Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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235088

Externalism and "knowing what" one thinks

T. Parent

pp. 1337-1350

Abstract

Some worry that semantic externalism is incompatible with knowing by introspection what content your thoughts have. In this paper, I examine one primary argument for this incompatibilist worry, the slow-switch argument. Following Goldberg (Pac Philos Quart 87:301–314, 2006), I construe the argument as attacking the conjunction of externalism and “skeptic immune” knowledge of content, where such knowledge would persist in a skeptical context. Goldberg, following Burge (J Philos 85(1):649–663, 1988), attempts to reclaim such knowledge for the externalist; however, I contend that all Burge-style accounts (at best) vindicate that a subject can introspectively know that she is thinking that “water is wet.” They do not yet show how a subject can introspectively know what she is thinking—which is the distinctive type of knowing at issue in the slow-switch argument. Nonetheless, I subsequently amend the Burge-style view to illustrate how an externalist can introspectively “know-what” content her thought has, and know it in a skeptic immune manner, despite what the slow-switch argument may suggest. For one, I emphasize that “knowing what” can be ontologically non-committal (so that knowing your thought is about water does not require knowing that water exists). For another, following Boer and Lycan (Knowing who, 1986), I stress that “knowing what” is purpose-relative–and for at least some purposes, it seems possible for the externalist to “know what” content her thought has, even if skeptical hypotheses about XYZ are relevant.

Publication details

Published in:

Hamami Yacin, Roelofson Floris (2015) Logic of questions. Synthese 192 (5).

Pages: 1337-1350

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-014-0624-x

Full citation:

Parent T. (2015) „Externalism and "knowing what" one thinks“. Synthese 192 (5), 1337–1350.