Externalism and Self-Knowledge

¿Qué es la mente humana? ¿Es un aspecto de la naturaleza? ¿O acaso la trasciende? ¿Se puede explicar enteramente al hombre en un lenguaje científico-natural? Desde que Aristóteles definió al hombre como un "animal racional", el pensamiento occidental ha erigido una distinción ontológica entre hombre y naturaleza. Sin embargo, el darwinismo nos ha legado una verdad ineludible: que somos organismos animales, cuyas capacidades conceptuales no escapan a los procesos propios de la naturaleza. ¿Se puede, entonces, pensar al hombre como un (...) ser mental, y al mismo tiempo como un organismo natural? Para ello, sin duda, será necesario reformular los conceptos tradicionales de "mente" y de "naturaleza" en busca de una reconciliación conceptual. El siguiente volumen recorre campos como la fenomenología trascendental, la lógica, la biología, la semiótica, la lingüística y la psicología con el fin de superar este dualismo tan antiguo como la filosofía. (shrink)

When involved in a disagreement, a common reaction is to tell oneself that, given that the information about one’s own epistemic standing is clearly superior in both amount and quality to the information about one’s opponent’s epistemic standing, one is justified in one’s confidence that one’s view is correct. In line with this natural reaction to disagreement, some contributors to the debate on its epistemic significance have claimed that one can stick to one’s guns by relying in part on information (...) about one’s first-order evidence and the functioning of one’s cognitive capacities. In this article, I argue that such a manoeuvre to settle controversies encounters the problem that both disputants can make use of it, the problem that one may be wrong about one’s current conscious experience, and the problem that it is a live possibility that many of one’s beliefs are the product of epistemically distorting factors. I also argue that, even if we grant that personal information is reliable, when it comes to real-life rather than idealized disagreements, the extent of the unpossessed information about one’s opponent’s epistemic standing provides a reason for doubting that personal information can function as a symmetry breaker. (shrink)

Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self-knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson’s account stems from his remarks on disquotational specifications of self-ascriptions of meaning and mental content, the account which I will call the “Disquotational Explanation”. It has also been claimed that Davidson’s account rather rests on his version of content externalism, which I will call the “Externalist Explanation”. I will (...) argue that not only are these explanations of self-knowledge implausible, but Davidson himself has already rejected them. Thus, neither can be attributed to Davidson as his suggested account of self-knowledge. I will then introduce and support what I take to be Davidson’s official and independent account of self-knowledge, that is, his “Transcendental Explanation”. I will defend this view against certain potential objections and finally against the objections made by William Child. (shrink)

In this thesis, I elaborate and defend Donald Davidson's account of knowing one's own mental states that exhibit first-person authority. To that end, I place Davidson's account among others in the philosophical landscape concerning self-knowledge. Next, I examine his response to philosophical challenges that arise from mental content externalism and self-deception. Finally, I draw some insights froms Davidson's account to the broader aims of epsitemology.

From my ongoing "Metalogical Plato" project. The aim of the diagram is to make reasonably intuitive how the Socratic elenchos (the logic of refutation applied to candidate formulations of virtues or ruling knowledges) looks and works as a whole structure. This is my starting point in the project, in part because of its great familiarity and arguable claim to being the inauguration of western philosophy; getting this point less wrong would have broad and deep consequences, including for philosophy’s self-understanding. -/- (...) (i.) is the first pass at elenchos in which the Socratic interlocutor does not reflect on knowledge being the crux of the problem. (ii.) is the second, rarer, reflective pass in which they are, making the investigation explicitly about knowledge. Its centrality in the Charmides makes that neglected dialogue of superlative importance. This structure is also the gateway through which the discussion/dialectic crosses into the Agathology (discussion of the form of the good) at Republic 505. -/- The problem of elenchos, then, grasped as a whole structure, is that it seems that knowledge can neither satisfactorily be included in nor excluded from its own scope. The development of the ti esti (“what is ---?”) question leads to the introduction of knowledge into its own scope (i. implicitly, as goodness contrasted with blind rule-following ii. explicitly qua knowledge) while the development of the dual peri tinos (“----about what?) question leads to K’s elimination from its own scope. The introductions are motivated to avoid contradiction, but produce regress; the eliminations are motivated to avoid regress, but produce contradiction. In scholarship, and in the history of philosophy, the ti esti question is universally recognized, to the point of being identified with philosophy’s origin and essence; the peri tinos question is neglected textually and never recognized as the equal dual to the ti esti. This, I claim, has blocked the development of a nontrivial logical appreciation of what Plato's Socrates is up to. (One rather disastrous effect of this neglect is taking Aristotle as the beginning of the development of logic, rather than, correctly, for the beginning of logic’s fatal separation from mathematics and dialectic.) -/- Further, because of this monopticism of the ti esti, the function of consistency in the elenchos has not been understood, even with respect to the ti esti. The ti esti is actually in search of completeness, given a norm of consistency; the peri tinos is in search of consistency, given a norm of completeness. Only appreciating the two questions as dual allows space in the structure to clarify these different orientations relative to consistency. (And, dually, to completeness, whose function in the elenchos is generally entirely missed by scholars and relegated to discussions of eros; it's not out of place there, of course, but its significance is secured here.) Recognizing the duality of the ti esti and peri tinos questions is thus the royal road, in the Socratic-Platonic context, to catching sight of what we post-Cantorians can recognize as the metalogical duality of consistency and completeness. (The salutary disruptive effects of this Plato-Cantor proximity have, of course, been traced in complementary ways by Badiou.) -/- Note that the diagram is supposed to provide a relatively accessible orientation, not to stand on its own, and certainly not to be the last word on any subject. An important qualification (telegraphed in the previous paragraph) is that what elenchos shows is not finally circular or paradoxical, though the problem first presents as such (stubbornly, obdurately, as "difficult" Plato's Socrates always says with characteristic understatement). What is depicted here is meant, at a first pass, to be the shape of that first presentation, the form of the problem of elenchos, rather than of its solution. It's not an accident that this problem strongly resembles "Russell's paradox" (not Russell's not a paradox.) Problem is to solution as RP is to the diagonal theorems. (shrink)

This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to (...) face serious problems of their own. (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)

Note first that knowledge of one's own thought-contents would not count as a priori according to the usual criteria for knowledge of this kind. Surely, then, incompatibilists are using this term to refer to some other, stipulatively defined, epistemic property. But could this be, as suggested by McKinsey { 1 99 1: 9), the property of being knowable 'just by thinking' or 'from the armchair'? Certainly not if these were metaphors for knowledge attainable on the basis of reason alone, since (...) self-knowledge would fail to come out a priori in this sense. And exactly the same would happen if the property were that of being knowable by inference, since, according to a common intuition, self-knowledge is noninferential. (shrink)

Semantic externalism holds that the content of at least some of our thoughts is partly constituted by external factors. Accordingly, it leads to the unintuitive consequence that we must then often be mistaken in what we are thinking, and any kind of claim of privileged access must be given up. Those who deny that semantic externalists can retain any account of self-knowledge are ‘incompatibilists’, while those who defend the compatibility of self-knowledge with semantic externalism are ‘compatibilists’. This paper examines the (...) claim of compatibilism, focusing on Burge’s “Slow Switching Argument” and Boghossian’s “Objection of Relevant Alternatives”. I argue that compatibilism is false, and that semantic externalism is incompatible with self-knowledge. (shrink)

Akeel Bilgrami has always argued that the contents of our thoughts are constitutively constrained by what we could be said to know about them. In earlier work he explained this in terms of a connection between thought and rationality, but his recent book argues that the ultimate ground for self-knowledge rests in our notion of responsibility. This paper will examine these arguments, and suggest that if Bilgrami is right about how self-knowledge is grounded, then it need not constrain our content (...) ascriptions as thoroughly as he once proposed that it must. (shrink)

In this paper I argue in favor of the compatibility of semantic externalism with privileged self-knowledge by showing that an argument for incompatibilism from switching scenarios fails. Given the inclusion theory of self-knowledge, the hypothesis according to which I am having twater thoughts while thinking that I have water thoughts simply isn't a (entertainable) possibility. When I am on Earth thinking earthian concepts, I cannot believe that I am thinking that twater is wet for I don't have the concept of (...) twater available; so this concept cannot figure in any of my mental states. Analogously, when I am on Twin Earth, I cannot mistakenly believe that I am entertaining water thoughts. No matter how often I am switched between Earth and Twin Earth, I will never erroneously think that I am having water thoughts while in fact I am having twater thoughts and vice versa. Privileged self-knowledge is therefore immune to skeptical arguments from switching and twinning scenarios. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper introduces and analyses the doctrine of externalism about semantic content; discusses the Twin Earth argument for externalism and the assumptions behind it, and examines the question of whether externalism about content is compatible with a privileged knowledge of meanings and mental contents.

This paper argues for externalism about justification on the basis of thought experiments. I present cases in which two individuals are intrinsically and introspectively indistinguishable and in which intuitively, one is justified in believing that p while the other is not. I also examine an argument for internalism based on the ideas that we have privileged access to whether or not our own beliefs are justified and that only internalism is compatible with this privilege. I isolate what I take to (...) be the most plausible form of privileged access to justification and show that it is compatible with externalism. (shrink)

This paper discusses an "expressive constraint" on accounts of thought and language which requires that when a speaker expresses a belief by sincerely uttering a sentence, the utterance and the belief have the same content. It will be argued that this constraint should be viewed as expressing a conceptual connection between thought and language rather than a mere empirical generalization about the two. However, the most obvious accounts of the relation between thought and language compatible with the constraint (giving an (...) independent account of one of either linguistic meaning or thought content and understanding the other in terms of it) both face serious difficulties. Because of this, the following will suggest an alternative picture of the relation between thought and language that remains compatible with the constraint. (shrink)

There has been much discussion recently of what has been labeled the “Brown-Boghossian-McKinsey”, “Brown-McKinsey” or sometimes just “McKinsey” arguments for the incompatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. However, while the three author's arguments have been treated as interchangeable, they are not identical. In particular, Brown’s and Boghossian’s arguments have a fairly serious flaw that cannot so easily be attributed to McKinsey. In what follows, I’ll (1) present a version of the ‘received’ “Brown-Boghossian-McKinsey” argument, (2) outline what I take to be the (...) most serious objection to it, (3) explain why this sort of objection does not seem, or do not seem immediately, to tell against McKinsey’s argument, and (4) suggest a number of alternative responses that might apply to McKinsey as well. (shrink)

Hillary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, his original use of the brain in a vat scenario was meant to illustrate a point about the "mind/world relationship." In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of (...) a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's conclusions about the scenario are, however, actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world. Reflections on semantics give us no compelling reason to suppose that claims like "I am a brain in a vat" could not turn out to be true. (shrink)

In his paper “What the externalist can know a priori”, Paul Boghossian rejects the compatibility between self-knowledge and content externalism by arguing that compatibilists are committed to the absurd view that a subject can know, by reasoning purely a priori, substantive truths about the world, such as that water exists. In this paper I try to show that Boghossian’s incompatibilist argument does not succeed. According to Boghossian, it is enough, for an externalist to reach the undesired conclusion, that she satisfies (...) a number of conditions that can be known by her a priori. I argue that, by an externalist’s lights, some of these conditions are simply too weak to be acceptable by her and some of them can only be known a posteriori. So, compatibilists are not committed to the absurdity Boghossian ascribes to them. (shrink)

In this paper I address the question whether self-knowledge is compatible with an externalist individuation of mental content. Against some approaches, I consider self-knowledge as a genuine cognitive achievement. Though it is neither incorrigible nor infallible, self-knowledge is direct, a priori (no based on empirical investigation), presumptively true and authoritative. The problem is whether self-knowledge, so understood, is compatible with externalism. My answer will be affirmative. I will defend this species of compatibilism against several objections, in particular those based on (...) the possibility of an individual’s being unwittingly switched between worlds. (shrink)

The critic Cyril Connolly once pointed out that diarists don’t make novelists. He went on to describe the problem for the would-be writer. “Writing for oneself: no public. Writing for others: no privacy” (Cyril Connolly, Journal). This paper addresses Connolly's worry about the public ad private: how can we reconcile the inner and conscious dimension of speech with its outer and public dimension? For if what people mean by their words involves, or consists in, what they have in mind when (...) they speak then how can what someone has in mind — the meaning she attaches to her words — be at the same time publicly accessible to others on the basis of her behaviour? The issue is whether there is a notion of the linguistic meaning of an expression that can do justice to both speakers’ inner experience of comprehension and to what is outwardly available in their public practice. (shrink)

En décadas recientes se ha considerado que una formulación adecuada del autoconocimiento (AC) debería ser consistente con la tesis del externalismo (E). Michael McKinsey es uno de los personajes que ha enfatizado con mayor ahínco que la conjunción de ambas posturas es inconsistente. En este trabajo defiendo la idea de que las objeciones presentadas por McKinsey no afectan de manera importante la formulación davidsoniana de la autoridad de la primera persona (AC3) en conjunción con (E); señalo, además, que si no (...) pudiera hacerse una reconstrucción à la Davidson de (AC3) desde la postura de McKinsey sería en virtud de las diferencias metodológicas, semánticas, epistemológicas y ontológicas entre ambos autores, y no debido a que esta reconstrucción en sí misma sea incompatible con el externalismo. (shrink)

In this paper I take side on externalist incompatibilism. However, I intend to radicalize the position. First, based on my criticism of Burge's anaphoric proposal, I argue that there is no reasoning‐transparency: the reasoner is blind to the reasoning he is performing. Second, assuming a global form of content‐externalism, I argue that “in the head” are only logical and formal abilities. That is what I call “bite the bullet and swallow it too.”.

Judgments about the validity of at least some elementary inferential patterns (say modus ponens) are a priori if anything is. Yet a number of empirical conditions must in each case be satisfied in order for a particular inference to instantiate this or that inferential pattern. We may on occasion be entitled to presuppose that such conditions are satisfied (and the entitlement may even be a priori), yet only experience could tell us that such was indeed the case. Current discussion about (...) a perceived incompatibility between content externalism and first-person authority exemplifies how damaging the neglect of such empirical presuppositions of correct reasoning can be. An externalistic view of mental content is ostensibly incompatible with the assumption that a rational subject should be able to avoid inconsistency no matter what the state of her empirical knowledge may be. That fact, however, needs not be taken (as it often is) as a reductio of externalism: alternatively, we may reject that assumption, adding to the agenda of a philosophical investigation of rationality an examination of the vicissitudes of logical luck. I offer an illustration and defense of that alternative. (shrink)

This is an anthology of ?fteen papers concerning various philosophical problems related to the topic of self-knowledge. All but one of the papers were previously unpublished, and all but two are descendants of presentations at a conference on self-knowledge held at the University of St Andrews in 1995. The collection.

If the contents of our thoughts are partly determined by facts outside our heads, can we still know those contents directly, without investigating our environment? What if we were surreptitiously switched to Twin-Earth? Would we know the contents of our thoughts under these unusual circumstances? By looking carefully at what determines the content of a second-order thought, a candidate for self-knowledge, the paper argues that we can know the contents of our thoughts directly, even after being switched. Learning about the (...) switch, however, does raise some interesting difficulties. (shrink)

Minha proposta, nesta introdução a “Autoconhecimento e os limites da autenticidade”, texto de Sven Bernecker traduzido e publicado neste número de Sképsis, é dar razões para que defensores do anti-individualismo que sejam partidários da estratégia do autoconhecimento básico, no que diz respeito ao debate sobre a compatibilidade entre anti-individualismo e conhecimento de si, mudem de posição, e passem a defender anti-individualismo com teoria da autenticidade.

My concern in this paper is with the claim that knowledge is a mental state – a claim that Williamson places front and centre in Knowledge and Its Limits. While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think it carries certain costs that have not been widely appreciated. One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental – the view, roughly speaking, that one’s mental states are determined by one’s (...) internal physical state. In order to know that something is the case it is not, in general, enough for one’s internal physical state to be a certain way – the wider world must also be a certain way. If we accept that knowledge is a mental state, we must give up internalism. One might think that this is no cost, since much recent work in the philosophy of mind has, in any case, converged on the view that internalism is false. This thought, though, is too quick. As I will argue here, the claim that knowledge is a mental state would take us to a view much further from internalism than anything philosophers of mind have converged upon. (shrink)

Based on content externalism, the question of whether self-knowledge is authoritative or not has launched a real controversy in the philosophy of mind. Boghossian proposed slow switching argument in defense of incompatibility of the two views. This argument has been criticized by some philosophers through different approaches. Vahid is one of them. He claimed that Boghossian's argument appeals to some controversial assumptions without which it cannot achieve its conclusion. In this article, I criticize Vahid's response to slow switching argument and (...) show that self-knowledge in Vahid's response differs in having authority and therefore in function from that of Boghossian. (shrink)

There is a thesis that assure the computability between externalize about mental content and self-knowledge (BURGE, 1988). However, this theses, that explore the auto-verification property of claims of the type “I think that p”, works only for assertive claims that are express in the simple present tense. Among the problematic cases are the claims in the past tense and claims about specific propositional attitude. This fails about the thesis of the compatibility is pointed by Boghossian (1992) as a prove of (...) the incompatibility between externalism and self-knowledge. There is a wide bibliography that try to manage the claims in past tense. In these articles (BURGE, 1995), It's argued that the preservative function of memory assure the veracity of the claims in past tense (at last in normal situations). However, there isn't a lot of work about the problem of the claims about specific propositional attitude. This article propose a expanse the preservative memory theory, with the purpose that It manages the self-knowledge of past propositional attitudes. We propose some criteria that define when a claim of this type is true, mainly in the cases that the content of the attitude of the past thought is not identical with the actual thought. The criterion about the similarity of content is the Bernecker's one (2009). The criterion about similarity of attitudes is new: the attitude that S thinks in t1 as if he have had in t2 is similar with the attitude that he had in t 1 iff the actual attitude is entailed by the former. (shrink)

During the last decade Jessica Brown has been one of the main participants in the on-going debate over the compatibility of anti-individualism and self-knowledge. It is therefore of great interest that she is now publishing a book examining the various epistemological consequences of anti-individualism. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses the question of whether a subject can have privileged access to her own thoughts, even if the content of her thoughts is construed anti-individualistically. This section contains (...) a detailed and useful discussion not only of how we are to understand privileged access, but also of epistemological issues of more general import, such as the connection between knowledge and reliability. The second section focuses on various aspects of the problem of anti-individualism and reasoning, including an extensive discussion of the relation between anti-individualism and a Fregean account of content. The final section discusses the so-called reductio argument against compatibilism (i.e. the view that anti-individualism is compatible with a priori knowledge of one’s own thoughts), according to which compatibilism implies that we can have a priori knowledge of certain facts about the world that, intuitively, are not knowable that way. The book is very clearly written and structured. Readers unfamiliar with the debate will get a good sense of its broad contours and the various positions taken. Brown starts out by distinguishing different forms of anti-individualism. This is very helpful since it is quite clear that the term has come to be rather carelessly used, as if it referred to one particular thesis, whereas in fact a number of loosely related positions are labeled ‘antiindividualist’. At the outset she distinguishes three familiar anti-individualist theses: natural kind anti-individualism, social anti-individualism, and singular anti-individualism. These.. (shrink)

This paper argues that, given a certain apparently inevitable thesis about content, we could not know our own minds. The thesis is that the content of a thought is determined by its relational properties.

The content of the externalist thesis about the mind depends crucially on how we define the distinction between the internal and the external. According to the usual understanding, the boundary between the internal and the external is the skull or the skin of the subject. In this paper I argue that the usual understanding is inadequate, and that only the new understanding of the external/internal distinction I suggest helps us to understand the issue of the compatibility of externalism and privileged (...) access. (shrink)

It has become increasingly popular to suggest that non-individualistic theories of content undermine our purported a priori knowledge of such contents because they entail that we lack the ability to distinguish our thoughts from alternative thoughts with different contents. However, problems relating to such knowledge of 'comparative' content tell just as much against individualism as non-individualism. Indeed, the problems presented by individualistic theories of content for self-knowledge are at least, if not more, serious than those presented by non-individualistic theories. Consequently, (...) considerations of self-knowledge give one no reason to embrace individualism. If anything, they give one reason to reject it. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the Armchair Access Problem for E=K as presented by Nicholas Silins (2005), and I argue, contra Silins, that it does not represent a real threat to E=K. More precisely, I put forward two lines of response, both of which put pressure on the main assumption of the argument, namely, the Armchair Access thesis. The first line of response focuses on its scope, while the second line of response focuses on its nature. The second line (...) of response is the most interesting one, for it represents the framework within which I develop a novel account of second-order knowledge, one that involves evaluation of counterfactual conditionals and the employment of our imaginative capacities, i.e., an imagination-based account of second-order knowledge. The two lines of response are shown to be jointly compatible and mutually supportive. I then conclude that the Armchair Access Problem is not a challenge for E=K, yet it relies on the ambiguity of the notion of armchair knowledge underpinning the Armchair Access thesis. (shrink)

Dretske is a “conciliatory skeptic” on self-knowledge. Take some subject S such that S thinks that P and S knows that she has thoughts. Dretske’s theory can be put as follows: S has a privileged way of knowing what she thinks, but she has no privileged way of knowing that she thinks it. There is much to be said on behalf of conciliatory skepticism and Dretske’s defense of it. We aim to show, however, that Dretske’s defense fails, in that if (...) his defense of CS’s skeptical half succeeds, then his defense of CS’s conciliatory half fails. We then suggest a potential way forward. We suggest in particular that the correct way of being a Dretskean conciliatory skeptic is to deny that S has a privileged way of knowing about her thoughts, but to grant that she is nonetheless an authority on her thoughts. (shrink)

This is an anthology of ?fteen papers concerning various philosophical problems related to the topic of self-knowledge. All but one of the papers were previously unpublished, and all but two are descendants of presentations at a conference on self-knowledge held at the University of St Andrews in 1995. The collection.

Before remarking on “The New Science of the Mind”, I first offer some comments on philosophy and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S),Wittgenstein (W), Hacker (H) et al. It will help to see my reviews of PNC (Philosophy in a New Century), TLP, PI, OC, Making the Social World (MSW) and other books by and about these geniuses, who provide a clear description of higher order behavior, not found in psychology nor philosophy, (...) that I will refer to as the WS framework. -/- As with so many philosophy books, we might stop with the title. As the quotes and comments above and in my other reviews and the books they cover indicate, there are compelling reasons for regarding the problems we face in describing the psychology of higher order thought as conceptual and not scientific. This ought to be crystal clear to all, but science envy and almost complete oblivion to WSH etc. is a la mode! But as H notes above, the issues discussed here are all about language games and have nothing to do with science. In fact, as usual, if one translates into plain English there is very little of interest here, and certainly nothing not said before and better by WS etc. countless times since the 30’s (see e.g., The Blue and Brown Books from 1933-35). It is not surprising that he makes no significant references to any of the above books or persons (the only reference to S is an article from 1958!), though in my view they are at the top of the list of the major figures in descriptive psychology. -/- On p119 he tells us that the key to all this is to figure out how “…a personal level cognitive process can belong to a representational subject. This is the task of the second half of the book.” But W did this 80 years ago and since we have the beautifully clear explanations of WSH, H&M etc., there is no point to torturing oneself with the rather aimless and opaque prose that veers off at the end into Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl, and Frege, with a dash of postmodernist word salad for good measure. A valiant effort on an interesting topic, but ultimately exhausting and fruitless. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Note first that knowledge of one's own thought-contents would not count as a priori according to the usual criteria for knowledge of this kind. Surely, then, incompatibilists are using this term to refer to some other, stipulatively defined, epistemic property. But could this be, as suggested by McKinsey { 1 99 1: 9), the property of being knowable 'just by thinking' or 'from the armchair'? Certainly not if these were metaphors for knowledge attainable on the basis of reason alone, since (...) self-knowledge would fail to come out a priori in this sense. And exactly the same would happen if the property were that of being knowable by inference, since, according to a common intuition, self-knowledge is noninferential. (shrink)

Based on content externalism, the question of whether self-knowledge is authoritative or not has launched a real controversy in the philosophy of mind. Boghossian proposed slow switching argument in defense of incompatibility of the two views. This argument has been criticized by some philosophers through different approaches. Vahid is one of them. He claimed that Boghossian's argument appeals to some controversial assumptions without which it cannot achieve its conclusion. In this article, I criticize Vahid's response to slow switching argument and (...) show that self-knowledge in Vahid's response differs in having authority and therefore in function from that of Boghossian. (shrink)

In this paper I argue first, that a contrastive account of self-knowledge and the propositional attitudes entails an anti-individualist account of propositional attitude concepts, second, that the final account provides a solution to the McKinsey paradox, and third, that the account has the resources to explain why certain anti-skeptical arguments fail.

During the last decade Jessica Brown has been one of the main participants in the on-going debate over the compatibility of anti-individualism and self-knowledge. It is therefore of great interest that she is now publishing a book examining the various epistemological consequences of anti-individualism. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses the question of whether a subject can have privileged access to her own thoughts, even if the content of her thoughts is construed anti-individualistically. This section contains (...) a detailed and useful discussion not only of how we are to understand privileged access, but also of epistemological issues of more general import, such as the connection between knowledge and reliability. The second section focuses on various aspects of the problem of anti-individualism and reasoning, including an extensive discussion of the relation between anti-individualism and a Fregean account of content. The final section discusses the so-called reductio argument against compatibilism (i.e. the view that anti-individualism is compatible with a priori knowledge of one’s own thoughts), according to which compatibilism implies that we can have a priori knowledge of certain facts about the world that, intuitively, are not knowable that way. The book is very clearly written and structured. Readers unfamiliar with the debate will get a good sense of its broad contours and the various positions taken. Brown starts out by distinguishing different forms of anti-individualism. This is very helpful since it is quite clear that the term has come to be rather carelessly used, as if it referred to one particular thesis, whereas in fact a number of loosely related positions are labeled ‘antiindividualist’. At the outset she distinguishes three familiar anti-individualist theses: natural kind anti-individualism, social anti-individualism, and singular anti-individualism. These.. (shrink)

Dry earth seems to its inhabitants (our intrinsic duplicates) just as earth seems to us, that is, it seems to them as though there are rivers and lakes and a clear, odorless liquid flowing from their faucets. But, in fact, this is an illusion; there is no such liquid anywhere on the planet. I address two objections to externalism concerning the nature of the concept that is expressed by the word 'water' in the mouths of the inhabitants of dry earth. (...) Gabriel Segal presents a dilemma for the externalist concerning the application conditions of the concept, and Paul Boghossian presents a dilemma for the externalist concerning the complexity of the concept. I show that, in both cases, the externalist may occupy the horn of his choice without departing from either the letter or spirit of externalism. (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)