Semantic Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Slow Switching

The Semantic Realism/Anti-Realism Dispute and Knowledge of Meanings

Here the relationship between understanding and knowledge of meaning is discussed from two different perspectives: that of Dummettian semantic anti-realism and that of the semantic externalism of Putnam and others. The question addressed is whether or not the truth of semantic externalism would undermine a central premise in one of Dummetts key arguments for anti-realism, insofar as Dummetts pr...

Incompatibility Arguments and Semantic Self Knowledge

There has been much discussion recently of what has been labeled the “Brown-Boghossian-McKinsey”, “Brown-McKinsey” or sometimes just “McKinsey” arguments for the incompatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. However, while the three author’s arguments have been treated as interchangeable, they are not identical. In particular, Brown’s and Boghossian’s arguments have a fairly serious flaw t...

Externalism and Self-Knowledge: Content, Use, and Expression

The Problem of Armchair Knowledge

1. McKinsey’s reductio argument: Externalism and self-knowledge In ‘Anti-individualism and privileged access’ (1991), Michael McKinsey asks us to consider the following three propositions, where ‘E’ says that some particular externalist condition for thinking that water is wet is met: (1) Oscar knows a priori that he is thinking that water is wet. (2) The proposition that Oscar is thinking that...

First-Person Externalism

Ever since the 1970’s, philosophers of mind have engaged in a lively discussion of Externalism. Externalism is the metaphysical thesis that the contents of one’s thoughts are determined partly by empirical features of one’s environment. Externalism appears to clash with another plausible thesis—the epistemological thesis that one can have knowledge of one’s own thoughts, without evidence or emp...