Reply to Byrne
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Reply to Byrne Juhani Yli-Vakkuri1 • John Hawthorne1,2
Accepted: 6 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this reply to Alex Byrne’s comment on our book Narrow Content (YliVakkuri and Hawthorne 2018), we address Byrne’s claim that internalism is best framed as a thesis about properties of agents rather than properties of thoughts, arguing that a thought-based framework is better suited to standard internalist ambitions. We also discuss whether there is any prospect for a view in the internalist spirit that prescinds from multiplying indices beyond worlds, address Byrne’s ordinary language considerations against an ontology of thoughts, and briefly evaluate the prospects for giving narrow content ascriptions explanatory life by using them to give an account of how things perceptually seem. Keywords Narrow mental content Semantic externalism Semantic internalism Perceptual content
In his comment on our book Narrow Content (NC), Alex Byrne (2020) questions the need to frame disagreements between internalists and externalists, as we did in the book, as concerning assignments of contents to (token) thoughts. Byrne prefers to explore the merits of internalism within a ‘coarse narrowness’ framework, where we prescind from positing thoughts and instead discuss whether various contentinvolving properties of thinkers—including those that might be ascribed by constructions of the form ‘believes that p’—depend only on inner goings-on. Byrne is right that our baboon example was indecisive against his favored coarse framework, and his points in this connection are very well taken. We also agree that & Juhani Yli-Vakkuri [email protected] 1
Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia
2
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
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J. Yli-Vakkuri, J. Hawthorne
the coarse framework does not prejudge the debate between the sectarian and the ecumenical internalist. However, we would articulate ecumenism a bit differently than Byrne does within a coarse framework. Here is how he does it: … consider a view on which (i) believing that snow is white is extrinsic, and (ii) being in that state entails being in the intrinsic state of believing that the snowish-stuff is white, where the proposition that the snowish-stuff is white is the ‘‘internal’’ component of the broad content that snow is white. Byrne’s ‘basic’ ecumenical idea is that, for some contents, the property of believing that content is broad, but for other contents, the property of believing it is narrow. This is analogous to the view within our framework that a component of the urcontent assignment is narrow. In effect Byrne’s ecumenism is what you get when you restrict the sectarian thesis to an interesting subclass of contents. But that is not how we thought of ecumenism. Our ecumenism says that the ur-content assignment is broad but a different kind of content assignment is narrow. If one is looking for something analogous in the coarse framework, it is this: The class of belief properties is not narrow—i.e., at least so
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