On Bilgrami's Belief and Meaning

Abstract

Like all topics that generate a fruitful philosophical debate, the issue of psychological content is very complex, while at the same time featuring reasonably clear desiderata for a successful theory. Akeel Bilgrami's book is a splendid response to the challenge that this issue provides, containing an especially lucid analysis of the requirements of a successful theory, a deep understanding of the crucial examples, and a creative development of a genuinely original view. I will develop three points of criticism: the first concerns Bilgrami's argument against Tyler Burge's externalism, the second his claims against internalism, and the third the contextualism of his own externalist position.' (1) Burge provides good reason to believe that ordinary attribution is often non-individualistic in the sense that our ordinary attributions of content are dependent on facts about a subject's physical and social environment. From this fact about ordinary attributions he concludes that belief contents themselves have externalist individuation-conditions. The claim that ordinary attributions are strongly evidential or determinative of the nature of content is essential to Burge's arguments. Bilgrami's attack on this claim is that ordinary attributions do not aim at philosophical precision, and hence should not be taken as strongly evidential or determinative of content: Why should we take facts about ordinary, everyday reports to be relevant to this theoretical notion?.... The common practice of reporting does not fine-tune its tracking of the states of mind of the person on whom it reports and whose behavior it has to explain (p. 74). But these remarks could easily be regarded as question-begging by Burge, for he might argue that it denies what he claims without giving a good reason to do so. Nevertheless, a stronger line of argument is available on Bilgrami's side. It would be more effective to appeal to the fact that belief attributions have various purposes, among them the purpose of communicating to others evidence about features of the world represented by a belief. Donald Davidson