Externalism and knowledge of content

Philosophical Review

Volumn 105, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 287-310

  Gibbons, John ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 77950006579     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: 15581470     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2185702     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. 'Here and in what follows, 'thought' refers to token mental events with prepositional content-for example, particular beliefs and desires. I take it that 'the content of a thought' refers to a proposition or a type of thought, though nothing in what follows turns on a particular ontology of contents.
2. See Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," in Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215-71
3. and Tyler Burge, "Individualism and the Mental," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol.4, ed. French et al., (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1977), 73-121.
4. For the distinction and reasons for thinking the difference is causal, see Donald Davidson, "Actions, Reasons, and Causes," in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1980), 3-19.
5. By 'second-order belief I mean a belief about any first-order prepositional attitude.
6. A detailed argument connecting consciousness with higher-order thoughts using the notion of reportability appears in David Rosenthal's "Thinking That One Thinks," in Consciousness: Psychological and Philosophical Essays, ed. Martin Davies and Glyn W. Humphreys (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 197-223.
7. Also see his "Two Concepts of Consciousness," Philosophical Studies 49 (1986): 329-359 In the more recent paper, Rosenthal explicitly rejects the requirement that first- and second-order thoughts be causally related (205 n. 16).
8. Second-order beliefs, even false second-order beliefs, can come about through some other process-for example, through applying a psychological theory to oneself. But I am not concerned with showing that content externalism is consistent with infallibility with respect to one's own mental states, since we are not infallible. I want to see how we know when we do and whether content externalism is inconsistent with our knowing in this way.
9. 'See, for example, Tyler Burge, "Individualism and Self-Knowledge," Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 654-55;
10. John Heil, "Privileged Access," Mind 42 (1988): 238-51;
11. and Kevin Falvey and Joseph Owens, "Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Skepticism," Philosophical Review 103 (1994): 107-137 I discuss the difference between this causal account and Burge's account of self-knowledge in "Externalism and Knowledge of the Attitudes."
12. Paul Boghossian, "Content and Self-Knowledge," Philosophical Topics 17 (1989): 5-26.
13. Here is how Boghossian concludes the slow argument: S has to be able to exclude the possibility that his thought involved the concept arthritis rather than the concept tharthritis, before he can be said to know what his thought is. But this means he has to reason his way to a conclusion about his thought" (14; his emphasis).
14. Both of these cases are modeled on similar cases in Alvin Goldman's "Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge," Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 771-791 Goldman discusses the cases in terms of counterfactuals about what you would believe under certain circumstances, not in terms of reasoning.
15. Falvey and Owens present a similar objection to Boghossian's argument. We agree that the truth values of the counterfactuals are what is most important and that these truth values come out the way the externalist wants them to. With my account of self-knowledge, I think I can give an explanation of why the relevant counterfactual is true. And I can reply to a question they raise but do not discuss. "How can it be that the subject is always right about the contents of her beliefs, despite the fact that the introspectible evidence in her possession underdetermines their contents?" (Falvey and Owens, 118). If you think of the evidence for p on the model of premises in an argument for p, then on my account, evidence in this sense is not necessary for self-knowledge. For one thing, you must believe all of the premises in an argument in order for them to justify the conclusion. But self-knowledge is not like this. A hope, fear, or doubt can cause, determine the content of, and justify a relevant second-order belief.
16. For the second possibility, see Carl Ginet, "Knowing Less by Knowing More," in Midwest Studies in Phifosophy, vol.5, ed. French et al. (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1980), 151-161
17. Gareth Evans, "The Causal Theory of Names," Aristotelian Society, supp. vol.47 (1975): 187-208.
18. Igal Kvart, "Divided Reference," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol.14, ed. French et al. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 140-179
19. Many thoughts in these conflation cases will not be determinately about one candidate or the other. For example, you may believe that your cousin Vinnie is a lawyer and base this belief on some evidence that is determinately about one cousin and some which is about the other. Hartry Field has developed a semantics for refcrentially indeterminate expressions that extends quite naturally to this sort of case. See "Theory Change and the Indeterminacy of Reference," Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 462-81
20. and "Quine and the Correspondence Theory," Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 200-228
21. "Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions," in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Davidson and Harman (Dordrecht D. Reidel, 1972), 356-379
22. "In order to move from this discussion of reference back to the level of sense, or content, where we began, all we need is the Fregean view that sense determines reference: if x and y have the same sense or content, then they have the same reference or extension with respect to the same possible world and time. It follows easily enough from this that if two of your "Vinnie"-thoughts have different referents or extensions (with respect to the same world and time), they have different contents, despite the fact that the members of each pair are intrinsically indistinguishable.
23. I assume that there is nothing peculiar or even particularly Freudian about the notion of a nonconscious inferential process. According to most cognitive scientists, your visual ability to detect edges depends on such a process.
24. Falvey and Owens also distinguish the claim that we have introspective knowledge of content from the claim that we have introspective knowledge of sameness and difference of content. They argue that the latter claim is implausible independently of externalism.
25. I owe this example to an anonymous reader for the Philosophical Review.
26. Of course, any two beliefs can inferentially interact. Your belief that there are brick houses on Elm Street might lead you to believe that Jones is a liar. But if this is a case of inference rather than association, you need mediating beliefs. For example, you might believe that Jones said that there are no brick houses on Elm Street and that Jones would not be mistaken about diis. But the addition of mediating beliefs must come to an end somewhere on pain of a regress. Where it comes to an end, you have direct inferential interaction.
27. If you believe that your concept of Cicero is distinct from your concept of Tully when you do not know that Cicero is Tully, then we have another case where gaining information involves losing a concept. If, after being informed of the identity, you express one concept with both terms, then the new concept cannot be identical to both of the old ones. But we can easily devise cases where there are no grounds for choosing among the two. So the new concept must be distinct from both.
28. I would like to thank Paul Boghossian, Jaegwon Kim, Roy Sorensen, Ernie Sosa, Ed Stein, Peter Unger, Ed Witherspoon, and two anonymous readers for the Philosophical Review tor comments on earlier versions of this paper.