Holistic Knowledge

This paper addresses the question whether introspection plus externalism about mental content warrant an a priori refutation of external-world skepticism and ontological solipsism. The suggestion is that if thought content is partly determined by affairs in the environment and if we can have non-empirical knowledge of our current thought contents, we can, just by reflection, know about the world around us – we can know that our environment is populated with content-determining entities. After examining this type of transcendental argument and discussing various objections found in the literature, I argue that the notion of privileged self-knowledge underlying this argument presupposes that we can learn, via introspection, that our so-called thoughts are propositional attitudes rather than contentless states. If, however, externalism is correct and thought content consists in the systematic dependency of internal states on relational properties, we cannot know non-empirically whether or not we have propositional attitudes. Self-knowledge (a propos-itional attitude) is consistent with us lacking the ability to rule out, via introspection, the possibility that we don't have any propositional attitudes. Self-knowledge provides us with knowledge of what is in our minds, but not that we have minds. Hence, the combination of externalism with the doctrine of privileged self-knowledge does not allow for an a priori refutation of skepticism and is therefore unproblematic.

Erkenntnis, 2003

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2001

In this paper, I argue that the entertaining of thoughts about natural kinds is not subject merely to a causal constraint, but is subject rather to the very two constraints Russell imposed on the understanding of propositions. I then argue that understanding singular thoughts as involving an acquaintance relation serves to dispel arguments against externalist theories on the grounds that they are incompatible with privileged access to thought content.

2008

The first part of this article contains certain elements of the epistemologically different worlds perspective that focus the idea that the "I" or human subjectivity is an EW corresponding to the brain and body. The second part shows that Bechtels's notion of "mechanism" is, in fact, a kind of more "technical" functionalism that tries to avoid the mind-brain problem. However, by avoiding the mind-brain problem, many cognitive science issues remain unsolved. Thus, we consider that Bechtel's solution is only a surrogate-alternative in explaining the notions of cognition (or some of its functions) or mind/brain in interaction with the environment.

One key issue connected with the scope and limits of human knowledge and human belief systems is the ontological relationship between human consciousness and the physical world. Within the study of human knowledge there has been ongoing inquiry and debate regarding the methods that should be used to acquire and validate human knowledge. In this article I address both these philosophical issues.

Human Knowing: Our Hopes and Our Limits ©Harold I. Brown I have invoked, although not copied, Russell's (1948) title because I aim to pursue a traditional part of epistemology that has fallen into neglect in recent decades, but do so in a contemporary context. This is the project that Hume described, with his usual eloquence, in the Introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature: "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another.

The intuition that knowledge is more valuable than true belief generates the value problem in epistemology. The aim in this paper is to focus on the intuitive notion of knowledge itself, in the context of the value problem, and to attempt to bring out just what it is that we intuitively judge to be valuable. It seems to me that the value problem brings to the fore certain commitments we have to the intuitive notion of knowledge, which, if we take seriously, reveal that we actually think of knowledge as an irreducible factive mental state.

Metascience, 2012