Abstract

This dissertation addresses the question of whether externalism and privileged access are compatible. I defend the view according to which they are, indeed, incompatible. However, this follows unproblematically from a distinction between two notions of mental content that I introduce and develop. My main suggestion is that a confusion between two notions of mental content is responsible for the view that the incompatibility of privileged access and externalism is problematic, since these are views about, strictly speaking, different varieties of mental content. ;The discussion is divided into an introduction and four chapters. In the second chapter, I discuss the main argument for the position according to which externalism and privileged access are compatible. In the third chapter, I distinguish two kinds of mental content by using the two-dimensional semantics framework developed by David Kaplan, Robert Stalnaker and others. I then move to argue that externalism and privileged access are views about different sorts of content. Externalism is correct only when it is understood as a view about "objective content", essentially constituted by truth-conditions, whereas privileged access is correct only when it is understood as a view about "subjective content", a kind of "narrow" content essentially constituted by Stalnaker's "diagonal proposition". In the fourth chapter, I focus on privileged access and I offer an explanation of it. The main tenet of my account of privileged access is that our grounds for our first-order beliefs are the same as our grounds for the appropriate second-order beliefs. In the fifth chapter, I discuss the two main arguments for the position according to which externalism and privileged access are incompatible. By using the distinction regarding mental content drawn on chapter three, I argue that neither argument shows the incompatibility of externalism about objective content and privileged access about subjective content. Thus, I conclude that the incompatibility of privileged access and externalism is not problematic