Externalism and the Attitudinal Component of Self-Knowledge

Abstract

Externalism about mental content is the view that the contents of many of our thoughts are determined at least in part by conditions which do not supervene on our nervous system. Many philosophers have thought that externalism undermines the natural and intuitively compelling idea that we possess authoritative and privileged knowledge of our thought contents. Since mental content is determined by affairs outside the brain, it seems that we must first acquire knowledge of the relevant environmental features to then be able to know the contents of our thoughts. If this reasoning is correct, externalism becomes dubious, since it is difficult to deny the intuition that we frequently have authoritative first person knowledge of thought content. Typically, our thought contents are capable of being known by us antecedently to our acquiring knowledge of the existence of any particular external object, and apart from special cases, we possess authority about our own mental states. A number of externalists have tried to accommodate privileged selfknowledge and to neutralize scepticism about one's ability to authoi-itatively know one's own mind. The leading externalist theory of self-knowledge has been first worked out by T. Burge in Individualism and Self-Knowledge and by J. Heil in Privileged Access. Because Burge's presentation of the compatibilist argument is more detailed than Heil's, I will concentrate on his paper and refer to this compatibilist line as 'Burgean compatibilism'. Burgean compatibilism is not only the most promising but also the most widely accepted externalist theory of privileged self-knowledge. Among its advocates are A. Brueckner (1992), D. Davidson (1988, 1991), E. LePore & B. Loewer (1986), H.W. Noonan (1993), S. Shoemaker (1994), R. Stalnaker (1990), and C. Wright (1991).