The Epistemological Argument for Content Externalism*

It is argued that there are good prima facie grounds for believing that the theses of content externalism and epistemic internalism are inconsistent.

Two arguments against the compatibility of epistemic internalism and content externalism are considered. Both arguments are shown to fail, because they equivocate on the concept of justification involved in their premises. To spell out the involved equivocation, a distinction between subjective and objective justification is introduced, which can also be independently motivated on the basis of a wide range of thought experiments to be found in the mainstream literature on epistemology. The subjective/objective justification distinction is also ideally suited for providing new insights with respect to central issues within epistemology, including the internalism/externalism debate and the New Evil Demon intuition.

2016

The disputes between externalism and internalism in the philosophy of mind and epistemology are revealed to be greatly intertwined. In this paper, I would like to defend the compatibility between content externalism and epistemic internalism, and then explore some of its potential consequences. More precisely, I have a twofold goal: first, I shall examine the widespread idea that content externalism is not compatible with epistemic internalism, and argue that, if the two theses are appropriately understood, then there is no real tension between them; second, I shall sketch some interesting effects that may hopefully come from the combination of content externalism and epistemic internalism, as that of accommodating the constitutive link between justification and truth.

Rationalität, Realismus, Revision / Rationality, Realism, Revision

The question whether direct, authoritative knowledge of one's own thought contents and an externalist individuation of those contents are compatible has been, and still is, the object of a wide discussion. In this paper I shall present the main lines of the discussion and put forward the makings of an affirmative answer to the compatibility question. Owing to space restrictions, my presentation is bound to be rather sketchy, though I will try to bring out the central points of my perspective as clearly as possible. The simplest way in which incompatibilism could be established would be to start from the premise according to which if content depends on external factors, knowledge of content must depend on knowledge of those factors (cf. Bonjour 1992, p. 136). Given externalism, this premise would entail that in order to know what we think we should first investigate our surroundings, which in turn leads to the conclusion that we do not have direct, authoritative knowledge of our own thoughts. This premise, however, does not seem to be true. Think, for example, that though my existence (metaphysically) depends on my parents' existence, I can know that I exist even if I do not know about my parents' existence. This holds not only in cases of metaphysical dependence, but also in cases of conceptual dependence: someone can know that a certain figure is a triangle and not know that its internal angles measure 180 degress even though this figure's being a triangle depends upon its internal angles' measuring 180 degrees. Some philosophers (Burge 1988, Heil 1988, Davidson, unpubl. ms) have tried to defend compatibilism by noting that reflexive self-ascriptions of thoughts include the content of the ascribed thought itself, whatever the way this content is determined. On the inclusion model of self-knowledge, as this proposal might be called (Bernecker 1996), Cogito-like judgments are reliably true in that they are contextually self-verifying, as Burge insists. A subject need not know what the individuation conditions of his thoughts are in order to correctly ascribe these thoughts, with their right contents, to himself. One major objection to the inclusion model has been put forward by Boghossian (1989, 1992), on the basis of thought experiments in which a subject is unwittingly switched between distinct but observationally undistinguishable environments, say between Earth and Twin Earth. Let's baptize our inter-world traveller 'Peter'. Suppose that Peter is unwittingly 1 Research for this paper has been funded by the Spanish Government's DGES as part of the project PB96-1091-C03-02. My thanks to this institution for its help and encouragement. I want also to express my gratitude to Carlos Ulises Moulines, Julian Nida-Rümelin and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl for inviting me to present a version of this paper to the 3rd Congress of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie. I am also grateful to Sven Bernecker, Andreas Kemmerling and Nenad Miscevic for their useful comments and criticism.

Philosophical Issues, 2007

Our fundamental conception of the self seems to be, broadly speaking, epistemic: selves are things that have thoughts, undergo experiences, and possess reasons for action and belief. In this paper, I evaluate the consequences of this epistemic conception for the widespread view that properties like thinking that arthritis is painful are relational features of the self.

The Externalist Challenge, 2004

Philosophical Quarterly, 2004

A Priori Justification. By Albert Casullo.Epistemic Justification: Internalism vs Externalism, Foundations vs Virtues. By Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa.New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge. Edited by Susana Nuccetelli.Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public. By Alvin I. Goldman.The Sceptics: Contemporary Essays. Edited by Steven Luper.Thinking about Knowing. By Jay F. Rosenberg.

2010

The internalism/externalism debate is of interest in epistemology since it addresses one of the most fundamental questions in the discipline: what is the basic nature of knowledge and epistemic justification? It is generally held that if a positive epistemic status obtains, this is not a brute fact. Rather if a belief is, for example, justified, it is justified in virtue of some further condition(s) obtaining. What has been called epistemic internalism holds, as the label suggests, is that all the relevant factors that determine justification must be “internal” (in a sense that needs to be specified). Epistemic externalism is the denial of internalism. Epistemic internalism about justification is the subject of this article. After introducing the central intuitive considerations that have tended to motivate internalism, this paper will explore different ways of construing the internalist position (or family of positions). In addition to classical formulations, more recent formulations will be discussed, concluding with a discussion of an emerging position known as “Epistemological Disjunctivism”, which its advocates claim preserves the most important features of more traditional forms of internalism, while avoiding their difficulties. Epistemological Disjunctivism is particularly worthy of attention since if true, it promises to bridge internalist and externalist epistemologies, bringing a rapprochement to two sides of what may otherwise appear a deep and intractable debate about the fundamental nature of epistemology.

2016

The disputes between externalism and internalism in the philosophy of mind and epistemology are revealed to be greatly intertwined. In this paper, I would like to defend the compatibility between content externalism and epistemic internalism, and then explore some of its potential consequences. More precisely, I have a twofold goal: first, I shall examine the widespread idea that content externalism is not compatible with epistemic internalism, and argue that, if the two theses are appropriately understood, then there is no real tension between them; second, I shall sketch some interesting effects that may hopefully come from the combination of content externalism and epistemic internalism, as that of accommodating the constitutive link between justification and truth.