Social externalism and conceptual errors

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 51, Issue 203, 2001, Pages 217-231

  Wikforss, Åsa Maria ^a  

^a STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645124491     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0031-8094.2001.00225.x     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. See H. Putnam, 'The Meaning of "Meaning" ', repr. in his Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Cambridge UP, 1975), pp. 215-72
2. T. Burge, 'Individualism and the Mental', in P. French et al. (eds), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IV (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1979), pp. 73-121
3. See for instance J. Fodor, 'Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in the Cognitive Sciences', Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (1980), pp. 63-73
4. and C. McGinn, 'The Structure of Content', in A. Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 207-58
5. For a slightly different internalist response to Burge see M. McKinsey, 'Curing Folk Psychology of "Arthritis" ', Philosophical Studies, 70 (1992), pp. 323-36
6. See A. Bilgrami, Belief and Meaning: the Unity and Locality of Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
7. D. Davidson, 'Knowing One's Own Mind', Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 60 (1987), pp. 441-58
8. B. Loar, 'Social Content and Psychological Content', in H. Grimm and D. Merrill (eds), Contents of Thought (Univ. of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 99-110
9. and G. Segal, in A Slim Book about Narrow Content, forthcoming
10. I discuss physical externalism in my 'It Ain't Necessarily H2O', presented at the Karlovy Vary Symposium on the philosophy of Hilary Putnam, 1998
11. See S. Kimbrough, 'Anti-Individualism and Fregeanism', The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998), pp. 470-82, at pp. 478-9, for a related point
12. See Putnam, 'The Analytic and the Synthetic', repr. in his Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Cambridge UP, 1975), pp. 33-69
13. Burge, 'Intellectual Norms and the Foundations of Mind', Journal of Philosophy, 83 (1986), pp. 697-720, at p. 703
14. Burge, 'Concepts, Definitions, and Meaning', Metaphilosophy, 24 (1993), pp. 309-27, at p. 316. See also p. 314: 'scientific practice indicates that a definition that functions as the most basic explanation of a concept at one time can later be displaced'
15. 'Individualism and the Mental', p. 78
16. In his 'Other Bodies', in Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object, pp. 97-120, Burge even tries to derive the difference in extension of 'water' in the twin earth case from a difference in conventions: 'The fact that the twin earthians apply "water" to XYZ is not a reflection of a shift in extension of an indexical expression with a fixed linguistic (English) meaning, but of a shift in meaning between one language, and linguistic community, and another. Any expression, indexical or not, can undergo such "shifts", as a mere consequence of the conventionality of language' (p. 105)
17. See Putnam, 'The Meaning of "Meaning"'
18. and S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)
19. For some scepticism on this point see Bob Hale, 'Modality', in B. Hale and C. Wright (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 487-514
20. See Bilgrami's Belief and Meaning for a detailed discussion of externalism and the rationality problem. Bilgrami suggests that Burge has no satisfactory solution to this problem, and that therefore externalism of Burge's sort must be rejected