Philosophy of Mind > Intentionality > Content Internalism and Externalism > Content Internalism and Externalism, Misc > Externalism and Mental Causation
Externalism and Mental Causation
Edited by Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa)
About this topic
Summary | One of the problems of mental causation involves showing how the popular externalist view of how mental content is individuated can be compatible with the claim that mental states are causally efficacious in virtue of their content. For example, if your belief that the water in the bucket is frozen is part of what causes you to put the bucket over a fire, it does so in virtue of the fact that it has that content (and not, say, the content that the water in the bucket is steaming hot). Semantic externalism is the idea that mental contents are individuated partly in terms of thinkers' relations to the environment: for example, you think about water because you're in a world that has water, but a physically identical twin on a planet with a similar-seeming substance (but not H2O) would think about that substance. Hilary Putnam expressed this as the idea that contents "ain't in the head". The problem is to reconcile this fact about content individuation with the idea that causal relationships are in some sense "local" or "in the head". |
Key works | Putnam 1975 and Burge 1979 are seminal defenses of the ideas that the individuation of mental content depends at least in part on relations between thinkers and (respectively) their physical and social environments. Arguments for a notion of narrow (or non-relational) content, such as Fodor 1991, are often motivated by the idea that wide content is incompatible with causal efficacy, while others, such as Jacob 1992, defend a view in which wide content is compatible with causal relevance if not efficacy. Burge 1989 and Dretske 1988 (summarized in Dretske 1990) defend influential compatibilist views, while Yablo 1997 suggests a more generalized compatibilism framed in response to Jaegwon Kim's problem of causal exclusion (the general claim that physical properties 'screen off' mental properties). |
Introductions | Putnam 1975; Burge 1979; Jacob 1993; Peacocke 1993;Wilson 1992. An accessible (though longer) discussion is included in Fodor 1994, while Heil & Mele 1993 is an excellent collection of articles on various problems of mental causation. |
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Related categories
Siblings:
- Narrow Content (135)
- Two-Dimensionalism about Content (35)
- Content Internalism and Externalism, Miscellaneous (41)
- Mental Causation (1,221 | 1)
- Externalism and Psychological Explanation (95)
- Externalism and Computation (19)
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Editorial team
General Editors:
David Bourget (Western Ontario) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: David Bourget Gwen Bradford Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers James Chase Rafael De Clercq Ezio Di Nucci Barry Hallen Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Michelle Kosch Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Manolo Martínez Matthew McGrath Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Giuseppe Primiero Jack Alan Reynolds Darrell P. Rowbottom Aleksandra Samonek Constantine Sandis Howard Sankey Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell Aness Kim Webster Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers |