Externalism and Authoritative Knowledge of Content: A New Incompatibilist Strategy

Abstract

A typical strategy of those who seek to show that externalism is compatible with authoritative knowledge of content is to show that externalism does nothing to undermine the claim that all thinkers can at any time form correct and justified self-ascriptive judgements concerning their occurrent thoughts . In reaction, most incompatibilists have assumed the burden of denying that externalism is compatible with this claim about self-ascription. Here I suggest another way to attack the compatibilist strategy. I aim to show that forming a justified true self-ascriptive judgement about one’s occurrent thought does not amount to or imply that one ‘knows the content’ of the self-ascribed thought. While the difference between present-tense self-ascription and knowledge of content has previously been brought out using the familiar trappings of world-switching examples, 1 here I attempt to establish the difference by appeal to actual (real-life) memory-involvingcases. To this end, I present a ‘recollection problem’ and argue that, so long as one conflates present-tense self-ascription and self-knowledge of content, there can be no satisfactory response to this problem. The result is that, even if the compatibilist strategy is correct in what it asserts about self-ascription, it has not delivered the relevant goods if it aims to establish a thesis asserting externalism’s compatibility with knowledge of content. I conclude by speculating how the recollection argument to be presented here can be transformed, from an argument against the compatibilist strategy, into an argument for incompatibilism.