In this paper, I argue that content externalism and privileged access are compatible, but that one can, in a sense, have privileged access to the world. The supposedly absurd conclusion should be embraced.

Burge's thesis is the thesis that certain second-order self-ascriptionsare self-verifying in virtue of their self-referential form. The thesis hasrecently come under attack on the grounds that it does not yield a theory ofself-knowledge consistent with semantic externalism, and also on the groundsthat it is false. In this paper I defend Burge's thesis against both charges,in particular against the arguments of Bernecker, Gallois and Goldberg. Thealleged counterexamples they provide are merely apparent counterexamples, andthe thesis is adequate to its proper task. To (...) think otherwise is simply tomisunderstand the thesis. (shrink)

Because there is a fair amount of overlap in the points by Balog and Rey, I will organize this response topically, referring specifically to each commentator as rele- vant. And, because much of the discussion focuses on my higher-order-thought hypothesis independent of questions about metacognition, I will begin by addressing a cluster of issues that have to do with the status, motivation, and exact formulation of that hypothesis.

The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, it is intended to articulate theses that are often assessed independently, thus showing that a strong version of epistemological disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge implies a transformative conception of rationality. This entails that individuals in skeptical scenarios could not entertain rational thoughts about their environment, for they would fail to have perceptual states. The secondary aim is to show that this consequence is not a sufficient reason to abandon the variety of disjunctivism presented. (...) The argument for this claim depends on the assessment of rationality attributions to subjects in plausible cases of illusion and some clinical cases of hallucination. RESUMO Este artigo tem dois objetivos: primeiramente, pretende-se articular teses que são frequentemente avaliadas independentemente, mostrando com isso que uma versão robusta do disjuntivismo epistemológico sobre conhecimento perceptual implica uma concepção transformativa da racionalidade. Uma consequência disso é que indivíduos em cenários céticos não poderiam entreter pensamentos racionais sobre o ambiente em que habitam, pois eles não possuiriam estados perceptuais. Em segundo lugar, argumenta-se que a consequência delineada acima não é uma razão suficiente para rejeitar o disjuntivismo tal como apresentado. Esse argumento depende da avaliação de atribuições de racionalidade a indivíduos em casos plausíveis de ilusão e em alguns casos clínicos de alucinação. (shrink)

I discuss Burge's argument that our entitlement to self-knowledge consists in the constitutive relation between the second-order review of thoughts and the thoughts reviewed, and defend it against Peacocke's criticism. I then argue that though our entitlement to self-knowledge is neutral to different environments, as Burge claims, the consideration of Burge's own notion of brute error shows that Burge's effort to reconcile externalism and self-knowledge is not successful.

Because reference is not transparent, coreference is not transparent either: it is possible for the subject to refer to the same individual twice without knowing that the two acts of reference target the same individual. That happens whenever the subject associates two distinct yet coreferential files with two token singular terms. The subject may not know that the two files corefer, so her ascribing contradictory properties to the same object does not threaten her rationality. But if the subject deploys the (...) same file twice, in association with both of the singular terms, she is bound to know that she is referring to the same entity twice. (shrink)

A great deal of discussion in the recent literature has been devoted to the so-called 'McKinsey' paradox which purports to show that semantic externalism is incompatible with the sort of authoritative knowledge that we take ourselves to have of our own thought contents. In this paper I examine one influential epistemological response to this paradox which is due to Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. I argue that it fails to meet the challenge posed by McKinsey but that, if it is (...) set within an externalist epistemology, it may have application to a related paradox that concerns the problem of radical scepticism. (shrink)

Cappelen proposes a radically externalist framework for conceptual engineering. This approach embraces the following two theses. Firstly, the mechanisms that underlie conceptual engineering are inscrutable: they are too complex, unstable and non-systematic for us to grasp. Secondly, the process of conceptual engineering is largely beyond our control. One might think that these two theses are peculiar to the Austerity Framework, or to metasemantic externalism more generally. However, Cappelen argues that there is no reason to think that internalism avoids either commitment. (...) Cappelen argues that to do so she must provide arguments for 3 claims: there are inner states that are scrutable and within our control; concepts supervene on these inner states; and the determination relation from supervenience base to content is itself scrutable and within our control. In this paper, I argue that internalist conceptual role theories of content can meet Cappelen’s challenge. (shrink)

A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there’s something it’s like consciously to think that p, which is distinct from what it’s like consciously to think that q. This thesis, if true, would have important consequences for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I offer an argument for it, and attempt to induce examples of it in the reader. The argument claims it would be impossible introspectively to distinguish conscious thoughts with respect to their (...) content if there weren’t something it’s like to think them. This argument is defended against several objections. Then I use what I call “minimal pair” experiences—sentences read without and with understanding—to induce in the reader an experience of the kind I claim exists. Further objections are considered and rebutted. (shrink)

Descartes held the view that a subject has infallible beliefs about the contents of her thoughts. Here, I first examine a popular contermporary defense of this claim, given by Burge, and find it lacking. I then offer my own defense appealing to a minimal thesis about the compositionality of thoughts. The argument has the virtue of refraining from claims about whether thoughts are “in the head;” thus, it is congenial to both internalists and externalists. The considerations here also illuminate how (...) a subject may have epistemicially priviledged and a priori beliefs about her own thoughts. (shrink)

Some worry that semantic externalism is incompatible with knowing by introspection what content your thoughts have. In this paper, I examine one primary argument for this incompatibilist worry, the slow-switch argument. Following Goldberg , I construe the argument as attacking the conjunction of externalism and “skeptic immune” knowledge of content, where such knowledge would persist in a skeptical context. Goldberg, following Burge :649–663, 1988), attempts to reclaim such knowledge for the externalist; however, I contend that all Burge-style accounts vindicate that (...) a subject can introspectively know that she is thinking that “water is wet.” They do not yet show how a subject can introspectively know what she is thinking—which is the distinctive type of knowing at issue in the slow-switch argument. Nonetheless, I subsequently amend the Burge-style view to illustrate how an externalist can introspectively “know-what” content her thought has, and know it in a skeptic immune manner, despite what the slow-switch argument may suggest. For one, I emphasize that “knowing what” can be ontologically non-committal . For another, following Boer and Lycan , I stress that “knowing what” is purpose-relative–and for at least some purposes, it seems possible for the externalist to “know what” content her thought has, even if skeptical hypotheses about XYZ are relevant. (shrink)

Externalism holds that the content of our utterances and thoughts are determined partly by the environment. Here, I offer an argument which suggests that externalism is incompatible with a natural view about ontological commitment--namely, the Quinean view that such commitments are fixed by the range of the variables in your theory. The idea in brief is that if Oscar mistakenly believes that water = XYZ, the externalist ontologically commits Oscar to two waterish kinds, whereas the Quinean commits him to one (...) such kind (albeit a metaphysically impossible kind). The penultimate section addresses a variety of objections to the argument. (shrink)

The present piece is a reply to G. Hoffmann on my infallibilist view of self-knowledge. Contra Hoffmann, it is argued that the view does not preclude a Quinean epistemology, wherein every belief is subject to empirical revision.

My primary goal in this paper is to focus attention on a certain conception of internal access, on the Cartesian conception that a rational subject's capacity to determine sameness and difference in explicit propositional attitudes is independent of knowledge of the external world. This conception of introspection plays a crucial, if unacknowledged, role in numerous arguments and theoretical positions. In particular, it plays a large role in motivating psychological internalism. I argue in favor of rejecting this epistemology and the internalism (...) it supports. (shrink)

Note first that knowledge of one's own thought-contents would not count as a priori according to the usual criteria for knowledge of this kind. Surely, then, incompatibilists are using this term to refer to some other, stipulatively defined, epistemic property. But could this be, as suggested by McKinsey { 1 99 1: 9), the property of being knowable 'just by thinking' or 'from the armchair'? Certainly not if these were metaphors for knowledge attainable on the basis of reason alone, since (...) self-knowledge would fail to come out a priori in this sense. And exactly the same would happen if the property were that of being knowable by inference, since, according to a common intuition, self-knowledge is noninferential. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s own states (or processes) in an indexical mode of presentation. The philosophical debate is concentrating on mental states (or processes). If we characterize self-knowledge by natural language sentences, the most adequate utterance has a structure like “I know that I am in mental state M”. This common sense characterization has to be developed into an adequate description. In this investigation we will tackle two questions: (i) What precisely is the phenomenon referred to by “self-knowledge” and (...) how can we adequately describe a form of self-knowledge which we might realistically enjoy? (ii) Can we have self-knowledge given the fact that the meaning of some words which we utter depends on the environment or the speech community? The theory we defend argues that we have to distinguish the public meaning of utterances, on the one hand, and the mental representations which are constituting a mental state of an individual, on the other. Self-knowledge should be characterized on the level of mental representations while the semantics of utterances self-attributing mental states should be treated separately. Externalism is only true for the public meaning of utterances but not for beliefs and other mental states including self-knowledge. (shrink)

Pa ul Boghos s i a n’ s ‘ Me mor y Ar gume nt ’ a l l ege dl y s hows , us i ng t he f ami l i a r s l ow-switching scenario, that externalism and authoritative self-knowledge are incompatible. The aim of this paper is to undermine the argument by examining..

Several lines of reasoning have been proposed to show the incompatibility of content externalism with justification internalism. In this paper I examine two such lines of reasoning, which both rely on the general idea that since content externalism is incompatible with certain aspects of the alleged privileged character of self-knowledge, it would tend to undermine justification internalism as well. I shall argue that both lines of reasoning, as they stand, lack plausibility, though the core idea of the second line can (...) be reconstructed into a new argument which shows considerable promise. In particular, relying upon the reliability constraint on knowledge, I shall argue that the so-called ‘two-concept’ version of content externalism is incompatible with ‘the transparency of sameness of content’, and thereby would also undermine justification internalism. (shrink)

Reliabilism is invoked by a standard causal response to the slow switching argument for incompatibilism about mental content externalism and privileged access. Though the response in question is negative, in that it only establishes that, given such an epistemology, externalism does not rule privileged access out, the appeal to reliabilism involves an assumption about the reliability of introspection, an assumption that in turn grounds a simple argument for the positive conclusion that reliabilism itself implies privileged access. This paper offers a (...) two-part defense of that conclusion: the reliabilist account of privileged access is defended both againstarguments in favor of the rival content inheritance strategy and against an argument turning on empirical considerations concerning the individuation of the belief-producing process of introspection. (shrink)

Reliable misrepresentation is getting things wrong in the same way all the time. In Mendelovici 2013, I argue that tracking theories of mental representation cannot allow for certain kinds of reliable misrepresentation, and that this is a problem for those views. Artiga 2013 defends teleosemantics from this argument. He agrees with Mendelovici 2013 that teleosemantics cannot account for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation, but argues that this is not a problem for the views. This paper clarifies and improves the argument (...) in Mendelovici 2013 and response to Artiga's arguments. Tracking theories, teleosemantics included, really do need to allow for clean cases of reliable misrepresentation. (shrink)

This is a critical discussion of selected chapters of the first volume of Scott Soames's _Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. It is argued that this volume falls short of the minimal standards of scholarship appropriate to a work that advertises itself as a history, and, further, that Soames's frequent heuristic simplifications and distortions, since they are only sporadically identified as such, are more likely to confuse than to enlighten the student. These points are illustrated by reference to Soames's discussions (...) of Russell's logical system and the place of the theory of descriptions in his ontological development. It is then argued that Soames's interpretation of the point of G. E. Moore's famous 'proof' of an external world, while not straightforwardly undermined by the textual evidence, is nonetheless questionable, and plausibly overlooks what is novel in Moore's discussion. This, it is argued, in his attempt to offer a common sense 'refutation of idealism', rather than (as is more commonly supposed) an antiskeptical argument 'from differential certainty'. (shrink)

It is commonly held that our intuitive judgements about imaginary problem cases are justified a priori, if and when they are justified at all. In this paper I defend this view — ‘rationalism’ — against a recent objection by Timothy Williamson. I argue that his objection fails on multiple grounds, but the reasons why it fails are instructive. Williamson argues from a claim about the semantics of intuitive judgements, to a claim about their psychological underpinnings, to the denial of rationalism. (...) I argue that the psychological claim — that a capacity for mental simulation explains our intuitive judgements — does not, even if true, provide reasons to reject rationalism. (More generally, a simulation hypothesis, about any category of judgements, is very limited in its epistemological implications: it is pitched at a level of explanation that is insensitive to central epistemic distinctions.) I also argue that Williamson’s semantic claim — that intuitive judgements are judgements of counterfactuals — is mistaken; rather, I propose, they are a certain kind of metaphysical possibility judgement. Several other competing proposals are also examined and criticized. (shrink)

In this paper I consider a recent argument of Timothy Williamson’s that epistemic internalism and content externalism are indeed incompatible, and since he takes content externalism to be above reproach, so much the worse for epistemic internalism. However, I argue that epistemic internalism, properly understood, remains substantially unaffected no matter which view of content turns out to be correct. What is key to the New Evil Genius thought experiment is that, given everything of which the inhabitants are consciously aware, the (...) two worlds are subjectively indistinguishable for them, which is what matters on internalist accounts of epistemic justification. I argue that even if a standard moral of the New Evil Genius intuition is untenable due to considerations arising from content externalism, the case can be understood as supporting epistemic internalism in a way that is wholly compatible with content externalism. In short, epistemic internalism is committed to sameness of justificatory status between subjectively indistinguishable counterparts, not sameness of content of their justifiers. (shrink)

What is knowledge of one's own current, consciously entertained intentional states a form of inner awareness? If so, what form? In this paper I explore the prospects for a quasi-observational account of a certain class of cases where subjects appear to have self-knowledge, namely, the so-called cogito-like cases. In section one I provide a rationale for the claim that we need an epistemology of self-knowledge, and specifically, an epistemology of the cogito-like cases. In section two I argue that contentful properties (...) in such cases have two features in common with observational properties of objects. In section three, I develop a quasi-observational account of self-knowledge for the cogito-like cases by considering various accounts of the nature of observational properties (specifically, secondary qualities) and by applying them to these cases. I conclude by addressing some important objections to the account. (shrink)

In this paper I outline and defend an introspectionist account of authoritative self-knowledge for a certain class of cases, ones in which a subject is both thinking and thinking about a current, conscious thought. My account is distinctive in a number of ways, one of which is that it is compatible with the truth of externalism.

Externalism in the philosophy of mind is threatened by the view that subjects are authoritative with regard to the contents of their own intentional states. If externalism is to be reconciled with first-person authority, two issues need to be addressed: (a) how the non-evidence-based character of knowledge of one's own intentional states is compatible with ignorance of the empirical factors that individuate the contents of those states, and (b) how, given externalism, the non-evidence-based character of such knowledge could place its (...) subject in an authoritative position. This paper endorses a standard strategy for dealing with (a). The bulk of the paper is devoted to (b). The aim is to develop an account of first-person authority for a certain class of intentional states that is capable of explaining (1) why knowledge of one's own intentional states is peculiarly authoritative, and (2) why such authority is compatible with externalism. (shrink)

Many recent discussions of self-consciousness and self-knowledge assume that there are only two kinds of accounts available to be taken on the relation between the so-called first-order (conscious) states and subjects' awareness or knowledge of them: a same-order, or reflexive view, on the one hand, or a higher-order one, on the other. I maintain that there is a third kind of view that is distinctively different from these two options. The view is important because it can accommodate and make intelligible (...) certain cases of authoritative self-knowledge that cannot easily be made intelligible, if at all, by these other two types of accounts. My aim in this paper is to defend this view against those who maintain that a same-order view is sufficient to account for authoritative self-knowledge. (shrink)

Knowing one’s past thoughts and attitudes is a vital sort of self-knowledge. In the absence of memorial impressions to serve as evidence, we face a pressing question of how such self-knowledge is possible. Recently, philosophers of mind have argued that self-knowledge of past attitudes supervenes on rationality. I examine two kinds of argument for this supervenience claim, one from cognitive dynamics, and one from practical rationality, and reject both. I present an alternative account, on which knowledge of past attitudes is (...) inferential knowledge, and depends upon contingent facts of one’s rationality and consistency. Failures of self-knowledge are better explained by the inferential account. (shrink)

There is a continuing debate as to whether externalism about mental content is compatible with certain commonly accepted views about the nature of self-knowledge. Both sides to this debate seem to agree that externalism is _not compatible with the traditional view that self-knowledge is acquired by means of observation. In this paper, I argue that externalism is compatible with this traditional view of self-knowledge, and that, in fact, we have good reason to believe that the self-knowledge at issue is acquired (...) by means of observation. (shrink)

There are close parallels between Frank Jackson's case of black-and-white Mary and David Lewis's case of the two omniscient gods. This essay develops and defends what may be called “the ability hypothesis” about the knowledge that the gods lack, by adapting Lewis's ability hypothesis about the knowledge that Mary acquires. What the gods might lack despite their propositional omniscience is not any distinctive kind of information, but certain abilities of introspection. The motivating idea is that knowledge one acquires by exercising (...) introspective abilities cannot fail to be knowledge about oneself or indexical knowledge. So in order to envisage the gods' epistemic situation coherently, we need to assume that they lack those introspective abilities. But once we recognize that, it turns out that positing a special kind of information is a gratuitous addition. The two gods' ignorance simply consists in their lack of introspective abilities. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to develop and defend an account of narrow content that would neutralize the commonplace charge that narrow content.

How come we can represent Bigfoot even though Bigfoot does not exist, given that representing something involves bearing a relation to it and we cannot bear relations to what does not exist? This is the problem of intentional inexistence. This paper develops a two-step solution to this problem, involving an adverbial account of conscious representation, or phenomenal intentionality, and the thesis that all representation derives from conscious representation. The solution is correspondingly two-part: we can consciously represent Bigfoot because consciously representing (...) Bigfoot does not involve bearing a relation to Bigfoot, but rather instantiating a certain non-relational property of representing Bigfoot-wise; and we can non-consciously represent Bigfoot because non-consciously representing Bigfoot does not involve bearing a relation to Bigfoot, but rather bearing a relation to conscious representations of Bigfoot. (shrink)

This paper uses developments in externalist epistemology and philosophy of mind as a foundation for a tolerance-producing attitude of epistemic humility towards the beliefs one retains in light of religious diversity. The first section of this paper describes the conditions under which epistemic humility tends to occur in both the philosophy of mind and externalist epistemology due to what shall be called the resolution problem, and the second section argues that these conditions often obtain in the presence of religious diversity. (...) A third section argues that epistemic humility tends to lead to religious tolerance. (shrink)

Externalism holds that the individuation of mental content depends on factors external to the subject. This doctrine appears to undermine both the claim that there is a priori self-knowledge, and the view that individuals have privileged access to their thoughts. Tyler Burge's influential "inclusion theory of self-knowledge" purports to reconcile externalism with authoritative self-knowledge. I first consider Paul Boghossian's claim that the inclusion theory is internally inconsistent. I reject one line of response to this charge, but I endorse another. I (...) next suggest, however, that the inclusion theory has little explanatory value. (shrink)

Many philosophers hold one of two extreme views about our capacity to have phenomenally conscious experience : either that inner-sense enables us to know our experience and its properties infallibly or the contrary conviction that inner-sense is utterly fallible and the evidence it provides completely defeasible. Both of these are in error. This paper presents an alternative conception of inner-sense, modeled on disjunctive conceptions of perceptual awareness, that avoids both erroneous extremes, but that builds on the commonsense intuitions that motivate (...) them. (shrink)

Working from a naïve-realist perspective, I examine first-person knowledge of one's perceptual experience. I outline a naive-realist theory of how subjects acquire knowledge of the nature of their experiences, and I argue that naive realism is compatible with moderate, substantial forms of first-person privileged access. A more general moral of my paper is that treating “success” states like seeing as genuine mental states does not break up the dynamics that many philosophers expect from the phenomenon of knowledge of the mind.

Crispin Wright’s epistemic response to McKinsey’s paradox is to argue that introspective knowledge of the first premise fails to transmit across the semantic externalist entailment in the second premise to the conclusion that one has such untoward knowledge of the external world. This paper argues first that Stewart Cohen and Jonathan Vogel’s bootstrapping arguments suffer from a novel kind of epistemic circularity, which triggers failure of transmission but allows for the possibility of basic perceptual knowledge. It is then argued that (...) McKinsey’s paradox falls out as a special case of this template for transmission failure. The circularity in play is semantic: the paradox illicitly imports semantically relevant properties of knowledge-individuating sources into the contents of the knowledge states that those sources individuate by instantiating those properties. Importantly, this diagnosis permits the possibility of basic introspective knowledge as propounded by Tyler Burge and other semantic ex.. (shrink)

Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's (...) terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well. (shrink)

Externalism is the view that the contents of many of a person’s propositional attitudes and perhaps sensory experiences are extrinsic properties of the person’s brain: they involve relations between the person’s brain and properties instantiated in his or her present or past environment. Privileged self-knowledge is the view that every human being is able to know directly or non-inferentially, in a way unavailable to anybody else, what he or she thinks or experiences. Now, if what I think is not in (...) my brain, then it seems indeed as if I cannot have any privileged authoritative first-personal access to the content of what I think. Hence, externalism seems inconsistent with privileged self-knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to provide a road towards a conciliation between self-knowledge and externalism. (shrink)

Tyler Burge says that first-person authority can be reconciled with anti-individualism about the intentional by denying part of the "Cartesian conception" of authority, which claims that I am actually authoritative about my intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This clause, he says, wrongly conflates the evaluation-conditions for sceptical doubts about the "external" world with the conditions for classifying intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This paper argues that the kind of possibility needed to understand external-world scepticism justifies the conflation and that Burge (...) can reject the Cartesian conception only if he rejects either metaphysical realism or anti-individualism. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that content externalism can provide the foundations of an argument against the traditional epistemological skeptic. I maintain that if such an argument is available, it seems there is also an a priori argument against the possibility of a creationist god. My suspicion is that such a strong consequence is not desirable for the content-externalists, and that the availability of this argument therefore casts doubt on the anti-skeptical position. I argue that all content externalists should be troubled by (...) this result, since even those philosophers who do not endorse the anti-skeptical strategy must either reject the possibility of a creationist god or admit that their thesis does not hold a priori for minds in general. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to show that semanticexternalism – the thesis that contents are notdetermined by ``individualistic'' features of mentalstates – is mistaken. Externalist thinking, it isargued, rests on two mistaken assumptions: theassumption that if there is an externalist wayof describing a situation the situation exemplifiesexternalism, and the assumption that cases in which adifference in the environment of an intentional stateentails a difference in the state's intentional objectare cases in which environmental factors determine thestate's content. Exposing these mistakes (...) leads to seethat the conditions that are required for thetruth of externalism are inconsistent. (shrink)

On rationalist infallibilism, a wide range of both (i) analytic and (ii) synthetic a priori propositions can be infallibly justified (or absolutely warranted), i.e., justified to a degree that entails their truth and precludes their falsity. Though rationalist infallibilism is indisputably running its course, adherence to at least one of the two species of infallible a priori justification refuses to disappear from mainstream epistemology. Among others, Putnam (1978) still professes the a priori infallibility of some category (i) propositions, while Burge (...) (1986, 1988, 1996) and Lewis (1996) have recently affirmed the a priori infallibility of some category (ii) propositions. In this paper, I take aim at rationalist infallibilism by calling into question the a priori infallibility of both analytic and synthetic propositions. The upshot will be twofold: first, rationalist infallibilism unsurprisingly emerges as a defective epistemological doctrine, and second, more importantly, the case for the a priori infallibility of one or both categories of propositions turns out to lack cogency. (shrink)

It is widely held that the meaning of certain types of terms, such as natural kind terms, is individuated externalistically, in terms of the individual's external environment. Recently a more radical thesis has emerged, a thesis we dub 'a posteriori semantics.' The suggestion is that not only does a term's meaning depend on the external environment, but so does its semantics. One motivation for this is the aim to account for cases where a putative natural kind term fails to pick (...) out a natural kind: The term may have a standard externalist semantics (if it picks out a natural kind) or a more descriptivist one (if it does not). Knowing which semantics applies will therefore require detailed empirical knowledge. This move has also been employed in cases where a singular term, such as a name, fails to have a reference. We argue that a posteriori semantics is inherently implausible, since the type of semantics common terms should be given ought not to be conditional on details of chemistry or physics. A number of difficulties for the position—'metaphysical,' epistemological, and methodological—are articulated. Finally, we suggest that a posteriori semantics misconstrues the way in which semantics is empirical. (shrink)