spells trouble for externalism (see, e.g., F&O, 1994, p. 108). Boghossian has argued that there is indeed a conflict between externalism and introspective knowledge of content. Surprisingly, however, he also argues that there is a conflict between internalism and introspective knowledge of content. I will defend Boghossian's claim that there is a conflict between externalism and knowledge of content, but criticize his claim that there is a conflict between internalism and knowledge of content. (shrink)

Externalist theories hold that a comprehensive understanding of mental disorder cannot be achieved unless we attend to factors that lie outside of the head: neural explanations alone will not fully capture the complex dependencies that exist between an individual’s psychiatric condition and her social, cultural, and material environment. Here, we firstly offer a taxonomy of ways in which the externalist viewpoint can be understood, and unpack its commitments concerning the nature and physical realization of mental disorder. Secondly, we apply (...) a strongly externalist approach to the case of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, and argue that this condition can be illuminated by appeal to the hypothesis of extended cognition. We conclude by briefly considering the significance this strongly externalist approach may have for psychiatric practice and pedagogy. (shrink)

Slavoj Zizek's (2014) criticism of Western Buddhism for being a late capitalist opiate of the people is partly unwarranted and partly of undeniable relevance. His implicit assumption is that Buddhism is an internalist path that only looks into in the individual inner world, leaving harmful societal systems in peace. This paper offers a response to Zizek's analysis, by interpreting the chariot simile in the Buddhist Pali Canon. Even though Pali chariot similes indeed support an internalist perspective, some of them also (...) allow for a reading that opens up to two 'externalist' complements: the social outer world and the technological environment. In this way, while acknowledging Zizek's criticism, we point at Buddhist philosophy's inherent potential for developing a social-technological critical stance, for instance by linking it to mediation theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Husserl—Heidegger relationship is systematically misunderstood when framed in terms of a distinction between internalism and externalism. Both philosophers, it is argued, employ the phenomenological reduction to immanence as a fundamental methodological instrument. After first outlining the assumptions regarding inner and outer and the individual and the social from which recent epistemological interpretations of phenomenology begin, I turn to the question of Husserl's internalism. I argue that Husserl can only be understood as an internalist (...) on the assumption that immanence equates with internal. This, however, is not the case as can be seen once the reduction is understood not as setting aside the existence of the world, but rather a reflection on its meaning. Turning to Heidegger, I argue that his commitment to a form of the phenomenological reduction precludes him from being either a semantic or a social externalist. The place of authenticity and the first person perspective in his work derive from his phenomenological commitments, which can be seen in his accounts of discourse and language and of falling (Verfallen). I then go on to briefly outline a more plausible basis for understanding the difference between Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenologies in terms of their respective emphases on logic and on poetics. (shrink)

Our aim is to provide a topography of the relevant philosophical terrain with regard to the possible ways in which knowledge can be conceived of as extended. We begin by charting the different types of internalist and externalist proposals within epistemology, and we critically examine the different formulations of the epistemic internalism/externalism debate they lead to. Next, we turn to the internalism/externalism distinction within philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In light of the above dividing lines, we then (...) examine first the extent to which content externalism is compatible with epistemic externalism; second, whether active externalism entails epistemic externalism; and third whether there are varieties of epistemic externalism that are better suited to accommodate active externalism. Finally, we examine whether the combination of epistemic and cognitive externalism is necessary for epistemology and we comment on the potential ramifications of this move for social epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Many philosophers regard collective behavior and attitudes as the ground of the whole of social reality. According to this popular view, society is composed basically of collective intentions and cooperative behaviors; this is so both for informal contexts involving small groups and for complex institutional structures. In this article, I challenge this view, and propose an alternative approach, which I term institutional externalism. I argue that institutions are characterized by the tendency to defer to elements that are external (...) to the content of collective intentions—such as laws, declarations, and contracts. According to institutional externalism, those elements are the grounds of institutional statutes, rights, and duties. (shrink)

Content-externalism is the view that a subject’s relations to a context can play a role in individuating the content of her mental states. According to social content-externalists, relations to a socio-linguistic context can play a fundamental individuating role. Åsa Wikforss has suggested that ‘social externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of their own concepts’ (Wikforss 2004, p. 287). In this paper, I show that this isn’t so. I develop and defend an (...) argument for social content-externalism which does not depend on this assumption. The argument is animated by strands of thought in the later work of Wittgenstein. In addition to demonstrating that social externalists are not necessarily committed to thinking that a subject can have thoughts involving concepts which she incompletely understands, this argument is important insofar as it: (1) supports a form of content-externalism with extended scope; (2) avoids the controversy surrounding the claim that subjects can think with concepts which they incompletely understand; and (3) situates Wittgenstein’s later work with respect to contemporary debates about content-externalism. (shrink)

Abstract: Chomsky (1986) has claimed that the prima facie incompatibility between descriptive linguistics and semantic externalism proves that an externalist semantics is impossible. Although it is true that a strong form of externalism does not cohere with descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistic theory can unify the two approaches. The resulting two-level theory reconciles descriptivism, mentalism, and externalism by construing community languages as a function of social identification. This approach allows a fresh look at names and definite descriptions while (...) also responding to Chomsky's (1993, 1995) challenge to articulate an externalist theory of meaning that can be used in the scientific investigation of language. (shrink)

Externalism holds, and internalism denies, that the individuation of many of an individual’s mental states (e.g., thoughts about the physical world) depends necessarily on relations that individual bears to the physical and/or social environment. Many philosophers, externalists and internalists alike, believe that introspection yields knowledge of the contents of our thoughts that is direct and authoritative. It is not obvious, however, that the metaphysical claims of externalism are compatible with this epistemological thesis. Some (e.g., Burge, 1988; Falvey (...) and Owens (F&O), 1994) have sought to dispel the worry that there is a conflict, though they admit that if such a contlict exists, it spells trouble for externalism (see, e.g., F&O, 1994, p. 108). Boghossian has argued that there is indeed a conflict between externalism and introspective knowledge of content. Surprisingly, however, he also argues that there is a conflict between internalism and introspective knowledge of content. I will defend Boghossian’s claim that there is a conflict between externalism and knowledge of content, but criticize his claim that there is a conflict between internalism and knowledge of content. (shrink)