In this article I offer a naturalistic defence of semantic externalism. I argue against the following: (1) arguments for externalism rest mainly on conceptual analysis; (2) the community conceptual norms relevant to individuation of propositional attitudes are quasi-analytic; (3) externalism raises serious questions about knowledge of propositional attitudes; and (4) externalism might be OK for “folk psychology” but not for cognitive science. The naturalist alternatives are as follows. (1) Community norms are not anything like a priori; sometimes they are incoherent. (...) (2) Often propositional attitudes lack determinate content: we do not know the content of thoughts or sentences because there is no fully definite content to be known. (3) Often achieving determinate content is a major socially mediated cognitive achievement that depends on just the factors of social and environmental embedding posited as individuative by externalists, so (4) externalism explains how people can, sometimes, come to have, and to know, determinate attitude contents. (5) Reference and content, for both thought and language, are determined by complex and messy dialectical relations involving many such environmental and social factors; consequently, determinate reference, truth-conditions, etc., are somewhat uncommon outcomes. (6) The basic semantic relation is (typically imperfect) socially mediated accommodation between perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, classificatory and inferential dispositions and relevant causal structures in the environment. (7) This accommodation explains how concepts, language, taxonomies, etc., contribute to individuals' rational inductive, explanatory and practical achievements. (8) So externally individuated propositional attitudes are required for cognitive science explanations of individual human rationality and its inductive and explanatory achievements. “Individual rationality ain't (entirely) in the individual head.”. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualists like David Lewis allow that we have substantially infallibilist reflective intuitions about knowledge even though our everyday talk accepts fallibilist attributions of knowledge. They give serious weight to both our everyday talk and our propensity to assent to the skeptic's conclusions, and give us a concept of knowledge that accommodates both. The skeptic would, of course, leverage such infallibilist intuitions in order to undermine the legitimacy of our everyday attributions. Most contemporary epistemologists would simply argue that our concept (...) of knowledge is fallibilist, but this doesn't give them a particularly convincing reply to intuitively compelling skeptical arguments. ;This essay, most generally, takes up the question of how best to argue about skepticism. I claim that a philosophical account of knowledge that responds to skepticism should be able to clearly accommodate our epistemic agency. In chapter 1 I explain how skepticism challenges our naIve conception of agency and introduce two criteria for an adequate response to skepticism. In chapter 2, I discuss contextualist solutions; I argue they fail to satisfy our criteria and fail on their own terms; I explain how both failures relate to a failure to adequately treat epistemic agency. In chapter 3 I develop a conception of epistemic agency that describes what it is to be an active, reasoning source of belief. This picture is at odds with a dominant strain of epistemology that has it that one is substantially subject to belief, not effectively responsible for it; I criticize an influential argument by Bernard Williams that claims belief is not an attitude we control. This discussion in chapter 3 gives support to, a rationale for, the anti-insulationism requirement set out in chapter 1. Finally, in chapter 4 I return to the methodological issues of how to argue about skepticism. I first defend the idea that a knowledge-based skepticism is worth philosophical attention. I then offer an interpretation of what the skeptic is up to, and discuss what an effective counterstrategy might look like; I suggest that a particular sort of normative argument is the best way with the skeptic. (shrink)