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 mustin each case be satisfied in order for a particular inference to instantiate this or that inferentialpattern. We may on occasion be entitled to presuppose that such conditions aresatisfied (and the entitlement may even be a priori), yet only experience could tell us thatsuch was indeed the case. Current discussion about a perceived incompatibility betweencontent externalism (...) and first-person authority exemplifies how damaging the neglect ofsuch empirical presuppositions of correct reasoning can be. An externalistic view of mentalcontent is ostensibly incompatible with the assumption that a rational subject should beable 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 investigationof rationality an examination of the vicissitudes of logical luck. I offer an illustrationand defense of that alternative. (shrink)

Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. Personal memory, in particular - the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it - often has intense emotional or moral significance: it is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of our limited but genuine freedom from our present environment and our immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the history (...) of philosophy as much in relation to ethics and to epistemology as in theories of psyche, mind, and self. (shrink)

Content externalism about memory says that the individuation of memory contents depends on relations the subject bears to his past environment. I defend externalism about memory by arguing that neither philosophical nor psychological considerations stand in the way of accepting the context dependency of memory that follows from externalism.

The development of the semantic externalism in the 1970s was followed by a debate on the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. Boghossian’s memory argument is one of the most important arguments against the compatibilist view. However, some compatibilists attack Boghossian’s argument by pointing out that his understanding of memory is internalistic. Ludlow and others developed the externalist view of memory to defend the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. However, the externalist view of memory undermines the epistemic status of memory since (...) it gives memory a burden that is too heavy for it to carry. This paper argues that only if we take the content of memory to be narrow and take that of self-knowledge to be wide and replace Cartesian self-knowledge with contextually constrained self-knowledge, can the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge be effectively defended. (shrink)

Pa ul Boghos s i a n’ s ‘ Me mor y Ar gume nt ’ a l l ege dl y s hows , us i ng t he f ami l i a r s l ow-switching scenario, that externalism and authoritative self-knowledge are incompatible. The aim of this paper is to undermine the argument by examining..

Our aim in this paper is to clarify the distinctions and the relationships among several phenomena, each of which has certain characteristics of what is generally called “deference”. We distinguish linguistic deference, which concerns the use of language and the meaning of the words we use, from epistemic deference, which concerns our reasons and evidence for making the claims we make. In our in-depth study of linguistic deference, we distinguish two subcategories: default deference, and deliberate deference. We also discuss the (...) phenomenon of im-perfect mastery, often associated with deference, and which we show to be independent both of linguistic deference and of epistemic deference. If our analysis is correct, then some recent debates on deference can be shown to result from a failure to appreciate all the distinctions that we draw here. (shrink)

Externalism holds that the individuation of mental content depends on factors external to the subject. This doctrine appears to undermine both the claim that there is a priori self-knowledge, and the view that individuals have privileged access to their thoughts. Tyler Burge's influential "inclusion theory of self-knowledge" purports to reconcile externalism with authoritative self-knowledge. I first consider Paul Boghossian's claim that the inclusion theory is internally inconsistent. I reject one line of response to this charge, but I endorse another. I (...) next suggest, however, that the inclusion theory has little explanatory value. (shrink)