Externalism, Naturalism
and Method
This paper is concerned
with certain arguments and motivations for externalism in the philosophy of
mind, and with the proper method for answering questions about the conditions for
having mental contents. I am interested
in particular in the interplay between arguments for externalism and the demand
that the mental be naturalized. Broadly
speaking, we naturalize the mental by showing how it can be integrated
successfully with the rest of our picture of the natural world. Arguments for externalism often seem to presuppose
that the naturalistic project, cast in the particularly strong form of
providing a conceptual reduction of the mental to the non-mental, can be successfully
carried out. I find the arguments for
externalism unconvincing, and the motivations for pursuing the naturalistic project
in this form in which it is often cast, which would buttress these arguments for
externalism, unpersuasive. In the
following, I first provide an account of the externalist thesis, distinguishing
it from two other positions, which I call `strong individualism' and
`internalism' – the distinction between which is easily overlooked -- and
reject a further distinction sometimes advanced between `modal externalism' and
`constitutive externalism'. As we will
see, getting clear about the relations among these views is crucial to any
adequate evaluation of arguments for externalism. Next, I turn to certain thought experiments that purport to
establish externalism specifically about perceptual content. I argue that they fail, for two reasons, one
of which can be traced partly to the failure to observe the distinctions
between the different views mentioned above.
These results generalize to externalist arguments of the same form about
other sorts of content. My primary
target in this is a series of recent papers by Martin Davies, culminating in one
delivered at the 1992 SOPHIA conference.