Abstract
Sanford Goldberg (2015) argues for Content Externalism by drawing our attention to the extent to which an individual’s concepts depend on the concepts of others. More specifically, he focuses on cases that involve knowledge transmission between experts and non-experts to make his point. In this paper, I argue that the content internalist cannot only plausibly respond to his argument but that Content Internalism offers a more plausible account of intentional content with regard to knowledge transmission than does Content Externalism.
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Notes
The view is considered minimalist because subjects count as having a concept even if they are not in a position to explicate the concept, to give, that is, an explanation of the application conditions of the concept.
The locus classicus of Content Externalism is Burge (1979).
Content Externalism and Content Internalism disagree on whether intentional content depends entirely on the intrinsic properties of thinkers. The internalist says that it does while the externalist says it does not. These forms of externalism and internalism should not be confused with externalism and internalism about semantic content, the content of linguistic items. If one collapses these distinct theses, then the view I argue for in this paper will seem to be incoherent. The Hybrid View I defend combines internalism about intentional content with externalism about semantic content.
It should be noted that Goldberg (2009) makes a similar argument to the one discussed in this paper. This argument functions as a reductio of the following apparently internalist principle: “In order to understand a speech act, one must completely grasp each of the concepts that compose the content of the speech act” (585). The problem with this assumption according to Goldberg is that it cannot be squared with two other plausible assumptions in a way that preserves the fact that testimonial knowledge is reliable. The two other plausible assumptions are: we speak public languages and these public languages express concepts of which speakers have incomplete grasps. Since testimonial knowledge is transmitted by way of public languages, then the three assumptions above entail that subjects do not really understand the concepts that compose the content of what is transmitted in testimony. This is a serious problem, of course, and to solve it Goldberg suggests we reject the internalist assumption about complete grasp. I do not address this argument here, but it is worth noting that consideration of the Hybrid View could diffuse the reductio in (Goldberg 2009) in the same way that I argue it diffuses his argument in (Goldberg 2015).
The idea here is that subjects can possess concepts without being in a position to spell out or explain the application conditions of those concepts.
I should note that my use of 'concept' in this paper is not in complete harmony with Sawyer's. According to my terminology, concepts are abstract whereas she seems to understand them as concrete mental representations.
See (Wikforss 2008) for more on this idea. She argues that the main problem for Content Externalism is that it fails to attribute to subjects concepts that they understand and therefore fails to capture properly their perspectives on the world.
I follow an established convention of using ‘conceptions’ to refer to personal concepts. See (Burge 1993) and (Carey 2009) for examples. It is worth noting, also, that to match up to the standard definition of Content Internalism one would have to hold that personal conceptions supervene on just the intrinsic properties of thinkers.
Sawyer gives us a nice way to think about personal conceptions. As was noted earlier, such conceptions are constituted by the set of beliefs that a subject has about the referent of the concept.
There are options open here about what makes it the case that two conceptions are typed by the same concept and also what makes it the case that the intentional content of two particular beliefs are typed by the same abstract proposition. One could say for example that two conceptions are typed by the same abstract concept just in case they meet the same list of necessary and sufficient conditions, and extrapolate this for intentional content and propositions since these will be composed of personal conceptions and intersubjective concepts respectively. One could go with something looser and more Wittgensteinian and say that two personal conceptions fall under the same intersubjective concept just in case they bear a family resemblance to each other. I favor the family resemblance view, but someone who endorses the Hybrid View seems free to choose either option here.
Sutton (2004) explores a similar idea, where abstracta are thought of as types and mental particulars are thought of as tokens that fall under these types.
I don’t mean to suggest that content internalists are committed to these assumptions. It may even be that we have good reason to seriously qualify them or modify them. For instance, Kenyon (2013) has argued that many examples in the philosophical literature about testimony are oversimplified and lend credence to the idea that justification for knowledge based on testimony is non-inferential. This appearance of non-inferential justification could make CP seem more plausible; if testimonial knowledge is direct, then it seems more likely that the very selfsame proposition is transmitted in testimonial knowledge. Goldberg (2009) offers a lengthier defense of CP, largely related to the reliability of knowledge based on testimony. In short, if testimonial knowledge is reliable, then it must be the same proposition that is transmitted. Of course, the truth of CP is likely a complicated affair, and I don’t enter into a discussion about its truth here. My approach is to grant the assumptions and show how Content Internalism bolstered by the Hybrid View can satisfy them better than Content Externalism.
As noted earlier, Wikforss (2008) thoroughly discusses this problem.
It is worth noting that the Hybrid View doesn’t entail that the expert and non-expert conceptions must be distinct. It is possible that the two personal conceptions are exactly identical in terms of content. It will just be rare given that experts generally have so much more information about than non-experts in a given domain and thus have informationally richer concepts.
Goldberg (2007) argues that a cost of the Hybrid View is that it cannot properly account for communication. This argument fails to consider the possibility that the Hybrid View can be combined with the Mixed View of Concepts. Such a combination allows subjects to be communicating with the same intersubjective concept type by having personal conceptions (which may diverge slightly) that fall under the same intersubjective concept type.
References
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Burge, T. 1993. Concepts, definitions and meaning. In T. Burge, Foundations of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, S. (2007). Anti-individualism: Mind, language and justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, S. (2009). Experts, semantic and epistemic. Noûs, 43, 581–598.
Goldberg, S. (2015). Anti-individualism, comprehension and self-knowledge. In S. Goldberg (Ed.), Externalism, self-knowledge and skepticism (pp. 184–194). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kenyon, T. (2013). Noninferentialism and testimonial belief fixation. Episteme, 10, 73–85.
Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (2007). The ontology of concepts: Abstract objects or mental representations? Noûs, 41, 561–593.
Sawyer, S. Forthcoming. Concepts, Conceptions and Self-Knowledge. https://www.academia.edu/31676966/Concepts_Conceptions_and_Self-Knowledge_1.
Sutton, J. (2004). Are Concepts Mental Representations or Abstracta? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 68, 89–108.
Wikforss, A. (2008). Self-knowledge and knowledge of content. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 38, 399–424.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for insightful and useful comments.
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Woodling, C. Knowledge Transmission and the Internalism-Externalism Debate about Content. Philosophia 45, 1851–1861 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9869-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9869-1