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Galacticism, thought-relativism, quasi-internalism Jeff Speaks1

Accepted: 20 July 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020

1 The central argument One of the great virtues of Narrow Content is that it provides a framework for understanding the dispute between internalists and externalists which at the same time sharpens the disagreement and makes it clear what the most defensible versions of internalism are. Following Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne (Y&H), let’s think of thoughts as events, and content assignments as functions from thoughts to contents. The qualitative agential profile (QAP) of a thought is the maximal way in which that thought relates to the intrinsic qualitative properties of the agent of the thought. Then, in Y&H’s terms, a content assignment is narrow iff the contents assigned to thoughts strongly supervene on those thoughts’ QAP’s. A content assignment is truth-conditional iff it assigns to every thought a content which has (relative to the relevant index) the truth-value which the thought has in that index. Why the ‘relative to the relevant index’ qualifier? On standard views, contents will have different truth-values when evaluated at different indices. On virtually every view, contents can have different truth-values with respect to different worlds; on many views, they can have different truth-values with respect to different times. One of the central questions posed in the book is: is there a narrow truthconditional content assignment? The answer to this question, as Y&H show, depends on which parameters indices include. The reason why can be brought out by considering one of the main styles of argument exploited throughout the book. In a Do¨ppelganger argument, we consider a pair of thoughts which (i) have the same QAP, (ii) differ in truth-value, and (iii) are alike with respect to certain parameters. The existence of such a pair shows that & Jeff Speaks [email protected] 1

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, USA

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J. Speaks

there is no truth-conditional narrow content assignment if indices include only those parameters. Let’s say that a choice of indices is Do¨ppelganger-immune iff no Do¨ppelganger argument can be constructed for it. One way to state the conclusion of Chapter 2 of Narrow Content is that it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to construct Do¨ppelganger-immune indices. The central example here is Mirror Man, a left-right symmetric agent who thinks ‘Kit is human’ with his left hemisphere (while pointing with his left hand to Kit1 ) and simultaneously thinks ‘Kit is human’ with his right hemisphere (while pointing with his right hand to Kit2 ). Suppose that Kit1 is human and Kit2 is not. Let’s call thoughts of the first type L-thoughts and thoughts of the second type R-thoughts. Then a given L-thought and a simultaneous R-thought may have the same QAP and yet differ in truth value, despite having as their indices the same world, time, and agent.

2 Galacticism How should someone with internalist sympathies respond? Here is what David Chalmers says about the central argument of