Abstract

It is often alleged that semantic externalism, the thesis that mental content is partially determined by external factors, conflicts with the view that we have some kind of privileged access to the contents of our own mental states. If this is correct, we have a paradox: externalism is powerfully intuitive, but so is the idea of privileged access. In this essay, I examine the apparent paradox and argue that the alleged conflict is illusory. ;After sketching the paradox and its significance in Chapter I, I take a close look at privileged access and externalism . ;In Chapter IV, I address arguments for the incompatibility. I argue that all the significant arguments for it turn out to be the same argument; I call it the Improved McKinseyan Argument . In essence, IMA alleges that it is possible to infer from non-empirically justified knowledge of one's own thoughts and of externalism that certain paradigmatic empirical facts obtain; because it seems that one can know in a privileged way what one deduces from other privileged knowledge, it seems to follow, contrary to intuition, that one can have privileged knowledge of empirical facts. ;In Chapter V, I address the significant solutions offered by others to the paradox, and argue that none of them work. ;I turn in Chapter VI to a fresh examination of IMA. Crucial to the argument is the notion of non-empiricality it appeals to, and I argue that it divides into three separate notions. It turns out that on no consistent understanding of non-empiricality are all the premises of IMA true. I then diagnose the motivation for IMA, that is, what made it seem compelling in the first place. I suggest that two factors are at work here: first, reliance on an unexplicated notion of non-empiricality, and reliance on an unexplicated and controversial notion of privileged access. ;Chapter VII briefly addresses the underlying explanation for privileged access, and in it I suggest that what explains its non-empirical authority is a combination of naturalistic and conceptual factors