SH11 Externalism and Reference
Until the 1970s, it was accepted that your thoughts are in your head—or, more precisely, that what you are thinking is entirely a matter of what intrinsic properties you or your brain is in. On the neural version of this view, your thoughts are determined by your brain states: any brain in the states yours is now in would be thinking the thoughts you are now thinking, even if the world beyond that brain were very different from the world beyond yours, indeed even if there were no world beyond it, and the brain were floating in an otherwise empty universe. This idea is one route to the sceptical worry that there could be a complete mismatch between thought and the world. Recently, however, many philosophers have begun to resist this “internalist” view, arguing that our thoughts are not merely caused by the world out there, but essentially depend on it. This course exams the debate between internalists and externalists, and its fascinating ramifications: for what it is to be a thinking subject, for the nature of action, and for our knowledge of the world and our own minds.
Course lecturer: Dr David Bain
Semester: 2
Lecture hour & venue: see Honours timetable
Teaching resources for this course will be made available on the Philosophy Moodle site.
Suggested reading:
The following three books are not required but are likely to be useful:
- Gregory McCulloch’s The Mind and Its World
- Gabriel Segal’s A Slim Book About Narrow Content
- Jesper Kallestrup’s Semantic Externalism
McCulloch is an externalist, Segal an internalist.
Further course information
“Cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!” So exclaimed Hilary Putnam in 1975. In recent years it has seemed to a number of philosophers that if meanings ain’t in the head (and they ain’t, many now think), then nor are a lot of other things: for example, such mental states as beliefs, desires, and even perceptual experiences. That externalist idea is the focus of this course.
Internalism
What would it mean to say mental states are in the head? It would not be to say that our environments (the world beyond our skin) has no causal effect on our mental states. Internalists don’t say that. They don’t deny that my belief that that is a glass of water (pointing to this very glass in front of me) is an effect of that very glass (as if, had there instead been a rabbit there, I would still have believed there that was a glass of water). What they do say is that there is no stronger, non-causal, constitutive sense in which our mental states depend on our environments. Again, they say that my believing that that is a glass of water does not entail anything about my environment, that I could have had that belief even had that glass not existed, even had glasses not existed, even had water not existed, indeed (some will say) even had the entire physical universe never existed.
Again, although a great deal of your perceptual experiences and beliefs are, surely, caused by items in your environment—by the things you perceive, think about, and engage with in action—the traditional idea is that those experiences and beliefs and other mental states could have arisen in you even if you had never perceived the world, but instead been a brain in a vat, or even if the physical world had never existed, and you had instead been an unembodied, unlocated soul. That is what fuelled Descartes’s sceptical worries. For if all your mental states could have arisen in the absence of an external, physical world, then how, he wondered, can you know that they didn’t? If everything could have seemed to you just the same—i.e. been just the same, mentally—even if the physical world had not existed, or been very different, then how can you know there is one, or that it is the way it is?
Externalism
Over the past 30 years or so “externalists” have argued against internalism. They think that, regarding some mental states, things in our environment don’t merely cause them, they partially constitute them. Or, at least, they think that there are mental states we could not have had, had our environments been different in certain ways.
One claim, for example, inspired by Putnam’s philosophy of language, is that, if they always lived in a waterless environment (“Twin Earth”), even yoru and my atom-for-atom twins could not believe or even think that water is wet, or anything else about water. Others, such as Gareth Evans and John McDowell, argue that, had I not been seeing this very glass a moment ago—but instead been seeing a distinct, albeit identical, glass—I could not have been having the thought I was, the one I expressed using the sentence “This is a glass of water”, even if had I been atom-for-atom identical to the way I in fact was. Tyler Burge alleges another constitutive dependence: the dependence of our mental states on the linguistic conventions governing the terms of the languages in which we express them. So even my atom-for-atom twin and I could be having different thoughts just by virtue of our being members of linguistic communities with slightly different conventions governing the correct use of the words we both use.
So What?
Why’s externalism interesting? For one thing, it threatens to dislodge the internalist conception of the mind that has been dominant for centuries, a conception that is common to all the standard accounts of mind: Cartesian dualism, the identity theory, and standard versions of functionalism and behaviourism. Because of that it promises new ways of thinking about the mind, and new approaches to fundamental problems about the relationship between mind and world. How, for example, is it possible for us to know about the world? How, indeed, is it possible for us to so much as think about the world? Externalism also faces interesting problems of its own, such as whether it can accommodate the claim that our beliefs and desires causally explain our actions, or that a subject can know her own thoughts merely by introspecting, or that she cannot know a priori that water has one chemical composition rather than another. So externalism bears directly on some central questions in the philosophy of mind and epistemology.
It is also closely related to crucial themes in the philosophy of language. Indeed, externalists were originally led to their theses about the mental by considering the ways in which terms refer: both singular terms (such as “that glass” or “Aristotle”) and general terms (such as “water”). So this course will also be concerned with linguistic reference, the contrast between descriptive and non-descriptive reference, and the distinction between a term’s referent and its sense.