Table Of ContentWhat Determines Content?
The Internalism/Externalism Dispute
What Determines Content? The
Internalism/Externalism Dispute
Edited by
Tomáš Marvan
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS
What Determines Content? The Internalism/Externalism Dispute, edited by Tomáš Marvan
This book first published 2006 by
Cambridge Scholars Press
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2006 by Tomáš Marvan and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-011-6
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface................................................................................................................ix
Publicity, Externalism and Inner States
Barry C. Smith....................................................................................1
Internalist Constraints on Content Externalism
Anthony C. Grayling.........................................................................28
Intersubjective Externalism
Peter Pagin.......................................................................................39
Having a Concept
Petr Ko(cid:290)átko....................................................................................55
Arguments for Externalism
Steven Davis.....................................................................................69
Reference and Deference
Andrew Woodfield............................................................................97
External and Internal Aspects in the Semantics of Names
Wolfram Hinzen .............................................................................121
Externalism, Apriority and Transmission of Warrant
Sarah Sawyer..................................................................................142
Brown against the Reductio
Kathrin Glüer.................................................................................154
Content Externalism and Fregean Sense
Åsa Wikforss..................................................................................163
vi Table of Contents
Are Object-Dependent Beliefs Explanatorily Redundant?
Maria Lasonen................................................................................180
Wittgenstein’s Externalism: Context, Self-Knowledge & the Past
William Child.................................................................................198
Temporal Externalism, Constitutive Norms, and Theories of Vagueness
Henry Jackman...............................................................................221
Morally Alien Thought
Charles Travis................................................................................243
Contributors...................................................................................271
Preface
The present volume is predominantly composed of papers which survey, in a
critical manner, the debates on internalism and externalism in the philosophy of
language and mind, and contribute to the ongoing discussion. The volume thus
provides the reader with an overview of the state of the art of the dispute in
various areas. Besides this, some papers offer glimpses into the future: Barry C.
Smith formulates a Reconciliation Problem concerning the two perspectives on a
communicative act, the subjective and the public; Peter Pagin puts forward a
new position on content determination, intersubjective externalism; William
Child adresses externalist aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind and
language; and Charles Travis applies Putnam’s externalist insights in the domain
of moral matters. The main aspiration of the volume is to demonstrate the
philosophical significance and fruitfulness of the debate on a wide range of
issues, and doing it in a manner which could be followed, to a large extent, even
by non-specialists. The issues papers deal with include, to new a few, linguistic
deference, apriority, object-dependence of content and temporal externalism.
Seven of the papers collected here were presented at this or that conference
which took place in the Czech Republic in recent years. First of them, Swimming
in XYZ, was a 1998 Karlovy Vary symposium devoted to the work of Hilary
Putnam––the last in the series of memorable events organized annually by Petr
Ko(cid:290)átko and his colleagues from the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech
Academy of Sciences in Prague. Further papers were presented at Externalism-
Internalism Dispute and the Theory of Interpretation (2002) and The Levels of
Interpretation (2005), two parts in the ongoing series of Prague Interpretation
Colloquia. The remaining papers were commissioned especially for this volume.
Two papers––those of Steven Davis and Andrew Woodfield––were originally
presented in Karlovy Vary in 1998 but published in the meantime; they are
reprinted here, with the permission of the publishers.*
T. M.
* I would like to express indebtedness to Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a
research fellowship which provided time to work on this project.
PUBLICITY, EXTERNALISM AND INNER STATES(cid:13)
BARRY C. SMITH
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).
Connolly’s quip nicely illustrates a problem for the public and the private that
persists when we turn to the public and private dimensions of mind and
meaning: namely, that attempts to accommodate one are usually at the expense
of the other.
The philosophical problem this paper addresses is how to reconcile the inner
and conscious dimension of speech with its outer and public dimension. In
speaking, we are consciously aware of the meanings of the words we use. You
are aware of the meanings of the words you are reading now. And in speaking,
you and I choose which words to use, aware it seems of what we are saying. In
trying to describe some situation, we sometimes face choices as to which of two
words would best express a feature of the situation, we sometimes choose
between them because the meaning of the one word is more peculiarly apt to
express what it is we are trying to say than the other. To be able to do choose
words in this way, the meanings we attach to them have to be immediately
available to us, within our conscious reach. If the meanings of words were not
within our conscious reach, it is hard to see how we could find speech—our own
or anyone else’s—so much as intelligible.
From this stance as ordinary language users, our use and understanding of
language is easy and unreflective. Employing the language or responding to its
use by others seems effortless. It requires no special figuring out on our part, nor
(cid:13) Paper first given at a colloquium Externalism-Internalism Dispute and the Theory of
Interpretation at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in
Prague, April 9, 2002 and at Sentence Meaning, Utterance Meaning/Text, Work in
Prague in 2003. Thanks to Bill Child and Guy Longworth for comments on an earlier
draft, to Peter Pagin for discussion of publicity and to audiences at both conferences.
2 Publicity, Externalism and Inner States
does it appear to be any sort of cognitive achievement to find words meaningful
in the way we typically do. But if what a person means by his words is a matter
of what he has in mind, of how things are with him, consciously-speaking, when
he uses words or listens to them, how can the meanings of these words also be
publicly accessible to others and serve in communication? How can our words
have meanings that match what others take them to mean when they hear us
utter those words?
Meaning must be publicly accessible to others for communication to
succeed, and yet what is publicly accessible are facts about a speaker’s linguistic
behaviour. So how can what someone has in mind as he speaks—the meaning
he attaches to his words—also be publicly accessible to others on the basis of
linguistic behaviour alone? How can the meanings he gives his words match
what other people take him to mean?
In using words, one does not measure one’s use or understanding of a term
against any public, or other, standard, one simply starts speaking, giving the
words the meanings one simply takes them to have. But for communication to
succeed one has to get one’s meaning across to others, to make what one is
saying available to them somehow. And one could not do so if the significance
one attaches to one’s words was a wholly private and personal affair. Somehow
one must be using words with the meanings other people take them to have,
even though in using them one does not consult others or measure one’s
understanding against theirs.
In order to meaning anything at all by my words, there must be more to their
having the meanings they have for me than my simply taking them to mean
whatever I take them to mean, and this surely suggests my taking words to mean
something is answerable to something beyond my opinion. But does it involve
conformity to a standard? Surely, there has to be a fact about what I mean for
me to know what I mean. The question is: how can the effortless and immediate
impression of what I mean by the words I am using amount to knowledge—
authoritative first-personal knowledge—of an objective fact about what I mean;
a fact available to others on third-personal grounds? How does the existence of
publicly and behaviourally available facts about what a speaker means by his
words square with the speaker’s own immediate and effortless knowledge of
what he means? As speakers, we do not have to observe our own linguistic
output to see what significance we attach to expressions. We just know what our
words mean without the benefit of evidence or inference. The facts of meaning,
or of what a rule governing the correct use of a word requires of me, must be
something I am immediately and intimately acquainted with. And yet the facts
of meaning or the existence of rules (on which, according to the later
Wittgenstein, the possibility of meaning depends) must be answerable to more
