Questions about the mind and those about politics have conventionally found separate treatments in the philosophical literature. This paper proposes that crucial assumptions about the nature of the human person in politics actually turn on a compatible account of mental content. The particular relation that I will focus on here would be one between a discourse-theoretic model of persons in political ontology and social externalism in philosophy of mind. For the former, I’ll concern myself largely with Philip Pettit’s presentation of (...) it and its expression in terms of intentional systems which, I’ll argue, renders itself to a version of social externalism that emerges out of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. An auxiliary consequence of this exercise is the diagnosis of a familiar problem that is associated with the notion of rule-following—I’ll argue that skepticism about rule-following is only tenable when one holds on to an internalist thesis about the individuation of mental content. This objection is dissolved once a theory of understanding is adopted which works with a distinctly externalist account of mental content. Finally, I will take stock of the implications of this exercise in terms of suggesting basic grounds for a philosophically interesting relationship between political ontology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper discusses Wittgenstein's take on the problem of other minds. In opposition to certain widespread views that I collect under the heading of the “No Problem Interpretation,” I argue that Wittgenstein does address some problem of other minds. However, Wittgenstein's problem is not the traditional epistemological problem of other minds; rather, it is more reminiscent of the issue of intersubjectivity as it emerges in the writings of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. This is one sense in which (...) Wittgenstein's perspective on other minds might be called “phenomenological.” Yet there is another sense as well, in that Wittgenstein's positive views on this issue resemble the views defended by phenomenologists. The key to a proper philosophical grasp of intersubjectivity, on both views, lies in rethinking the mind. If we conceive of minds as essentially embodied we can understand how intersubjectivity is possible. (shrink)

One reason why the problem of other minds keeps cropping up in modern philosophy is that we seem to have conflicting intuitions about our access to the mental lives of others. On the one hand, we are inclined to think that it is wrong to claim, like Cartesian dualists must, that the minds of others are essentially inaccessible to direct experience. But on the other hand we feel that it is equally wrong to claim, like the behaviorists, that the mental (...) lives of others are completely accessible to an outside spectator. This paper attempts to address the problem of the accessibility of other minds while staying faithful to both these intuitions. Central to this undertaking is the idea that we express our mental lives in our bodily behavior. With a firm grasp of the notion of expression, as it is developed in the writings of Wittgenstein and Levinas, we can understand how other minds can be directly perceivable and yet retain a certain inaccessibility. The key is to emphasize the difference between the expressive appearance of a human being and the way an object appears in perception. (shrink)

According to Brentano in a much-quoted passage,Every psychological phenomenon is characterized by…intentional inherent existence of … an object… In the idea something is conceived, in the judgement something is recognized or discovered, in loving loved, in hating hated, in desiring desired, and so on.

‘Semantic externalism’ is the view that the thought and speech of internally identical subjects can have different contents, depending on facts about their environments. ‘Semantic internalism’ is the negation of this view. The details of these two views depend on the definition of ‘internal identity’. Katalin Farkas has shown that the traditional definition of internal identity as physical identity is too permissive: it misclassifies certain bodily states as internal. She has proposed defining internal identity as phenomenal identity instead. In the (...) critical part of my paper, I argue that Farkas’s proposal fails for being too restrictive: it misclassifies non-conscious mental states, most notably dispositional belief, as external. I consider two interpretations of Farkas’s proposal but conclude that neither succeeds, because each requires internal features to influence the subject’s phenomenal life in a way in which dispositional belief does not. In the constructive part of my paper, I consider dispositional identity as an alternative definition of internal identity. I argue that the dispositional-identity definition avoids the phenomenal-identity definition’s shortcoming and retains its main attraction, viz., that of securing the subjective indistinguishability that obtains between Twin Earth duplicates. My argument that it does the latter, however, faces potentially decisive obstacles. Thus, I retreat to a disjunctive proposal: internal identity should be defined either as dispositional identity or as dispositional-plus-phenomenal identity. I conclude by defending my proposal against a different charge that may be levelled against it, viz., that of misclassifying Cartesian dualism as an externalist theory of the mind. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against Twin-Earth externalism. The mistake that Twin Earth arguments rest on is the failure to appreciate the force of the following dilemma. Some features of things around us do matter for the purposes of conceptual classification, and others do not. The most plausible way to draw this distinction is to see whether a certain feature enters the cognitive perspective of the experiencing subject in relation to the kind in question or not. If it does, we (...) can trace conceptual differences to internal differences. If it doesn’t, we do not have a case of conceptual difference. Neither case supports Twin Earth externalism. (shrink)

The following thesis discusses a range of central aspects in Timothy Williamson’s so-called «knowledge-first» epistemology. In particular, it adresses whether this kind of epistemological framework is apt to answer the challenges of scepticism.

The following thesis starts from the question «why be moral?» and adresses an action-theoretic strategy for answering this question in the positive by reference to the constitutive natur of actions. In these debates, the epistemology of action has turned into a central issue. The thesis adresses these debates and develops a novel account of the epistemology: an account that may well turn out to provide a ground for the aforementioned constitutivist strategies.

The paper concentrates on the most pressing question of Indian philosophy: what is the exact connotation of a word or what sort of entity helps us to identify the meaning of a word? The paper focuses on the clash between Realism (Nyāya) and Apoha vāda (Buddhist) regarding the debate whether the meaning of a word is particular/universal or both. The paper asserts that though Naiyāyikas and Mīmāṁsakas challenged against Buddhist Apoha vāda, yet they realized that to establish an opinion in (...) support of a word that conceptually denotes a negative meaning first would be a very difficult task. (shrink)

What is the distinctively philosophical problem of perception? Here it is argued that it is the conflict between the nature of perceptual experience as it intuitively seems to us, and certain possibilities which are implicit in the very idea of experience: possibilities of illusion and to the world' which involves direct awareness of existing objects and their properties. But if one can have an experience of the same kind without the object being there -- a hallucination of an object -- (...) then it seems that perceptual experience cannot essentially be such a relation. This is the fundamentally philosophical problem of perception; the various philosophical theories of perception in the 20th and 21st centuries can be seen as responses to it. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam has famously undergone some radical changes of mind with regard to the issue of scientific realism and its wider epistemological bearings. In this paper I defend the arguments put forward by early Putnam in his essays on the causal theory of reference as applied to natural-kind terms, despite his own later view that those arguments amounted to a form of 'metaphysical' realism which could not be sustained against various lines of sceptical attack. I discuss some of the reasons (...) for Putnam's retreat, first to the theory of 'internal (or framework-relative) realism proposed in his middle-period writings, and then to a commonsensepragmatist stance which claims to resituate this whole discussion on ground that has not been trorldden into ruts by the contending philosophical schools. In particular I examine his protracted engagement with various forms of anti-realist doctrine (Michael Dummett's most prominent among them), with Wittgenstein's thinking about language-games or meaning-as-use, and with a range of sceptical- relativist positions adopted in the wake of Quine's influential attack on the two last 'dogmas' of logical empiricism. My paper seeks to show that Putnam has been over-impressed by some of the arguments — from these and other sources — which he takes to constitute a knock-down case against the kind of extemalist and causal-realist approach developed in his early essays. It concludes by re-stating that position in summary form and relating it to other, more recent defences of causal realism in epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)