Abstract
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 (and not content) 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.
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Notes
Most philosophers who do not endorse social externalism endorse some other form of externalism (e.g. Fodor 1994; Millikan 1984). I do not consider other forms of content externalism in this paper, but I believe that a version of my argument would apply to any theory which posits widespread shared content.
Pagin talks of ‘inner’ states here in order to ensure that the sender and receiver are sufficiently complex entities. He writes, “Without such a restriction, it would be admissible to count any causal interaction between two entities as communication, and this would trivialize the idea” (2008, p. 89). Importantly, Pagin stresses that his talk of ‘inner’ states is not meant to suggest that these states are narrowly individuated, private, unobservable or suchlike.
I will assume that the content of an utterance is the same as the content of the mental state it is used to express.
A version of this view is argued for in Pagin (2008).
How to understand conceptual similarity will vary across different views of content. For example, some will appeal to similarity in conceptual-role, or in application-conditions, or in extension, etc. It should be noted that there may be problems with certain of these approaches. For example, Fodor and Lepore (1992) have argued that conceptual-role semantics cannot provide an account of similarity of content or sameness of content.
Note that this is different to the claim that subjects lack privileged access to thought content. Cf. Burge (1988, p. 662).
Thank you to Ted Parent for pointing this out.
For ease of exposition, I will henceforth use the phrase ‘understanding of the content’ as short-hand for ‘understanding of the concepts involved in the content’.
For an action-coordination account, see Paul (1999).
Further, it should also be stressed that the claim is simply that the hearers must recognise what it is that the speakers intended to communicate. I do not claim the Gricean view that the hearers must grasp the intention behind the speaker’s communicative attempt (Cf. Grice 1957). They must recognise what the speakers intend to communicate, but they needn’t recognise that the speakers had these intentions.
Thank you to Ted Parent for this suggestion.
Another thing to note is that there are two ways in which subjects can enjoy similar understanding of the content communicated. They can be in agreement as to the way in which to understand that content; but they can also disagree about how to understand it providing that the hearer is aware of the way in which the speaker understands the content (and thus grasps the way in which the speaker intended the content to be employed in reasoning). I will ignore this complication in what follows.
I provide further support for this thesis when dealing with objections in Sect. 7.
Note that this is not the same thing as endorsing the Combination View version of the Content Relation.
See, for example, Rapaport (2003).
As Burge has noted, it is possible to argue for social externalism using cases in which a subject is simply agnostic as to the correct application of a term (1979, p. 82). However, if my argument demonstrates that social externalism can only be motivated in such cases, this would be a serious blow to the view. Social externalism is supposed to apply to a much wider range of cases than just those in which subjects have agnostic grasp.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Jesper Kallestrup, Anders Schoubye, Sanford Goldberg, Åsa Wikforss and Ted Parent for their very helpful comments. Thanks also to audiences at the 2013 workshop on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge at the University of Glasgow, and the 2013 PLM conference at CEU, Budapest.
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Pollock, J. Social externalism and the problem of communication. Philos Stud 172, 3229–3251 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0467-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0467-4