Externalism and Inference

Abstract

Recent work in the theory of mental content has persuaded a large number of philosophers that many of the propositional attitudes attributed in ordinary speech and in psychology cannot be individuated wholly individualistically, without regard to the physical and/or social environment in which those attitudes are tokened. Even a Cartesian conception of thought could, of course, accommodate the claim that a person's de re attitudes might vary while his behavior and behavioral dispositions, his physical acts and states, and his qualitative feels, remained fixed. But de dicto attitudes, attitudes attributed with that-clauses forming oblique contexts, were traditionally held to be determined by facts wholly internal to the thinker whose attitudes they were. No more: