Understanding Meaning and World: A Relook on Semantic Externalism (original) (raw)

The Semantic Basis of Externalism

1. The primary evidence and motivation for externalism in the philosophy of mind is provided by the semantic facts that support direct reference theories of names, indexical pronouns, and natural kind terms. But many externalists have forgotten their semantic roots, or so I shall contend here. I have become convinced of this by a common reaction among externalists to the main argument of my 1991 paper AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access.@ In that argument, I concluded that externalism is incompatible with the principle that we can have privileged, non-empirical knowledge of the contents of our own thoughts. The reaction in question amounts to a dismissive denial of one of my argument=s main premises. This premise, which I defended at length in the paper, is that an externalist thesis regarding a cognitive property should hold that possession of the property by a person logically, or conceptually, implies the existence of objects external to that person.

In Defense of Semantic Externalism

E-Logos. Electronic Journal for Philosophy, 2020

The most popular and influential strategies used against semantic externalism and the causal theory of reference are critically examined. It is argued that upon closer scrutiny, none of them emerges as truly convincing.

Semantic externalism is not verifiable

Semantic externalism is not verifiable

A certain philosophical school of thought, which is known as externalism has recently received a lot of attention. Proponents of the theory emphasize that our knowledge of the properties of the environment depend on the metaphysical conditions of the world outside of our minds. This thesis posits that many of our thoughts, beliefs, and desires as well as the meanings we ascribe to things – which are called ‘intentional states’ – are related to the outside world. They hold the view, that much of our metaphysical statements describe the properties of the outside world and therefore there should be something in the identification of meanings themselves and thereby their intentional states which specifically refer to the particular world where the observation itself takes place. Contrary to this, individualism rejects this, and argues that intentional states depend solely on our mental properties. This debate has important consequences with regards to philosophical and empirical theories of the mind. In this article, my intention is to point out that some additional thoughts on the semantic externalist considerations are based on the misreading of views on methodological solipsism. In this respect I am attempting to prove that it would be preferable to reinterpret the methodological solipsism in order to not have the consequences of externalist thinking experiments be viewed as inexact.