Abstract

[Socialism, essentialism and externalism] The paper defends two assumptions in Burge's externalist argument against materialism. One assumption is that the content of a belief is determined by the rules that govern its expression in a shared language. Hence, I call this principle "linguistic socialism." According to the other assumption, a belief survives as long as it keepds its content. Content is regarded hee as essential to a belief, so I call this principle "semantic essentialism." The critics of socialism such as Davidson and Bilgrami reject it in favor of "individualism," claiming that the mental cotnent is idependent of conventionally fixed meaning. The opponents of essentialism such as Gibbons prefer "accidentalism," arguing that content is inessential to a belief. I argue that individualism and accidentalism contradict empirical facts and modal intuitions about belief ascriptions, respectively.