This paper attempts to do two things. First, it recounts the problem of intentionality, as it has typically been conceptualized, and argues that it needs to be reconceptualized in light of the radical form of externalism most commonly referred to as the extended mind thesis. Second, it provides an explicit, novel argument for that thesis, what I call the argument from meaning making, and offers some defense of that argument. This second task occupies the core of the paper, (...) and in completing it I distinguish _active _ _cognition_ from _cyborg fantasy arguments_ for externalism, and develop the analogy between the extended mind thesis in the cognitive sciences and developmental systems theory in developmental biology. The rethinking of the problem of intentionality on offer leads not so much to a solution as to a dissolution of that problem, as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

Semantic externalism in contemporary philosophy of language typically – and often tacitly – combines two supervenience claims about idiolectical meaning (i.e., meaning in the language system of an individual speaker). The first claim is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her intrinsic, physical properties. The second is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her understanding of (...) its use. I here show that a conception of idiolectical meaning is possible that accepts the “anti-internalism” of the first claim while rejecting (what I shall refer to as) the “anti-individualism” of the second. According to this conception, externally constituted idiolectical meaning supervenes on idiolectical understanding. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, (...) though this ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as ‘normative’ in two important ways. The first way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between actual and correct use. The second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the grounding base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can see our commitment to the ‘determinacy’ of meaning as a practical commitment that structures our linguistic practices rather than a theoretical commitment that merely describes them. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad (...) absurdum argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

What is the relationship between conceptual engineering and metasemantic externalism? Sally Haslanger has argued that metasemantic externalism justifies the seemingly counterintuitive consequences of her proposed conceptual revisions. But according to Herman Cappelen, metasemantic externalism makes conceptual engineering effectively impossible in practice. After raising objections to Haslanger’s and Cappelen’s views, I argue for a very different picture, on which metasemantic externalism bears very little on conceptual engineering. I argue that, while metasemantic externalism principally operates at the (...) level of semantic-meaning, we should understand conceptual engineering to operate largely at the level of speaker-meaning. This ‘Speaker-Meaning Picture’ has two key benefits. Firstly, it makes conceptual engineering often easy in practice. Secondly, it suggests a new, normative response to the well known objection that conceptual engineering serves only to change the subject. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent debates about conceptual engineering, it appears that the internalist has an explanatory advantage when it comes to accounting for meaning change and conceptual change. In this paper, I argue against this impression. I show how two different varieties of externalism, originalism and anti-individualism, can coherently explain various cases of meaning change, irrespective of whether they involve proper names or kind terms; and also irrespective of whether they occur in everyday, legal, or scientific contexts. I (...) point out which mechanisms and interpretational strategies the originalist and anti-individualist can invoke, relative to their respective background assumptions about the nature of concepts. Furthermore, I offer an argument in favour of the claim that externalism as such has no implications concerning whether concepts can undergo change. I establish this by showing that originalism allows for conceptual change while anti-individualism insists on conceptual stability. (shrink)

Semantic externalism is the view that meaning is at least partly determined by reference. This suggests that the classic philosophical distinction between truth in virtue of meaning alone and truth in virtue of the world may need reconsideration. If all sentences are true in virtue of reference it is difficult to see how we can distinguish some sentences from others as true in virtue of the world-independent, purely semantic entities that their truth-conditions involve. I argue, to the (...) contrary, that semantic externalism instead exposes significant problems with the orthodox view about meaning that underlies the orthodox view about analytic truth, and I offer an account of analyticity from the perspective of semantic externalism. On this view, the truth-value of analytic sentences will not be distinguished from those of synthetic sentences. The truth-conditions of an analytic sentence are, however, to be distinguished from what makes it "analytic". This account is one that revokes the customary world-independence of analytic sentences, but does not sacrifice their unique modal and epistemic features. (shrink)

Unlike conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering does not aim to identify the content that our current concepts do have, but the content which these concepts should have. For this method to show the results that its practitioners typically aim for, being able to change meanings seems to be a crucial presupposition. However, certain branches of semantic externalism raise doubts about whether this presupposition can be met. To the extent that meanings are determined by external factors such as causal histories or (...) microphysical structures, it seems that they cannot be changed intentionally. This paper gives an extended discussion of this ‘externalist challenge’. Pace Herman Cappelen’s recent take on this issue, it argues that the viability of conceptual engineering crucially depends on our ability to bring about meaning change. Furthermore, it argues that, contrary to first appearance, causal theories of reference do allow for a sufficient degree of meaning control. To this purpose, it argues that there is a sense of what is called ‘collective long-range control’, and that popular versions of the causal theory of reference imply that people have this kind of control over meanings. (shrink)

Semantic externalism is the view that the meanings of referring terms, and the contents of beliefs that are expressed by those terms, are not fully determined by factors internal to the speaker but are instead bound up with the environment. The debate about semantic externalism is one of the most important but difficult topics in philosophy of mind and language, and has consequences for our understanding of the role of social institutions and the physical environment in constituting language (...) and the mind. In this long-needed book, Jesper Kallestrup provides an invaluable map of the problem. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the theories of descriptivism and referentialism and the work of Frege and Kripke, Kallestrup moves on to analyse Putnam’s Twin Earth argument, Burge’s arthritis argument and Davidson’s Swampman argument. He also discusses how semantic externalism is at the heart of important topics such as indexical thoughts, epistemological skepticism, self-knowledge, and mental causation. Including chapter summaries, a glossary of terms, and an annotated guide to further reading, _Semantic Externalism_ an ideal guide for students studying philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Temporal externalists argue that ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that are only settled after the time of utterance. While the view has been criticized for failing to accord with our “ordinary linguistic practices”, such criticisms (1) conflate our ordinary ascriptional practices with our more general beliefs about meaning, and (2) fail to distinguish epistemically from pragmatically motivated linguistic changes. Temporal externalism relates only to the former sort of changes, and the future (...) usage relevant to what we mean reflects reason-driven practices that are rational for us to defer to. (shrink)

The most popular and influential strategies used against semantic externalism and the causal theory of reference are critically examined. It is argued that upon closer scrutiny, none of them emerges as truly convincing.

It is widely held that the meaning of certain types of terms, such as natural kind terms, is individuated externalistically, in terms of the individual's external environment. Recently a more radical thesis has emerged, a thesis we dub 'a posteriori semantics.' The suggestion is that not only does a term's meaning depend on the external environment, but so does its semantics. One motivation for this is the aim to account for cases where a putative natural kind term fails (...) to pick out a natural kind: The term may have a standard externalist semantics (if it picks out a natural kind) or a more descriptivist one (if it does not). Knowing which semantics applies will therefore require detailed empirical knowledge. This move has also been employed in cases where a singular term, such as a name, fails to have a reference. We argue that a posteriori semantics is inherently implausible, since the type of semantics common terms should be given ought not to be conditional on details of chemistry or physics. A number of difficulties for the position—'metaphysical,' epistemological, and methodological—are articulated. Finally, we suggest that a posteriori semantics misconstrues the way in which semantics is empirical. (shrink)

According to Bayesian orthodoxy, an agent should update---or at least should plan to update---her credences by conditionalization. Some have defended this claim by means of a diachronic Dutch book argument. They say: an agent who does not plan to update her credences by conditionalization is vulnerable (by her own lights) to a diachronic Dutch book, i.e., a sequence of bets which, when accepted, guarantee loss of utility. Here, I show that this argument is in tension with evidence externalism, i.e., (...) the view that an agent's evidence can entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. I argue that this tension casts doubt on the idea that diachronic Dutch books can be used to justify or vindicate updating plans. (shrink)

This paper argues that participants in the subjectivism/objectivism/hybridism debate, a central issue in recent meaning in life research, conflate two different distinctions marked by the terms objective and subjective, one having to do with the question of whether life's meaningfulness depends on factors internal or external to the agent, the other having to do with the question of whether there is any ‘absolute’ as opposed to ‘relative’ truth about the first question. The paper then argues that a distinctive type (...) of hybridism with respect to the first sense is true. To vindicate this type of hybridism, the paper identifies, by using examples and counterexamples, internal and external necessary conditions for having meaningful lives. In this type of hybridism, internal states that are not directed at external factors, such as autonomy, serenity and contentment, are also taken account of, and, more generally, internal and external factors need not relate to each other at all. Further, although the more a combination of internal and external factors is valuable the more meaningful a life is, not any increase in the value of any relevant internal or external factor enhances meaning. (shrink)

Semantic externalism is the view that meaning and mental content are determined by relations to the world of objects and properties outside the physical boundaries of the subject of mental states. What you mean by your words--what you're thinking when you're thinking about something--is essentially constituted by the world at large. It has become customary to formulate externalism in terms of so-called twin earth cases--cases where content do not supervene on inner states, but this formulation can be (...) shown to be too limited to be of any great use in characterizing a theory of mind. A more general formulation of externalism is defended in chapter 1, one that characterizes all content. ;That externalism has untoward consequences for belief-desire psychology is a familiar point, but, given the predominance of twin earth formulations, the problem of content's explanatory role is often construed as the problem of content's failing to supervene. In chapter 2 we argue that this is a mistake. Externalism in its most general formulation has consequences for all content in explanation, not just content that fails to supervene on inner states. If content is externalistically individuated, then content is redundant in causal explanation. In chapter 2 we examine the redundancy problem and consider the options for its solution. ;Part one of chapter 3 concerns the further--unnoticed--consequence of externalism that requires a reconsideration of Davidson's charge that Fregean semantic theories fail the test of 'semantic innocence.' If meaning is partly determined by reference, then what an expression refers to in an opaque context, is, ultimately, its reference. Part two of chapter 3 concerns the consequences of externalism for analytic truth. If meaning is partly determined by reference, a question arises as to what becomes of the classical philosophical distinction between analytic and synthetic truth; between 'truth in virtue of meaning alone' and 'truth in virtue of meaning and the world.' Chapter 3 concludes with an account of analytic truth from the perspective of semantic externalism. (shrink)

Abstract I first suggest some ways in which the externalist account of psychological content can be reconciled with the aspectual character of intentionality. I then give an argument against the externalist account which includes as premises the claims that a system capable of having intentional states must understand a language, and that a system that understands a language must be capable of consciousness. I defend the latter claim by arguing that a correct understanding of observation sentences requires conscious, sensory experience, (...) and by appealing to the fact that language has meaning in a holistic manner. (shrink)

According to an externalist theory of content the content of an individual’s thoughts and the meaning of her words need not supervene on her intrinsic history. Two individuals may be intrinsically exactly alike yet entertain different thoughts, and attach different meanings to the words they use. ETC, which has been most notably defended by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, has attained the status of current orthodoxy. Nevertheless, some maintain that combining ETC with the premisses that we have (...) privileged access to our intentional states yields a surprising conclusion. It yields the conclusion that we can have a priori knowledge of features of the external world that seem only accessible to empirical investigation. Call the argument from ETC and privileged access to this conclusion the main argument. Some take the main argument to be a reductio of ETC. Since we have privileged access to our intentional states, and lack the a priori knowledge attributed by the main argument, ETC is false. Some take the main argument to refute the premisses that we have privileged access to those intentional states falling within the scope of ETC. Others see the main argument as a refutation of external world scepticism. We will show that the main argument does not support any of these interesting conclusions. We will show that the main argument does not threaten to restrict privileged access, refute external world scepticism, or constitute a reductio of ETC. More exactly, we will show that the most defensible version of ETC, even when combined with the premiss that we have unrestricted privileged access to our intentional states, yields no a priori knowledge of the external world. (shrink)

Putnam and Burge have been viewed as launching a joint attack on individualism, the view that the content of one's psychological state is determined by what is in the head . Putnam argues that meanings are not in the head while Burge argues that beliefs are not in the head either, and both have come up with convincing arguments against individualism. It is generally conceived that Putnam's view is a version of physical externalism, which argues that factors in the (...) physical environment play a role in determining the meanings of natural kind terms. Burge, on the other hand, is regarded as following up Putnam's argument to bring in factors in the social environment for the determination of belief. Burge's view has been commonly referred to as 'social externalism.' The general consensus in the field is that physical externalism and social externalism are compatible views. Furthermore, both Putnam and Burge seem to endorse each other’s position for the most part. In this paper, however, I shall argue against this general view to show that the two theories are deep down incompatible. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show what sorts of logics are required by externalist and internalist accounts of the meanings of natural kind nouns. These logics give us a new perspective from which to evaluate the respective positions in the externalist-internalist debate about the meanings of such nouns. The two main claims of the paper are the following: first, that adequate logics for internalism and externalism about natural kind nouns are second-order logics; second, that an internalist second-order (...) logic is a free logic—a second order logic free of existential commitments for natural kind nouns, while an externalist second-order logic is not free of existential commitments for natural kind nouns—it is existentially committed. (shrink)

I consider an individualist reply to Burge's well-known anti-individualist thought experiment. It is commonly assumed that the individualist has one of two options: accept that reference is socially determined and opt for a bifurcation of content ; or reject the conclusions of the thought experiment and insist that Burge's patient uttering "I have arthritis in my thigh" has her or his own "arthritis"-concept and utters a true belief. I suggest that neither of these options is very attractive and thus the (...) individualist seems faced with a dilemma. However, Burge's thought experiment rests on problematic philosophical assumptions that the individualist need not accept. One such assumption is that the speaker uttering "I have arthritis in my thigh" makes a non-empirical error. This assumption, as Burge himself makes clear, is crucial if the thought experiment is to go through. So, Burge presents an account of the notion of a "non-empirical error" which is very problematic and fails to support the conclusions of the thought experiment. Once this account is questioned, the individualist can reject the claim that meaning is determined by the speaker's social environment without falling into the dilemma. (shrink)

I claim that there are four major strands of argument for externalism and set out to discuss three of them. The four are: (A) That referential thoughts are object-dependent. This I do not discuss. (B) That the semantics of natural kind terms is externalist. (C) That all semantic content, even of descriptive terms, stems from the causal relations of representations to the things or properties they designate in the external world. (D) That, because meaning is a social product (...) and no individual can capture the whole social practice that defines a concept, what the speaker means always outruns what he can know.I briefiy discuss (C) and (D) and conclude that they cannot be correct, because, if they were, the content of every thought would permanently transcend the refiective grasp of all thinkers. Then I discuss (B) and conclude that, though Putnam shows something interesting about natural kind terms -- namely that a real verbal definition requires science -- this has none of the consequences for philosophy of mind that it is normally supposed to have. (shrink)

In his 1975 paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labor and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars’s “Meaning as Functional Classification” at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to (...) trace the development of Putnam’s semantic externalism, situate his debate with Sellars in it, and reconstruct the two arguments he presented against Sellars. The second half of this paper aims to reconstruct how Sellars replied to Putnam. I argue that Sellars not only accepts the social character of language but also suggests how inferentialists can accommodate the contribution of the world. Sellars’s key idea is that substance terms have a “promissory note aspect” which is to be cashed out in a successor conceptual framework. I reconstruct Sellars’s position as ideal successor externalism, and compare it with temporal externalism. (shrink)

Abstract: Chomsky (1986) has claimed that the prima facie incompatibility between descriptive linguistics and semantic externalism proves that an externalist semantics is impossible. Although it is true that a strong form of externalism does not cohere with descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistic theory can unify the two approaches. The resulting two-level theory reconciles descriptivism, mentalism, and externalism by construing community languages as a function of social identification. This approach allows a fresh look at names and definite descriptions while also (...) responding to Chomsky's (1993, 1995) challenge to articulate an externalist theory of meaning that can be used in the scientific investigation of language. (shrink)

Thus the texts attempt to answer the fundamental questions - of whether there are meanings, and, if there are, of what they are and of the form a serious ...

There is a continuing debate as to whether externalism about mental content is compatible with certain commonly accepted views about the nature of self-knowledge. Both sides to this debate seem to agree that externalism is _not compatible with the traditional view that self-knowledge is acquired by means of observation. In this paper, I argue that externalism is compatible with this traditional view of self-knowledge, and that, in fact, we have good reason to believe that the self-knowledge at (...) issue is acquired by means of observation. (shrink)

I argue that the semantic content of thoughts and the linguistic meaning of expressions are things with a history in the sense that they can be made fully intelligible only from the point of view of the future. I defend this position by articulating a version of a view known in the philosophy of language as temporal externalism. Temporal externalism about content is the view that the content of a subject’s thoughts and utterances at a time t (...) depends on features of the linguistic practices of her community after t. There are two different ways in which temporal externalism can be developed. First, one can take it to be the view according to which the meaning of an expression is given by the whole pattern of use, including future ones, of that expression. Alternatively, one can interpret temporal externalism as the view that the meaning of a speaker’s utterance is determined by the norms that govern or constrain her linguistic behaviour. These norms, which may be instituted at a later date, place their authoritative stamp upon prior conduct. I show that the first version of temporal externalism faces severe objections from which the second version is immune. I also provide a defence of this second position through an extensive discussion of some thought experiments. (shrink)

The linguistic meaning of a word in a language is what fully competent speakers of the language have a grasp of merely in virtue of their semantic competence. The meanings of words sometimes change over time. ‘Meat’ used to mean ‘solid food’, but now means ‘animal flesh eaten as food’. This type of meaning change comes with change of topic, what we are talking about. Many people interested in conceptual engineering have claimed that there is also meaning (...) change where topic is retained. For example, they claim that the meanings of ‘fish’ and ‘pasta’ have undergone such change, and that the meaning of ‘marriage’ would change this way after gay marriages become legal and widely accepted. In this paper, I relate two sets of relatively independent literatures: mainstream philosophy of language and conceptual engineering to argue that on a plausible and widely accepted Minimalist view of meaning that is part and parcel of anti‐descriptivism, none of the above sorts of cases involve meaning change with topic retention. I do this by showing how to distinguish minimalism about meaning from the related theses of externalism and anti‐individualism about intension and how to separate meaning from intension in a way that allows meaning and topic to remain the same despite changes in intension. The larger lesson is that much like we should not disregard the boundary between the narrowly meaning‐related (‘semantics’) and the more broadly communication‐related (‘pragmatics’), and we should not disregard the boundary between the former and the more broadly thought‐related, conceptual or cognitive (‘cognition’). (shrink)

'Epistemic' theories of vagueness notoriously claim that (despite the appearances to the contrary) all of our vague terms have sharp boundaries, it's just that we can't know what they are. Epistemic theories are typically criticized for failing to explain (1) the source of the ignorance postulated, and (2) how our terms could come to have such precise boundaries. Both of these objections will, however, be shown to rest on certain 'presentist' assumptions about the relation between use and meaning, and (...) if allows that the meaning constitutive elements of our linguistic practices can extend into the future, the possibility of a new sort of 'normative epistemicism' emerges. (shrink)

Ever since Putnam and Burge launched their respective attacks on individualist accounts of meaning the individualist has felt squeezed for space.1 Very little maneuvering room, it seems, is left for the philosopher who wants to deny that meaning and mental content depend on the speaker's social environment. One option, popular amongst individualists, is to grant that reference is socially determined but argue that there is nevertheless a notion of meaning or content that can be understood individualistically. That (...) is, the individualist can opt for a. (shrink)

The argument that has inspired much of the recent discussion of the logical relationship between these views is found in Putnam : If externalism is true, then if S were a brain in a vat, S’s utterances of the sentence “I am a brain in a vat” would not express the proposition that S is a brain in a vat. S’s use of the words “brain” and “vat” would not refer to a real brain or vat, just as, in (...) a Twin Earth-style thought experiment, the Twin Earthling cannot refer to water with his use of the term “water.” If we accept that generally we have knowledge of the contents of our utterances, then, if S knows that her utterances of “brain” and “vat” mean brain and vat, it will be possible for S to know that she is not a brain in a vat. For if S has authority with respect to the contents of her utterances, then she can know that her utterance, “I am not a brain in a vat,” refers to brains and vats. On externalism, since S would not refer to brains and vats if she were a brain in a vat, she could know by mere introspection that she is not a brain in a vat. In fact, S can come to know many arbitrary propositions about the external world simply by attending to the contents of her thoughts. For if externalism is true, she can argue, then certain empirical conditions must be satisfied if she is even to have the thoughts about the external world that she does; since she knows what she is thinking, she knows these empirical conditions are satisfied. Thus, if S knows that she is thinking about brains and vats, then she can know that she is not a brain in a vat ; for if she was a BIV, then she would not be thinking about brains and vats, but instead about electrical impulses or some such thing. The standard BIV argument against scepticism, therefore, cannot be correct. This line of argument can then be used to conclude more generally that scepticism is false; for the argument can be run with virtually any utterance or thought with empirical content. If S knows that she is thinking about trees, for example, then she can know that there are trees. (shrink)

In this article I offer a naturalistic defence of semantic externalism. I argue against the following: (1) arguments for externalism rest mainly on conceptual analysis; (2) the community conceptual norms relevant to individuation of propositional attitudes are quasi-analytic; (3) externalism raises serious questions about knowledge of propositional attitudes; and (4) externalism might be OK for “folk psychology” but not for cognitive science. The naturalist alternatives are as follows. (1) Community norms are not anything like a priori; (...) sometimes they are incoherent. (2) Often propositional attitudes lack determinate content: we do not know the content of thoughts or sentences because there is no fully definite content to be known. (3) Often achieving determinate content is a major socially mediated cognitive achievement that depends on just the factors of social and environmental embedding posited as individuative by externalists, so (4) externalism explains how people can, sometimes, come to have, and to know, determinate attitude contents. (5) Reference and content, for both thought and language, are determined by complex and messy dialectical relations involving many such environmental and social factors; consequently, determinate reference, truth-conditions, etc., are somewhat uncommon outcomes. (6) The basic semantic relation is (typically imperfect) socially mediated accommodation between perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, classificatory and inferential dispositions and relevant causal structures in the environment. (7) This accommodation explains how concepts, language, taxonomies, etc., contribute to individuals' rational inductive, explanatory and practical achievements. (8) So externally individuated propositional attitudes are required for cognitive science explanations of individual human rationality and its inductive and explanatory achievements. “Individual rationality ain't (entirely) in the individual head.”. (shrink)

To what extent are meaning, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, determined by aspects of the 'outside world'? Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents twelve specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and the connections between them. In so doing, it examines how issues connected with the nature of mind and language bear on issues about the nature of knowledge and justification. Topics discussed include the compatibility of semantic externalism (...) and epistemic internalism, the variety of internalist and externalist positions, semantic externalism's implications for the epistemology of reasoning and reflection, and the possibility of arguments from the theory of mental content to the theory of epistemic justification. (shrink)

In this paper, I credit Quine with having implicitly held a view I had long urged on him: externalism. Quine was the first fully to recognize that all there is to meaning is what we learn or absorb from observed usage. This entails the possibility of indeterminacy, thus destroying the myth of meanings. It also entails a powerful form of externalism. There is, of course, a counter-current in Quine's work of the mid century: the idea of stimulus (...) meaning. Attractive as this choice of empirical base is compared to such options as sense data, appearances, and percepts, it has serious difficulties. In general, an externalism which ties the contents of observation sentences and perceptual beliefs directly to the sorts of situations that usually make them true is superior to those forms of empiricism which introduce intermediaries between word and object. (shrink)

Most current theories of meaning and mental content accept externalism. One of its forceful exponents is Ruth Garrett Millikan. She argues that externalism leads to the abandonment of "the last myth of the given", that is, of the idea that identity of meaning and mental content is somehow unproblematically given to us, and that we can easily recognize the sameness of meaning and mental content. If one refuses such a "mythical" giveness or meaning rationalism, (...) one has to admit that there is no logical possibility known a priori . The paper tries to show that even if one abandons meaning rationalism one can still hold that there are logical possibilities known a priori . The claim is defended by arguing that a priori knowledge is not completely independent from experience and does not demand the absolute transparency of meaning from the first-person point of view. A priori knowledge requires only a priori justification, that is, such a justification that is based merely on relations between meanings or contents. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam (1981) proposed an interesting and much discussed attempt to refute a skeptical argument that is based on one form of the brain-in-a-vat scenario. In turn, Putnam’s attempted refutation is based on content externalism (also known as semantic externalism). On this view, the referents and meanings of various types of singular and general terms, as well as the propositions expressed by sentences containing such terms, are determined by aspects of the speaker’s external environment. In this entry, we (...) will consider the basic features of and problems with Putnam’s original argument, and we will also present and discuss several of the most important attempts to reconstruct or improve upon that argument. (shrink)

There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertation I argue that one can underwrite such (...) externalist theories within a methodologically individualistic framework by understanding semantic norms in terms of the need to reach, for each of one's terms, a type of "equilibrium." Each speaker's commitment to making her _own_ beliefs and applications consistent allows one to incorporate these 'external' factors into the contents of their thoughts and utterances in a way that remains methodologically individualistic. Methodologically individualistic accounts are typically taken to be unable to incorporate 'external' factors such as the world's physical make-up or communal usage because of arguments suggesting that the individual's own beliefs and usage underdetermine or even misidentify what, according to externalist accounts, they mean by their terms. These arguments, however, only seem plausible if one presupposes a comparatively impoverished conception of the individual's beliefs. The beliefs a speaker associates with a given term extend far beyond the handful of sentences they would produce if asked to list such beliefs. In particular, speakers have an implicit, but rich, understanding of their language, their world, and the relation between them. Speakers typically understand languages as shared temporally extended practices about which they can be, both individually and collectively, mistaken. Once this conception of language is taken into account, the ascriptions which purportedly forced 'non-individualistic' conceptions of content upon us (particularly ascriptions which seemed to tie what we meant to social use rather than our own beliefs) turn out to be ultimately grounded in the individual's own beliefs. Indeed, our self-conception does much more than merely underwrite 'non-individualistic' ascriptions.. (shrink)

The method of Conceptual Analysis makes use of natural language speaker intuitions about the meanings of expressions, and relies on an externalist assumption about meanings—namely, that they can be given in terms of referential relations and truth. This article argues that this widely used methodology in metaphysics is troubled, because the assumed externalist hypothesis about natural language meanings is beset with trenchant obstacles in explaining linguistic phenomena. It argues that the use of Conceptual Analysis in metaphysical investigation inherits the difficulties (...) for the externalist hypothesis generally assumed by metaphysical inquiry. It explores two cases of such investigation that serve to exemplify the breadth of topics susceptible to troubles with the externalist hypothesis regarding natural language meanings: the extended mind hypothesis and the metaphysics of causation. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Husserl—Heidegger relationship is systematically misunderstood when framed in terms of a distinction between internalism and externalism. Both philosophers, it is argued, employ the phenomenological reduction to immanence as a fundamental methodological instrument. After first outlining the assumptions regarding inner and outer and the individual and the social from which recent epistemological interpretations of phenomenology begin, I turn to the question of Husserl's internalism. I argue that Husserl can only be understood as an internalist on (...) the assumption that immanence equates with internal. This, however, is not the case as can be seen once the reduction is understood not as setting aside the existence of the world, but rather a reflection on its meaning. Turning to Heidegger, I argue that his commitment to a form of the phenomenological reduction precludes him from being either a semantic or a social externalist. The place of authenticity and the first person perspective in his work derive from his phenomenological commitments, which can be seen in his accounts of discourse and language and of falling (Verfallen). I then go on to briefly outline a more plausible basis for understanding the difference between Husserl's and Heidegger's phenomenologies in terms of their respective emphases on logic and on poetics. (shrink)

Externalism about some mental property, M, is the thesis that whether a person (or other physical being) has M depends, not only on conditions inside the person.

This article-based dissertation studies the question whether Husserl could be understood as an internalist or an externalist about meaning or content. In this context, internalism and externalism represent different answers to the question whether things external to the subject, namely features of the subject’s social and physical environment, may individuate the content of the subject’s intentional states (e.g., judgments, beliefs, perceptions). Where internalism maintains that content can only be individuated by internal factors, externalism claims that content can (...) also be individuated by external factors. Husserl has traditionally been interpreted as an internalist, but in the past few decades this interpretation has been challenged. Yet, scholars continue to disagree whether Husserl is then better understood as an externalist or as a philosopher who cannot be positioned within the internalism-externalism debate in the first place. The main results of this dissertation are that the internalism-externalism framework remains meaningful within the transcendental framework of Husserl’s philosophy and that Husserl is better understood as an externalist. These results emerge from three original research articles, which are presented and discussed in an introductory chapter. -/- The first article analyses the argument that Husserl cannot be understood within the internalism-externalism framework because Husserl renounces a distinction between internality and externality. The article demonstrates that Husserl rejects the internal-external divide only in the spatial sense in which it is usually understood and suggests that if the internal-external divide is understood in relation to the subject’s point of view, the internal-external divide can be rendered applicable to the transcendental framework of Husserl’s philosophy. The second article evaluates the interpretational dispute about Husserl’s concept of the noema in relation to the internalism-externalism debate. The article proposes a reconciliation between two opposing interpretations of the noema by claiming that both interpretations can be correct in two separate areas of phenomenological investigation. Reconciling these two noema interpretations, the article then shows that these interpretations do not, unlike it has been previously presumed, have any direct implications for the question whether Husserl is an internalist or an externalist. The answer to this question rather hinges on what the correct way is to understand the individuation of meaning, which is not settled by either noema interpretation. The third article outlines an answer to this question. The article studies a research manuscript in which Husserl deals with the question about the identity of meaning which is associated with the philosophical problem in the internalism-externalism debate about the individuation of meaning. The article assesses different internalist interpretations of Husserl’s manuscript and proposes an externalist reading of it instead. The article develops an externalist interpretation of Husserl that reconciles the realism of externalism and the transcendental standpoint of Husserl’s phenomenology by synthesizing an asymmetrical view of individuation with Husserl’s view of the correlation between consciousness and the world. (shrink)

우리의 믿음, 욕구, 의도 등은 주관적인 성격을 갖는다. 예컨대, 우리는 존재하지 않는 대상에 대하여도 주관적으로 믿고, 생각하고, 욕구하고, 의도할 수 있다. 그리고 이와 같은 현상은 이러한 심적 태도의 내용이 외적 세계와 독립적으로, 즉 순수히 개인 내적으로 결정된다는 내재론적 직관을 이해할 수 있게 하여준다. 심성 내용이 내재적으로 결정된다는 전통적 견해는 그러나 버지(T. Burge)에 의해 촉발된 소위 심성 내용 외재론 논의에 의해 오늘날 심각하게 도전을 받고 있다. 버지는 퍼트남(H. Putnam)이 제시한 의미 외재론 논증을 응용하여, 의미뿐 아니라 심성 내용 역시 필연적으로 외적 세계의 (...) 인과적, 사회적 관계에 의존한다고 주장한다. 본 논문은 이 주장을 비판적으로 검토한다. 구체적으로, 이러한 주장을 위해 버지가 제시한 형태의 외재론 논증을 비판적으로 분석하고 그것이 충분한 설득력을 가지지 않음을 보이고자 한다. 이를 위해 본 논문은 우선, 심성 내용 외재론 논증이 전형적으로 어떤 형태를 취하는지 구체적으로 살펴보고, 이를 통해 심성 내용 외재론이 궁극적으로 의미론적 근거에 토대하고 있다는 것을 보일 것이다. 다음으로, 심성 내용에 대한 언어적 기술이 심성 내용을 결정하고 이해하는 데 있어 반드시 필요한지 또는 충분한 조건을 이루는지 구체적으로 검토한다. 이 검토를 통해 결국 언어적 기술은 심성 내용을 결정하고 이해하기 위해 필요하지도 충분하지도 않음이 드러날 것이다. 그리고 이러한 점은 결론적으로 심성 내용 외재론이 제시하고 있는 의미론적 근거는 이 이론이 주장하는 외재론적 견해를 뒷받침할 적절한 근거가 되지 않는다는 점을 드러내 보여줄 것이다. (shrink)

In this paper I address the question whether self-knowledge is compatible with an externalist individuation of mental content. Against some approaches, I consider self-knowledge as a genuine cognitive achievement. Though it is neither incorrigible nor infallible, self-knowledge is direct, a priori (no based on empirical investigation), presumptively true and authoritative. The problem is whether self-knowledge, so understood, is compatible with externalism. My answer will be affirmative. I will defend this species of compatibilism against several objections, in particular those based (...) on the possibility of an individual’s being unwittingly switched between worlds. (shrink)

My aim is to show that the externalist theses, "meanings are not in the head" and "thoughts are not in the head", do not necessarily imply the more extreme thesis that "the mind is not in the head". I consider this question in terms of the social externalism approach of Tyler Burge and Lynne Baker, arguing that the importance these thinkers attribute to language in questions relative to the mind does not mean either the reduction of the mind to (...) language or the elimination of the mind. My conclusion is that social externalism is not an efficient strategy for dealing with problems of the nature of the mind or the relationship between mind and body.Meu objetivo é mostrar que as teses externalistas "os significados não estão na cabeça" e "os pensamentos não estão na cabeça" não implicam, necessariamente, a tese mais radical "a mente não está na cabeça". Trato dessa questão no âmbito do Externalismo Social de Tyler Burge e Lynne Baker, argumentando que a importância que esses pensadores atribuem à linguagem nas questões relativas à mente não significa, como uma leitura apressada poderia sugerir, a redução da mente à linguagem e, muito menos, a eliminação da mente. A minha conclusão é que o externalismo social linguístico não se constitui como uma estratégia eficaz de enfrentamento dos problemas da natureza da mente e de sua relação com o corpo. (shrink)

Our ascriptions of content to utterances in the past attribute to them a level of determinacy that extends beyond what could supervene upon the usage up to the time of those utterances. If one accepts the truth of such ascriptions, one can either (1) argue that subsequent use must be added to the supervenience base that determines the meaning of a term at a time, or (2) argue that such cases show that meaning does not supervene upon use (...) at all. The following will argue against authors such as Lance, Hawthorn and Ebbs that first of these options is the more promising of the two. However, maintaining the supervenience thesis ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as 'normative' in two important ways. The first (more familiar) way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between correct usage and actual usage. This first type of normativity is accepted by defenders of many more temporally restricted versions of the supervenience thesis, but the second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the supervenience base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can understand other commitments we are often taken to have about meaning, particularly the commitment to meaning being 'determinate', as practical commitments that structure our linguistic practices rather than theoretical commitment that merely describe such practices. (shrink)

In this lecture I describe the path by which I was led to the “semantic externalism” for which I was honoured with the Rolf Schock Prize. Although my interest in linguistics goes back as far as my undergraduate days, it was conversations with Jerrold Katz and Jerry Fodor at MIT (where all three of us taught at the time) in the 1960s that first led to an effort by all three of us to develop semantic theories. My own direction (...) was a false one, by my present lights; at that time all three of us defended the “internalist” view that the meaning of a word is fixed by a “battery of semantical rules” implicitly known by each speaker. I describe how I was led to the realization that this could not be right, and finally to the views I defended in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning' ”. (shrink)

This book carries forward the discourse on the mind’s engagement with the world. It reviews the semantic and metaphysical debates around internalism and externalism, the location of content, and the indeterminacy of meaning in language. The volume analyses the writings of Jackson, Chomsky, Putnam, Quine, Bilgrami and others, to reconcile opposing theories of language and the mind. It ventures into Cartesian ontology and Fregean semantics to understand how mental content becomes world-oriented in our linguistic communication. Further, the author (...) explores the liaison between the mind and the world from the phenomenological perspective, particularly, Husserl’s linguistic turn and Heidegger’s intersubjective entreaty for Dasein. The book conceives thought as a biological and socio-linguistic product which engages with the mind-world question through the conceptual and causal apparatuses of language. A major intervention in the field of philosophy of language, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers interested in philosophy, phenomenology, epistemology, and metaphysics . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Externalist Psychiatry, Mindshaping, and Embodied InjusticeMichelle Maiese, PhD (bio)Ongaro maintains that although enactivist approaches to psychiatry help to account for the integration of biological, psychological, and social factors, they gloss over an important distinction between patient-centered (bio and psycho) approaches and externalist (social) approaches to mental illness. The central problem is that they lack the means to account for the social causes of illness and do not specify how (...) social determinants can be addressed in the clinic. Since much of an organism’s interaction with the external world is social in kind, the implementation of externalist psychiatry could make the enactivist model truly biopsychosocial and usher in novel forms of treatment.According to Ongaro, this externalist orientation gives rise to an important question about ontology: what are the social causes of psychiatric illness made of, and how can these be conveyed in the clinic to facilitate treatment? A “shared social etiology” would allow for a “rich explanatory framework” that accounts for the social causes of mental disorder. For example, by pointing to spirit affliction as the social cause of mental illness, the Akha transform amorphous pains (which are difficult to capture naturalistically) into meaningful and familiar experiences. Such an approach involves combining a realist understanding of biopsychosocial integration with an anti-realist, social constructivist outlook on social etiology. For them, an illness that is explained as a rupture of a human-spirit relationship is experienced as a ‘problem in living’ that affects the person in an immediate and meaningful way, and can be treated via ritual action.Ongaro then considers social causation in a more familiar context, one where social determinants of mental illness include factors such as employment. Losing one’s job is a significant life event because it signals a change in social status and prompts feelings of uselessness. Ongaro characterizes these feelings of low subjective status as “socially constructed experiences that depend on collectively ingrained ideas about status, value, and self-realization that a person accepts—one could say ‘believes in’—by virtue of living in a particular society.” Because social worlds differ and what counts as social defeat is culturally specific, [End Page 333] social determinants of illness such as unemployment are either negligible or non-applicable in Ahka (non-capitalist) society.To acknowledge the impact of these social constructions, Ongaro maintains, clinical psychiatry should abandon its commitment to naturalism and embrace methodological constructivism instead. Methodological naturalism treats social causes as ‘real’ and holds that the social causes of disorder should be investigated using the scientific method; research focuses on social determinants, social stressors, and social capital. However, despite acknowledging that declining mental health correlates significantly with political and economic factors, Ongaro maintains that methodological naturalism when it comes to social causes will be insufficient to bring about meaningful changes in clinical practice. For one thing, individual psychiatrists lack the political power and economic resources to bring about the sorts of societal changes that are needed to address social determinants of health. Second, social determinants are probabilistic factors rather than definitive causes of mental disorder; psychiatric illnesses often do not have a well-defined cause or a clear-cut social trigger. Third, an explanation that points to ‘lack of social capital’ does “not possess the immediacy, emotional charge, and embodied meaning that could make them therapeutically effective in the same way that Akha explanations for spirit afflictions are.”Philosophically, Ongaro’s embrace of ‘methodological constructivism’ when it comes to social etiology entails a commitment to antirealism about social causation and fictionalism more specifically. Wilkinson (2022) notes that the core tenet of psychiatric fictionalism is that “when we engage in psychiatric discourse... we are not attributing a robust, objective property, but are instead engaging with a useful, perhaps even an indispensable, fiction” (p. 91). For Ongaro, this fiction consists in a meaningful explanatory narrative about the social causes of illness. However, if we take the notion of integration seriously, and characterize this integration naturalistically (as Ongaro does), then questions arise as to how these fictional narratives about social causes can impact people both biologically and psychologically, and thereby have such a powerful impact.I argue that an enactivist approach to treatment will be... (shrink)