Comment on Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne, Narrow Content
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Comment on Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne, Narrow Content Alex Byrne1
Accepted: 2 July 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This comment mainly examines Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne’s preferred framework for examining whether narrow content is viable, arguing that their framework is not well-suited to the task; once a more traditional framework is adopted, Y&H’s case against internalism is strengthened. Keywords Narrow content Internalism Externalism
Narrow Content is a tremendously good book; of necessity, this comment will leave large parts undiscussed. I will concentrate on Y&H’s preferred framework for discussing the issue of broad versus narrow content, arguing that it is not well-suited to the task; once a more traditional framework is adopted, Y&H’s case against internalism is strengthened. I shall end by briefly mentioning an appealing internalist picture that their otherwise comprehensive critique does not address.
1 Framing Y&H begin by characterizing the mental phenomena of interest, ‘‘intentional states’’, paradigmatically ‘‘thoughts, beliefs, and hopes’’ (Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne 2018; 1).1 As they say, there are a number of grammatical constructions that we use to talk about intentional states. In the case of belief, these include 1
All page references to this book unless otherwise noted.
& Alex Byrne [email protected] 1
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
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A. Byrne
nominalizations like ‘Juhani’s belief that snow is white’, ‘the belief that snow is white’, gerund phrases like ‘believing that snow is white’, and sentences with ‘that’clausal-complements like ‘Juhani believes that snow is white’. ‘That’-clauses are not essential, as in ‘Juhani has many true beliefs’ or ‘Juhani hopes for snow’, but as Y&H note, philosophers have favored ‘‘‘that’-clause-involving constructions for describing intentional states’’, taking the clause to be ‘‘a canonical way of specifying the content’’ of the state, and they are happy to join the majority. Y&H adopt a technical understanding of ‘thought’, on which it applies to ‘‘all intentional states that are aptly described by ‘that’-clauses’’ (1). The main issue of the book—which receives sophisticated refinement and elaboration—is ‘‘whether contents are fixed by inner goings-on’’ (15). That is: are an agent’s thoughts—intentional states with content specified by that-clauses— determined by how the agent is internally? For example, could there be two people, alike with respect to ‘‘inner goings-on’’, one of whom believes that snow is white (or has a belief with the content that snow is white), and the other of whom doesn’t? It is not news that the standard post-Putnam-and-Burge answer is ‘‘no’’. That is, an uncompromising internalism about mental content is false. Neither is it news that internalists have a variety of more-or-less concessive responses, yielding a range of theses that purport to preserve the core spirit of internalism. The aim of Narrow Content is to shrink a viable form of internalism down to nothing. Here i
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