In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 5-27 [Access article in PDF] Environmental Epistemology Mark Rowlands 1. Externalism and Environmentalism There is a view of the mind that began life as a controversial philosophical thesis, and then, much like an aging rock group, evolved into respectability. Indeed, it became common sense. According to this view, minds are to be assimilated to the category of substance. That is, minds are objects (...) that possess properties. Indeed, minds can, to some extent, be conceived of as relatively similar to other bodily organs. Just as the heart circulates blood, the kidneys process waste, the mind thinks. According to the official version of this view, the major difference between the mind and these other organs is that the mind is a nonphysical substance. The brain and mind are, thus, distinct entities; the former a physical organ operating exclusively on mechanical principles, the latter a nonphysical organ operating according to principles of reason. The philosophical thesis from which this view was born was spelled out by Descartes, and its association with him is sufficiently robust for it to be called the Cartesian conception.The Cartesian conception has famously been ridiculed as the myth of the ghost in the machine. And it has been Descartes' decision to make the mind ghostly (i.e., nonphysical) that has drawn the principal fire from dissenters. The dissenters' case here has been largely successful, and, today, [End Page 5] not many would describe themselves as Cartesians in this sense. Ryle's expression, however, has another facet. Not only is the mind a ghost, but it is one that is in a machine. And while the revolt against ghostly views of the mind has been overwhelmingly successful, criticism of this second aspect of Descartes' view has, until recently, been comparatively muted. This changed with the development of a view that came to be known as externalism.The term 'externalism' in the philosophy of mind typically denotes a family of views, deriving from the work of Hilary Putnam (1975), Tyler Burge (1979, 1986), and certain work on indexicals associated, principally, with David Kaplan (1980), and all united by the idea that mental states, in some sense, are not in the head. Specifying the content of the clause in some sense, however, is no easy matter. Species and sub-species of externalism abound. Forms of externalism that assert the external location of mental states are contrasted with those that assert merely their external individuation (see, for example, McDowell 1986 and McGinn 1989 versus Macdonald 1990) Forms of externalism that admit a conceptually separable internally constituted component of mental states are contrasted with those that deny such a component. Weak externalism is commonly contrasted with strong, and one would look in vain for any unified construal of these qualifiers (contrast, for example, Forbes 1987, McGinn 1989, and Macdonald 1990).Nevertheless, for the purposes of this paper, externalism in all its forms, possesses two essential theses, one concerning the nature of the states to which the externalist thesis applies, and the other concerning the properties of those states in virtue of which it applies. The first thesis is that externalism applies only to the so-called propositional attitudes. It applies to beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, expectations, anticipations, and the like, all of which are (i) attributed to a subject by way of a that-clause, and (ii) are individuated, in part, by way of the proposition that follows this clause. The second thesis is that the externalist claim applies to such states because they possess semantic content; because they are individuated by way of the proposition that follows the that-clause.This means that the scope of externalism is severely restricted: it applies only to that relatively small group of mental states that have their contents essentially (i.e., propositional attitudes and possibly experiences—on some views of experience). What we might regard as the nuts [End Page 6] and bolts of cognition, processes, such as perceiving, remembering, thinking, reasoning, whereby we arrive at, or come to have, propositional attitudes, these are left outside the scope of externalism. That is, externalism as it is commonly understood, is... (shrink)

The Burge-Putnam thought experiments have generated the thesis that beliefs are not fixed by the constitution of the body. However, many philosophers have thought that if this is true then there must be another content-like property. Even if the contents of our attitudes such as the one in ‘believes that aluminum is a light metal’, do not supervene on our physical makeups, nevertheless people who are physical duplicates must be the same when it comes to evaluating their rationality and explaining (...) their actions. I argue that the considerations motivating this view are best handled with just the ordinary ‘that’-clause contents. (shrink)

Content externalism is the dominant view in the philosophy of mind. Content essentialism, the thesis that thought tokens have their contents essentially, is also popular. And many externalists are supporters of such essentialism. However, endorsing the conjunction of those views either (i) commits one to a counterintuitive view of the underlying physical nature of thought tokens or (ii) commits one to a slightly different but still counterintuitive view of the relation of thought tokens to physical tokens as well as a (...) rejection of realist physicalism. In this essay I reveal the problem and articulate and adjudicate among the possible solutions. I will end up rejecting content essentialism. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a theory of the physical realization of higher-level properties. I argue that physical realization is in an important sense indirect, and that at each level causal relations are crucial to realizing next-level phenomena. My account makes it intelligible how higher-level properties can be realized by wide stretches of physical reality without the inter-level dependence becoming weak, or global; it also explains how both physicalism and non-reductivism can be true.

In this paper I distinguish two types of mental causation, called 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation'. These notions superficially resemble the traditional problematic notions of supervenient causation and downward causation, but they are different in crucial respects. My new distinction is supported by a radically externalist competitor of the so-called Standard View of mental states, i.e. the view that mental states are brain states. I argue that on the Alternative View, the notions of 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation' can in combination dissolve (...) the problem of mental causation as standardly discussed. (shrink)

Your belief that Obama is a Democrat would not be the belief that it is if it did not represent Obama, nor would the pain in your ankle be the state that it is if, say, it felt like an itch. Accordingly, it is tempting to hold that phenomenal and representational properties are essential to the mental states that have them. But, as several theorists have forcefully argued (including Kripke (1980) and Burge (1979, 1982)) this attractive idea is seemingly in (...) tension with another equally attractive thesis, namely, the token-identity thesis; the thesis according to which every mental state token is identical with some or other token physical state. In this paper, we show that these seemingly incontrovertible essentialist intuitions are in fact compatible with “token physicalism” regarding the mental. Given a suitably plentitudinous ontology of objects, we argue that there are physical things with which our token mental states can be identified. This is preferable to existing views that give up the essentiality claims or simply reject the token-identity thesis. (shrink)

Externalism with regard to mental content says that in order to have certain types of intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs), it is necessary to be related to the environment in the right way.

This paper starts from the familiar premise that psychological anti-individualism is incompatible with materialism. It attempts to state more clearly what this incompatibility consists in, and — rather than arguing in detail for any particular resolution — to inquire whether this incompatibility admits any resolution. However, the paper does offer a conditional argument concerning the possibility that the incompatibility is genuine and cannot be resolved. Provided that anti-individualism and materialism cannot be squared, and anti-individualism is correct, it follows that materialism (...) has to be abandoned. If so, the situation is not as disastrous as it might at first seem. We need not, in consequence of our inability to construe a coherent metaphysics of mind, give up on intentional vocabulary any more than we must stop, in consequence of our inability to make sense of induction, anticipating the future. (shrink)