The Epistemological Bases of the Slow Switching Argument

One of the main arguments intended to show that content externalism undermines the privileged access thesis is the ‘slow switching argument’, originally proposed by Boghossian (1989). In this argument, it is supposed that a subject is unknowingly switched back and forth between Earth and Twin Earth: then it is claimed that, given externalism, when the subject is on Earth thinking that water is wet, he cannot know the content of his thought a priori, for he cannot, by mere reflection, rule out the relevant alternative hypothesis that he is on Twin Earth thinking that twater is wet. One of the controversies surrounding this argument stems from the fact that it is not clear which epistemological principle underlies it. Here, I examine two suggestions made in the literature as to what that underlying principle might be. I argue that neither of these suggested principles is plausible, and thus that the slow switching argument never gets off the ground.     

Entitlement to Self‐Knowledge and Brute Error

Abstract

I discuss Burge’s argument that our entitlement to self‐knowledge consists in the constitutive relation between the second‐order review of thoughts and the thoughts reviewed, and defend it against Peacocke’s criticism. I then argue that though our entitlement to self‐knowledge is neutral to different environments, as Burge claims, the consideration of Burge’s own notion of brute error shows that Burge’s effort to reconcile externalism and self‐knowledge is not successful.     

Davidson on first‐person authority and externalism

Incompatibilism is the view that privileged knowledge of our own mental states cannot be reconciled with externalism regarding the content of mental states. Davidson has recently developed two arguments that are supposed to disprove incompatibilism and establish the consistency of privileged access and externalism. One argument criticizes incompatibilism for assuming that externalism conflicts with the mind‐body identity theory. Since mental states supervene on neurological events, Davidson argues, they are partly ‘in the head’ and are knowable just by reflection. Another argument rejects incompatibilism by repudiating the object perception model of introspection. Once extemalism is freed from the internalist idea that thoughts take objects which are inner epistemological intermediaries, Davidson maintains, it poses no threat to privileged self‐knowledge. It is argued that neither of these arguments is successful, since both disprove assumptions irrelevant to incompatibilism. Moreover, it is indicated how Davidson would have to go about defending his positive account of privileged self‐knowledge against the principal incompatibilist arguments.     

Content Externalism and the Internalism/Externalism Debate in Justification Theory

While recent debates over content externalism have been mainly concerned with whether it undermines the traditional thesis of privileged self-knowledge, little attention has been paid to what bearing content externalism has on such important controversies as the internalism/externalism debate in epistemology. With a few exceptions, the question has either been treated as a side issue in discussions concerning the implications of content externalism, or has been dealt with in a cursory way in debates over the internalism/externalism distinction in justification theory. In this paper, I begin by considering some of the arguments that have sought to address the question, focusing mainly on Boghossian's pioneering attempt in bringing the issue to the fore.¹ It will be argued that Boghossian's attempt to exploit the alleged non-inferentiality of self-knowledge to show that content externalism and justification internalism are incompatible fails.
In the course of this examination, I consider and reject as inadequate some recent responses to Boghossian's argument (due to James Chase²). I then turn to evaluating Chase's own proposed argument to show how content externalism can be brought to bear on the internalism/externalism debate in epistemology, and find it wanting. Finally, having discussed BonJour's terse remarks in this connection,³ I set out to present, what I take to be, the strongest argument for the incompatibility of content externalism and justification internalism while highlighting the controversial character of one of its main premises. Let us, however, begin by drawing the contours of the debate.     

Wittgensteinian content‐externalism

Content‐externalism is the view that a subject's relations to a context can play a role in individuating the content of her mental states. According to social content‐externalists, relations to a socio‐linguistic context can play a fundamental individuating role. Åsa Wikforss has suggested that “social externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of their own concepts”. In this paper, I show that this isn't so. I develop and defend an argument for social content‐externalism which does not depend on this assumption. The argument is animated by strands of thought in the later work of Wittgenstein. In addition to demonstrating that social externalists are not necessarily committed to thinking that a subject can have thoughts involving concepts which she incompletely understands, this argument is important insofar as it (a) supports a form of content‐externalism with extended scope, (b) avoids the controversy surrounding the claim that subjects can think with concepts which they incompletely understand, and (c) situates Wittgenstein's later work with respect to contemporary debates about content‐externalism.     

SEMANTIC EXTERNALISM AND A PRIORI SELF‐KNOWLEDGE

The argument known as the ‘McKinsey Recipe’ tries to establish the incompatibility of semantic externalism (about natural kind concepts in particular) and a priori self‐knowledge about thoughts and concepts by deriving from the conjunction of these theses an absurd conclusion, such as that we could know a priori that water exists. One reply to this argument is to distinguish two different readings of ‘natural kind concept’: (i) a concept which in fact denotes a natural kind, and (ii) a concept which aims to denote a natural kind. Paul Boghossian has argued, using a Dry Earth scenario, that this response fails, claiming that the externalist cannot make sense of a concept aiming, but failing, to denote a natural kind. In this paper I argue that Boghossian’s argument is flawed. Borrowing machinery from two‐dimensional semantics, using the notion of ‘considering a possible world as actual’, I claim that we can give a determinate answer to Boghossian’s question: which concept would ‘water’ express on Dry Earth?¹     

PREFERENTISM AND SELF‐SACRIFICE

According to the argument from self‐sacrifice, standard, unrestricted desire‐based theories of welfare fail because they have the absurd implication that self‐sacrifice is conceptually impossible. I attempt to show that, in fact, the simplest imaginable, completely unrestricted desire‐based theory of well‐being is perfectly compatible with the phenomenon of self‐sacrifice – so long as the theory takes the right form. I go on to consider a new argument from self‐sacrifice against this simple theory, which, I argue, also fails. I conclude that, contrary to popular opinion, considerations of self‐sacrifice do not pose a problem for preferentist theories of welfare.     

Policy Externalism

I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non‐doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best explanation of some strange ways we use certain conditionals. The main thought throughout is that attitudes we reason with, like belief, are very different from attitudes we don't reason with, in a way that constrains the former but not the latter. Finally, I investigate some consequences of policy externalism, including that it secures the possibility of genuine conditional apologies.     

Self‐Knowledge Failures and First Person Authority1

Davidson and Burge have claimed that the conditions under which self‐knowledge is possessed are such that externalism poses no obstacle to their being met by ordinary speakers and thinkers. On their accounts, no such person could fail to possess self‐knowledge. But we do from time to time attribute to each other such failures; so we should prefer to their accounts an account that preserves first person authority while allowing us to make sense of what appear to be true attributions of such failures. While the core idea behind Davidson's and Burge's accounts appears ioadequate to this task, I argue that it can be deployed in such a way as to deliver the desired result. What makes this possible is that two attitude‐types can differ as follows: the self‐knowledge required for an utterance to be a Oing that p is different from the self‐knowledge required for it to be a Ψfing that p.     

Externalism and Token‐Identity

This study has two goals. The first is to identify three desiderata required for a successful defense of a version of nonreductive physicalism: semantic externalism, token‐identity between mental and physical events, and nonrelational type‐individuation of physical states. In this context, the paper also presents a refutation of recent challenges to content‐externalism by those who attempt to resuscitate internalism by focusing on narrow content associated with the fundamental phenomenology, rather than the intentionality, of mental states. The second goal is to defend the token‐identity thesis from Tyler Burge's argument to the effect that token‐identity is incompatible with semantic externalism. An account is also offered as to why Burge's argument, albeit fallacious, might seem persuasive under a certain interpretation of possible worlds.     

AQUINAS'S ARGUMENT AGAINST SELF-HATRED

Aquinas's argument against the possibility of genuine self‐hatred runs counter to modern intuitions about self‐hatred as an explanatorily central notion in psychology, and as an effect of alienation. Aquinas's argument does not deny that persons experience hatred for themselves. It can be read either as the claim that the self‐hater mistakes what she feels toward herself as hatred, or that, though she hates what she believes is her “self,” she actually hates only traits of herself. I argue that the argument fails on both readings. The first reading entails that all passions are really self‐love, and so is incompatible with Aquinas's own “cognitivist” view of what it is that distinguishes specific passions in experience. The second reading entails that persons have no phenomenal access to “self,” rendering self‐reference—how it is that the self can be an intentional object of conscious mental states—a mystery. Augustine's claim, which Aquinas accepts on authority, that all sin originates in inordinate self‐love seems to entail the impossibility of genuine self‐hatred because both thinkers fail to distinguish between two distinct forms of self‐love: amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae.     

The Discrimination Argument Revisited

The first explicit argument for the incompatibility of externalism in the philosophy of mind and a priori self-knowledge is Boghossian’s discrimination argument. In this essay, I oppose the third premise of this argument, trying to show by means of a thought experiment that possessing the “twater thought” is not an alternative, a fortiori not a relevant alternative, to having the “water thought.” I then examine a modified version of Boghossian’s argument. The attempt is made to substantiate the claim that the standard incompatibilist support for its second premise is untenable. Furthermore, a third Boghossian-style argument is rejected on the ground that either its second premise cannot be warranted in the way suggested by incompatibilists or its third premise is mistaken because having the “twater thought” instead of the “water thought” is not relevant. Finally, it is argued that the discrimination argument cannot be saved by invoking closure. The upshot of my discussion is that a compatibilist can dismiss Boghossian-style arguments for incompatibilism without having to deal with fundamental issues concerning self-knowledge and the nature of slow switching.     

Conceptual Errors and Social Externalism

Åsa Maria Wikforss has proposed a response to Burge's thought experiments in favour of social externalism, one which allows the individualist to maintain that narrow content is truth–conditional without being idiosyncratic. The narrow aim of this paper is to show that Wikforss' argument against social externalism fails, and hence that the individualist position she endorses is inadequate. The more general aim is to attain clarity on the social externalist thesis. Social externalism need not rest, as is typically thought, on the possibility of incomplete linguistic understanding or conceptual error. I identify the unifying principle that underlies the various externalist thought–experiments.     

McKinsey Paradoxes,Radical Scepticism,and the Transmission of Knowledge across Known Entailments

A great deal of discussion in the recent literature has been devoted to the so-called `McKinsey' paradox which purports to show that semantic externalism is incompatible with the sort of authoritative knowledge that we take ourselves to have of our own thought contents. In this paper I examine one influential epistemological response to this paradox which is due to Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. I argue that it fails to meet the challenge posed by McKinsey but that, if it is set within an externalist epistemology, it may have application to a related paradox that concerns the problem of radical scepticism.     

Justification and the Social Nature of Knowledge

In this paper I shall closely examine some of Gilbert Harman's cases that purport to show that one can have a justified true belief that does not constitute knowledge because of the social environment. I shall provide an account of these cases that helps us not only understand why the people in these situations lack knowledge, but also why philosophers have a difficult time evaluating these cases. More specifically, I shall argue that in these cases we should conclude that the cognizers lack justification. I shall also show how this account sheds some light on certain aspects of the internal-ism/externalism debate.     

The Solution to the Consequence Problem According to Anti‐Individualism

Abstract: For quite some time now there has been an ongoing debate whether authoritative self‐knowledge is compatible with anti‐individualism. 1 One influential line of argument against compatibilism is due to Paul Boghossian (1998) . I argue that Boghossian misconstrues what the anti‐individualist really is committed to. This defence of compatibilism is elaborated by showing how the Twin Earth thought experiment is meant to speak in favour of anti‐individualism. Partly this will show that Boghossian is wrong in his denial that empirical background knowledge is imported into the Twin Earth experiment. The main points argued are that Boghossian fails to realize, both, (1) that anti‐individualism does not involve concept‐individuation in terms of reference, and (2) that anti‐individualism assumes a core of representational success. In effect, these two points constitute an entirely new way to defend compatibilism, a way that seems to have gone unnoticed in the literature.     

Knowledge,society, power,and the promise of epistemological externalism

This paper has two aims. The first is to criticize epistemological externalism in a way different from most other criticisms. Most criticisms claim externalism fails because it does not adequately explicate ordinary notions of knowledge and justification. Such criticisms are often unhelpful to the externalist because he may not even intend his theory to be such an explication. The criticism presented here avoids this difficulty. The other aim, achieved en route to this criticism, is to explode a dogma of contemporary epistemology — that the primary end of epistemic endeavors is truth — and to bring to light the many other important goals there are for such endeavors in addition to truth. Several of these goals pertain to the power of knowledge in social contexts. The criticism ultimately made of externalism is that externalist knowledge is defective because it fails to achieve these extra-verific goals of epistemic endeavors.     

THE KNOWLEDGE ARGUMENT AND HIGHER-ORDER PROPERTIES

The paper argues that Jackson's knowledge argument fails to undermine physicalist ontology. First, it is argued that, as this argument stands, it begs the question. Second, it is suggested that, by supplementing the argument (and taking one of its premises for granted), this flaw can be remedied insofar as the argument is taken to be an argument against type‐physicalism; however, this flaw cannot be remedied insofar as the argument is taken to be an argument against token‐physicalism. The argument cannot be supplemented so as to show that experiences have properties which are illegitimate from a physicalist perspective.     

Externalism and Knowledge of the Attitudes

Usually, discussions about the compatibility of content externalism with self-knowledge focus on our knowledge of content. I look at externalist consequences for our knowledge of our own attitude-types. I show that there is a certain kind of mistake about the nature of one's own attitudes which would not be possible if externalism were false. While this does not cause trouble for externalism in general, it does cause trouble for some externalists' explanations of the compatibility of externalism with self-knowledge. I end with a picture of our knowledge of the attitudes that is compatible with externalism.