It’s easy enough to imagine that as some legend has been passed down through the ages, its legendary origin was lost, and people started to treat it as a story of real events. I believe Pythagoras was a real person – but suppose he wasn’t; would this fact change my thoughts about him? I think that on first reflection, the overwhelmingly plausible reply is no. That’s because nothing would change in me, so even if my Pythagoras thoughts are all false, instead of at least some of them being true, they would be the same thoughts nonetheless.

Perhaps this initial impression has to be given up under the pressure of arguments, but would you really say that for example your argument about w1 and w2 and so on has as much of a direct intuitive support as this simple consideration about Pythagoras? And all I was doing here was offering some intuitive support for internalism; I know that a conclusive argument would take much more.

But then, of course, intuitions are just opinions, and you probably don’t share mine. Let me address your argument.

I understand the setup as follows:
In @: Pegasus doesn’t exist, and “Pegasus likes strawberries” (P) is false.
In w1: Twin1-Clayton (your internal duplicate) believes what he expresses by “P”, and this a world which, according to the internalist, makes P true.
In w2: Twin2-Clayton also believes “P”, and the thought he expresses is true, but none of the winged horses that exist in w1 exist in w2.

This scenario is supposed to lead to problems for the internalist. But I don’t understand how the scenario is possible in the first place.

On the internalist view, Twin1-Clayton in w1 expresses the same belief by “Pegasus likes strawberries” as Clayton does. According to the setup, this belief is true – but then Pegasus must exist in w1, since otherwise how could Twin1-Clayton truly believe that Pegasus likes strawberries? Further, the setup says that none of the winged horses in w1 exist in w2 – consequently, Pegasus, one of the winged horses in w1, doesn’t exist in w2. But then how could Twin2-Clayton’s belief that Pegasus likes strawberries be true?

You say “the internalist can’t say that the thoughts in w1 and w2 aren’t both true”, but this is precisely what I’d like to say. I probably missed something – what is it?

Left by Kati Farkas on January 20th, 2007

“Moreover, the modal properties of a thought seem essential to it, in which case essential aspects of a thought (e.g., the thought expressed by (1) or (2)) depend upon more than just what’s going on locally with someone who considers (1) or (2).”

Hmmm…To answer the question on the other thread one way, what the advantages are to internalism, maybe this is one of them. If the modal properties of a thought somehow aren’t essential to it, then Zombie arguments break down as conceivability doesn’t lock us into a primary intension that picks out a logically possible world.

Left by AG on January 21st, 2007

Thanks, Clayton, for the explanation. I think I see the overall argument, but I’m afraid I still have difficulties with the scenario. In your recapitulation of the story:

“In w1, my duplicate believes the proposition he expresses by uttering “Pegasus loves strawberries” and that thought is true.”

(a) This entails, in my (internalist) view, that Pegasus exists in w1. Otherwise your duplicate couldn’t believe truly in w1 that Pegasus loves strawberries. (Admittedly, this presupposes an internalist view; but I thought we are trying to give the internalist a chance to explain the scenario in her own terms.)

“Now, suppose there is another world, w2 in which another duplicate of mine has this thought but none of the horses in w2 exist in w1.”

(b) If Pegasus is a horse, who, as we just concluded, exists in w1, and none of w2’s horses exist in w1, then Pegasus cannot be one of the horses in w2.

“If [the subjects in w1 and w2] believe the same thing, we have to say that the belief in w2 is false. But it seems as arbitrary as anything could be for the subject in w1 to get things right and the subject in w2 to get things wrong. Why not the other way around?”

(c) the internalist will indeed say that the belief in w2 is false, since Pegasus doesn’t exist in w2. But this isn’t arbitrary at all; the verdict follows from (a) and (b), which, in turn, follow from the way you set up the scenario. It couldn’t be the other way around, because you yourself stipulated that the thought in w1 is true. You also stipulated that w1 and w2 don’t share horses; and these entail that the thought in w2 is false.

Do you object to the conclusions drawn in (a) or (b) or (c)?

Left by Kati Farkas on January 22nd, 2007

Clayton, is this a (good) way to explain your worry?

Suppose the thought that “Pegasus loves fries” could be true. So there must be a possible world in which Pegasus exists and where he loves fries. This is w1. Because Pegasus exists in w1, and the subject in w1 has grounds to assert that Pegasus loves fries, that subject must have some interactions with Pegasus.

Now imagine another world w2 where Pegasus doesn’t exist but where the subject in w2 is an internal duplicate of the subject in w1.

The question is: are the thoughts expressed by “Pegasus loves fries” uttered by the subjects in w1 and w2 respectively true or false, and why?

Since the subject in w2 is an internal duplicate of the subject in w1 (and things are subjectively indiscriminable for both subjects), the former must at least have appearances of interaction with Pegasus.

And here’s the arbitrariness worry. If internalism is true and the subjects in w1 and w2 are internal duplicates, why assume that the thought expressed by “Pegasus loves fries” is about (a) Pegasus rather than about (b) appearances of Pegasus. Given Internalism, it’s arbitrary to choose (a) over (b) or vice versa. But then, it’s arbitrary to say that the thought expressed by “Pegasus loves fries” is true in w1 and false in w2, as opposed to being true in both worlds. (And, in fact, it could even be false in both worlds, depending on how one arbitrarily fixes the content.)

Is that it?

If so, is the suggestion that Internalists are either (i) illicilty helping themselves with external factors in determining the content of the thought in w1, or (ii) that, if Internalism is true, the content of the thought expressed by “Pegasus loves fries” could remain indeterminate between a bunch of relevant alternatives?

Left by Philippe Chuard on January 22nd, 2007

Thanks for the further explanations. I don’t think I agree with Philippe that an internalist has to face the option that her duplicate’s thoughts are about appearances of Pegasus. I am sure that none of my duplicate’s Pegasus thoughts are about appearances of Pegasus, since whatever the object of their thought is hairy (horses are hairy), and appearances are not hairy. (Cf. Quine: the Parthenon, and the idea of the Parthenon.)

However, I think I’m beginning to see the argument more clearly. Is it something like this:
Suppose that an internalist is indeed committed to the view that in some possible worlds, my internal duplicate truly believes that Pegasus likes strawberries. Such worlds, in any case, have to contain a strawberry-liking winged horse. But presumably, there are other worlds where there are strawberry-liking winged horses, neither of whom is identical to Pegasus. Take all these worlds, where the qualitative facts concerning winged horses are the same, but the horses are numerically different. What determines which of these worlds are the ones that include *Pegasus*, rather than a qualitatively similar, but numerically different winged horse?

I’d like to answer with Kripke: we don’t discover possible worlds, we stipulate them. It’s not like we look at a possible world through a telescope, and when we detect a winged horse stuffing himself with strawberries, we start to wonder whether we see Pegasus or a horse very similar to it. Possible worlds are not given merely descriptively, but also by our use of names. So if you tell me that my duplicate’s Pegasus thought is true in w1, this is indeed a stipulation, but it’s precisely this kind of stipulation that guides our understanding of counterfactual scenarios. Since a horse is either identical to Pegasus or not, I assume that there is a fact concerning the identity of all the horses in w1 and w2. If you don’t tell me whether w1 or w2 contains Pegasus, I’m none the wiser, but then it’s your scenario, so my only access to it is through what you tell me.

At the moment, I see no reason why an internalist couldn’t endorse this picture.

Left by Kati Farkas on January 23rd, 2007

Hi Kati,

about Pegasus appearances, that was just an example to make the point more vivid. But your point about hairy appearances doesn’t do justice to it. Note first that your horse thoughts are about things that appear to be hairy. And it could turn out that appearances of Pegasus for the subject in W2 appear to be hairy too.

More seriously, the suggestion is that whatever evidence about Pegasus the subject in w2 is presented with, her Pegasus thoughts could be about that evidence rather than about Pegasus itself (and you don’t need to think that the evidence has all the actual properties of Pegasus). In fact, it doesn’t have to be about evidence, it could be about any internal factors in virtue of which the subject in w2 is a duplicate of the subject in w1.

Now, Clayton’s worry is that the internalist’s response that it’s about Pegasus is arbitrary. Do you agree with that? You seem to when you make the kripkean point about stipulation.

Something in your response also reminded me of a point you made on the other thread which I had missed.

What’s really crucial for the internalist are 2 things: (a) the fact that things are supposed to be subjectively indiscriminable for internal duplicates and (b) the fact that we know what our thoughts are about (as in Clayton’s Pegasus case) and it couldn’t turn out that we have made a mistake about that.

So, the suggestion seems to be, we have (infallible?) epistemic access to the content of our thoughts, and that access is crucial in explaining the subjective indiscriminability of internal duplicates (either because internal duplication ensures we have the same access, or because having such an access is a condition on internal duplication).

Could this be, then, a kind of Internalism you find attractive? Forget about the having of content supervening upon neural structures in the brain, and forget about broad holism. This could be something like a HOT theory of mental content. A mental state M has a content p just in case there is another mental state M* (a dispositional state perhaps), where M* is a second-order thought to the effect that M has p.

Left by Philippe Chuard on January 23rd, 2007

Philippe, I think the point that internalism has to do with the nature of access to our thoughts is absolutely right. We probably don’t have infallible access to mental contents, but we have privileged access, and externalism imposes certain undesirable restrictions on this access. This is of course a very heavily contested issue, and many externalist argue that externalism does not threaten our first-person knowledge of our thoughts.

But I myself believe that the content of your thoughts is more fully accessible from the first-person perspective on an internalist view, than on an externalist view. And I also think that it’s because of this that Pegasus thoughts could NOT be about appearances, evidences, or internal factors, instead of being about a flesh-and-blood and hairy horse. Such possibilities may make sense on an externalist view, but they don’t seem to be compatible with internalism.

On a certain kind of externalist view, the causal origin of your thoughts constitutively determines the reference of your thoughts: internal duplicates in different worlds, with a very different causal origin for their thoughts, refer to the very different causal origins. Putnam for example toys with the idea that BIV thoughts refer to bits in the computer program, instead of referring to ordinary material objects. From the first-person perspective, being a BIV and being embodied seems the same; but the object of their thoughts are in fact very different. This is an externalist view.

If I may make another remark here, which is connected to this point and to something that came up in the other thread: I don’t think the motivation for internalism has anything to do with Berkeleyan idealism. The internalist view is not that your thoughts somehow refer (or could refer) to appearances or experiences. The paradigmatic internalist is after all Descartes, who was as much of a realist as you could want them to be.

On Descartes’s view, if you were deceived by the demon, you would have all the same thoughts you have now. This is a precondition for the demon hypothesis to serve its role, i.e. to introduce a scenario where almost all of your beliefs about the external world are false. If BIV thoughts are different from our thoughts, because BIV thoughts are about bits of the computer program (or about appearances, internal factors, suchlike), then BIVs can have many true beliefs about the world. E.g. when a BIV believes what it would express as “here are some strawberries”, this could easily be right, if the BIV is in fact talking about bits in the computer program, or about internal factors, or about apperances. Contrary to this, an internalist (realist) like Descartes would insist that the BIV thought, just like our thought, refers to strawberries, and since there are no strawberries in the BIV world, the BIV belief is false.

Left by Kati Farkas on January 24th, 2007

Thanks Kanti, but you still haven’t told me what you think of my HOT Theory of mental content:

mental state M of subject S has content p only if S thinks of M’s content as being p. (or something along these lines)

It seems as though this necessary condition should figure among the internal facts the Internalist puts into her supervenience basis, provided the Internalist cares about privileged access the way you do.

Here’s why. Unless this is part of the relevant internal facts upon which the fact that M has p as its content supervenes, then Internalism in no way ensures such privileged access (or at least not in any surer or stronger way than Externalism does).

So far in this thread, there has been 2 proposals about what the relevant internal facts might be for the Internalist: (i) neurophysiological facts of some kind, and (ii) relations to other mental contents (content-holism).

But neither version of Internalism ensures privileged access. If the having of content supervenes on neurophysiological facts, normal subjects certainly don’t have privileged access to such facts. And if they don’t have privileged access to the subvenient facts, it’s hard to see why exactly they should have privileged access to the supervening facts determined by such neurophysiological facts. In other words, nothing in this kind of Internalism guarantees, contrary to what you seem to assume, that we have any privileged access to the contents of your thoughts.

Similarly, if the fact that M has p as its content supervenes on (a) the content of other mental states of S, and (b) on the inferential relations between p and these other contents. There is no reason to think, just because M having p is determined by these relations to other contents, that S has a privileged access to the fact that M has p.

The point is similar to one made about Coherentism in Epistemology: there’s no reason to think that Coherentism is an internalist theory of justification, because there’s no reason to think we have a privileged access to all the relations of coherence between our beliefs. In fact, unless we assume we have logical omniscience, there is good reason to think we don’t usually have access (privileged or not) to all the coherence relations between our beliefs.

In the case that concerns us, there’s no reason to think that we have access (privileged or not) to all the inferential relations between the contents of our mental states. But these facts are supposed to determined what content mental state M has. Hence, we don’t have access to all the relevant determining facts. Hence, the subvenient facts certainly don’t guarantee the kind of privileged access you’re after.

So either your claim about internalism and privileged access is an unwarranted postulation on the Internalist’s part, or some subvenient facts guarantee we have such access (or I’ve missed something crucial)!

Hence, my proposal: put our privileged access to contents as an important internal fact in the internalist supervenience basis. Our privileged access to M’s content is a determining factor (perhaps, among many others) of the fact that M has p.

But then, you can see where this is going. What determines the fact that my second-order belief (resulting from privileged access) has the content that M has p? Some third-order belief, and so on…

So it seems to me that this appeal to privileged access doesn’t help Internalism much. On the contrary!

I agree with you about Idealism and Internalism, but I don’t think your appeal to BIVs help much. See here the discussion with Ignacio in the other thread about how to construct the BIV-motivation for Internalism.

We are not BIVs and it’s very improbable that we are. But we want a theory explaining how our actual mental states get their content. Why should such a theory care so much about these improbable situations? More surprisingly, when we imagine these BIV-worlds, we typically imagine that the BIV’s thoughts have been caused by an alternative EXTERNAL cause. Why is that?

Furthermore, there are many things an Externalist can say about BIV-worlds: (i) BIVs have no content, (ii) BIVs have the same contents that we do about the external world but they are had in a radically different way, caused by a completely different external factor, (iii) BIVs have contents about internal facts. Either option is opened to Externalists. You’re right: one externalist view takes it that thoughts are about THE cause of a thought. But shouldn’t the Internalists be careful not to reject Externalism simply because they have an objection to this version of Externalism?

So I don’t really think you can construct what I called a good “negative” argument on this basis.

But I’d like to know what you think of the HOT theory of content in the first place!

Left by Philippe Chuard on January 25th, 2007

Philippe,

I suppose that an Internalist could (and some of them do) adopt a HOT theory of mental content. At the same time, it seems to me that such a theory is also perfectly compatible with externalism.

Defenders of the compatibility of externalism and privileged access often point out (correctly) that second-order thoughts embed the content of first-order thoughts, so second-order thoughts are contextually self-verifying. Suppose externalism is true and Oscar has a water-thought (with content p1) and Twin-Oscar a twater-thought (with content p2). Each thinks a second-order thought he would express as “I m now thinking that water is wet”. The content of Oscar’s second-order thought is that he is thinking that *water* is wet; the content of Twin-Oscar’s second-order thought is that he is thinking that *twater is wet*. Both thoughts are correct; there is no possibility of mismatch between the content of the first- and the second-order thought.

You suggest the internalist accepts this necessary condition for contents:

“mental state M of subject S has content p only if S thinks of M’s content as being p. (or something along these lines)”

In the above case, it’s true of Oscar that he thinks of his thought as having content p1 (about water), and of Twin-Oscar that he thinks of his thought as having content p2 (about twater), and both are right. So even given externalism, your necessary condition can be met. Therefore I don’t think that this condition would secure any advantage for the internalist over the externalist, with regard to privileged access.

You raise the following worry for the internalist:

[suppose having of content supervenes on neurophysiological facts] normal subjects certainly don’t have privileged access to such facts. And if they don’t have privileged access to the subvenient facts, it’s hard to see why exactly they should have privileged access to the supervening facts determined by such neurophysiological facts.”

I don’t think I agree with the second sentence. Privileged access is a form of knowledge (or in any case a form of justification, or some sort of epistemic relation). And it’s generally not true of these epistemic relations that in order to stand in a relation to the supervening facts, you have to have the same relation to the subvenient facts.

This is a familiar point from the debate about the identity theory. An identity theorist may very well claim that I know what I am thinking about, and my thought supervenes on my brain-states, and yet I don’t know what brain-state I am in.

You may be right though about the problems emerging from the content-holist view…

Left by Kati Farkas on January 27th, 2007

Kati, sorry for not replying earlier but things are quite hectic here at SMU.

Yes, you’re right, an Externalist can have a HOT theory of content too. And no, appeal to such a condition wasn’t meant to deliver any advantage to anyone. The worry was only that, if that’s the only way to make sense of privileged access for the Internalists (or the Externalist), then that’s not a good way, because of the question: what determines the content of second-order thoughts? Third-order thoughts?

You’re also right that one could resist the claim that, in order to have privileged access to the supervenient facts, one must have privileged access to the subvening facts.

But, even if you deny this, I don’t think this helps your claim in any way. You said that one important motivation for Internalism is that it can preserve (or explain, or make more sense of, …) privileged access better than Externalism can. I don’t see why this is true.

If privileged access to mental content is not due, at least in part, to privileged access to the determining factors, then what explains the fact that we have such privileged access? Internalists can say that this is a datum, but I don’t see what exactly in their theory explains that datum.

So suppose there is another explanation, not having to do with privileged access of the subvening facts. Presumably, Externalists can have that explanation too. So Internalism is not better off in that respect.

The point was simply this: usually, the intuition that Externalism is incompatible with privileged access (whereas Internalism is perfectly compatible) seems to rely on the thought that, because content, according to the Externalists, supervenes on some external factors to which we lack privileged access, it should follow that we lack privileged access to content itself.

But, unless Internalists endorse something like a HOT theory of content, they are in exactly the same situation because we lack privileged access to the types of internal facts Internalists often put in their supervenience basis.

So your proposed motivation for Internalism (that Internalism makes more sense of privileged access than Externalism does) doesn’t seem to cut it at all. At best, it seems like an unwarranted assumption made by Internalists. To repeat, this is not to show that Externalists have any advantage: only that one proposed motivation for Internalism isn’t a good motivation.

Left by Philippe Chuard on February 1st, 2007

Hi Philippe,

Sorry for disappearing from the thread. I got married and went on a honeymoon since I last posted.

Thanks for inspiring such an interesting discussion. I’ll have more to say on the matter, and post it soon over at Brain Hammer.

Cheers,

Left by Pete Mandik on February 1st, 2007