Yli-Vakkuri offers a deductive argument for Content Externalism that primarily appeals to two main principles he says should be adopted by all parties to the debate. Sawyer criticizes this argument on the grounds that there are internalist theories that are not consistent with the two principles he offers, although she takes no issue with the derivation itself. While Sawyer’s critique is insightful and largely correct, there is a more fundamental problem with the original argument. The formal proof given in the (...) original paper begs the question. The informal argument is enthymematic, and all the possible valid reconstructions require assumptions that can be legitimately rejected by content internalists. This is significant to point out as someone might think that the internalist views that Sawyer says are not consistent with the two principles that drive Yli-Vakkuri’s argument can be successfully challenged and thereby the original argument defended. (shrink)

This is an extended review of Juhani Yli-Vakkuri & John Hawthorne's book: Narrow Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)..

Yli-Vakkuri argues that content externalism can be established without thought experiments, as the deductive consequence of a pair of uncontroversial principles about beliefs, contents and truth. I argue that the most dialectically plausible motivation for the first principle, that truth is a broad property or beliefs, undermines the second principle, that the truth-value of a belief goes hand-in-hand with that of its content, and that other motivations are likely to depend on externalist thought experiments the argument was meant to avoid. (...) As it stands, the argument for externalism therefore fails. (shrink)

According to Composition as Identity, a whole is distinct from each of its parts individually, but identical to all of them taken together. It is sometimes claimed that, if you accept CAI, then your belief in a whole is ‘ontologically innocent’ with respect to your belief in its parts. This claim is false. But the defender of CAI can claim a different advantage for her view. Following Agustín Rayo, I distinguish ontology from plethology. I then show that CAI allows us (...) to introduce an interesting notion of ‘plethological innocence’ which would otherwise collapse into the notion of ‘ontological innocence’, and that CAI renders belief in composite objects plethologically innocent. (shrink)

A recent argument against content internalism bucks tradition: it abandons Twin-Earth-style thought experiments and instead claims that internalism is inconsistent with plausible principles relating belief contents and truth values. Call this the transparency argument. Here, it is shown that there is a structurally parallel argument against content internalism’s foil: content externalism. Preserving the transparency argument while fending off the parallel argument against externalism requires that content-determination and truth-value-determination are implausibly linked together and that eternalism about belief contents is true. Given (...) these requirements, there may be reason to prefer simple, thought-experiment-based arguments against internalism – the sort of arguments that the transparency argument is meant to supersede. (shrink)

In their book, Narrow Content, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne attempt to argue against the claim that there is a kind of thought content which is both narrow and theoretically significant. However, their failure to distinguish indexical from non-indexical thought renders their arguments ineffective; a large class of the arguments they present are in fact irrelevant to the question of whether thought content is narrow. The unified treatment of thought content they advocate fails to capture the distinctively mental aspects of (...) indexical thought, and the kinds of indexical examples to which they appeal can tell us nothing very interesting about mental states. (shrink)