Anti-Externalism

360 Pages·2009·2.89 MB·English

by  Joseph Mendola

Anti-Externalism
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Anti-Externalism
Joseph Mendola
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For Allan Gibbard and Jaegwon Kim
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for help from Lily Griffin, Rowena Anketell, Patrick Arens,
Bill Bauer, Catherine Berry, Tim Black, Brent Braga, Al Casullo, David
Chavez, Ben Churley, Mark Cullison, Mark Decker, Cullen Gatten, John
Gibbons, Danielle Hampton, AblaHasan, LeoIacono, Clayton Littlejohn,
Tim Loughlin, Sally Markowitz, Peter Momtchiloff, Victoria Patton, Guy
Rohrbaugh, J. D. Trout, Mark van Roojen, Kate Walker, and several
anonymous referees. Thanks to Blackwell for permission to reuse material
from my articles ‘A Dilemma for Asymmetric Dependence’, Nous 37
(2003), 232–57, and ‘Papineau on Etiological Teleosemantics for Beliefs’,
Ratio 19 (2006),305–20.
Contents
1. Introduction 1
PartI: OnSomeMisleadingCases
2. Externalist Cases and Internalist Theory 23
3. Internalist Cases and Externalist Theory 55
4. The Real Moral 77
PartII: Mind-BasedExternalism andSensory Content
5. Against Etiological Semantics 103
6. Non-Etiological Mind-Based Externalism 143
7. Qualia and Sensory Content 173
PartIII: Language-BasedExternalism andThoughtContent
8. Private Language and Privileged Access 223
9. Language, Truth, and Inference 253
10. Qualia Empiricism 305
Bibliography 329
Index 347
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Introduction
ThetruthisthatwhenIdaydreamaboutgreenumbrellasinlightrain,itdoes
not require umbrellas, rain, anyone else, or any history. Likewise when I
havesuchadesire,belief,orexperience.Butthisoldviewisnowunpopular.
Internalism is the view that all the conditions that constitute a person’s
thoughts and sensations are internal to their skin and contemporaneous,
inside and now. Things outside my wall of skin cause my sensations and
thoughts,andmanyofmythoughtsareabouttheoutside.Butthingsoutside
are not constitutive parts of those mental states; they are not part of what
makes them up. Let me be more precise. First, mental states of one type,
say beliefs, often differ in content, much as declarative sentences differ in
meaning.Considerbeliefsthatgrassisgreenandthatrainiswet.Beliefscan
be about different things, and present the same things in different ways. It
isbecauseofthisthattheyveridicallyornon-veridicallyrepresent.Second,
some ways of typing mental states, say as knowledge and hence as true,
clearly involve external conditions. And so now I can put it this way:
According to internalism, my mental states of crucial and characteristic
types—for instance my beliefs, desires, and sensations—would exist and
retain their characteristic contents even if there were nothing outside me
and no past, as long as what is currently inside my skin were unchanged.
Externalism is the denial of internalism. It is the view that features of a
person’s external environment or history are part of what constitutes that
person’s beliefs, desires, and sensations. The natural kinds around me, the
machinationsofmylinguisticcommunity,andmylearningorevolutionary
history are some of the external resources that might partly constitute my
experiences and thoughts.¹
¹ Mendola(1997)callsexperiences‘thoughts’tostresstheirintensionalityandcapacityforfalsehood.
ButhereIwilldeploymorefamiliarterminology.