Reply to Speaks
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Reply to Speaks Juhani Yli-Vakkuri1 • John Hawthorne1,2
Accepted: 6 September 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In his commentary on our book Narrow Content (Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne 2018; henforth NC), Jeff Speaks (2020) helpfully explores the consequences of some of our arguments for the program of epistemic two-dimensionalism in light of David Chalmers’ (2018) reaction to the book. Since Chalmers’ program is widely regarded as the best hope for narrow content, the exploration is well worth undertaking. While there is nothing we particularly disagree with in Speaks’ discussion, a few points bear further emphasis. We begin with Chalmers’ idea of ‘galacticism’. This is closely related to the view that the content of a thought should supervene on what we called its total qualitative profile (TQP), which encodes how it qualitatively relates to the entire universe. And yes, variations on the Mirror Man thought experiment suggest that we must either adopt non-standard indices or accept that truth-conditional content does not supervene on TQP. Did we suggest that Mirror Man shows that there is no kind of truth-conditional content that depends only on goings-on inside the head? No. We took Mirror Man to show that either the standard palette of indices is insufficient or there is no kind of truth-conditional content that depends only on qualitative goingson inside the head (which we represented by a thought’s qualitative agential profile or QAP). But what of the idea—vivid in Chalmers’ brief discussion—that there is a kind of truth-conditional content that depends not only on qualitative goings-on in the head but on the total goings-on in the head, represented by ‘AP’s? For simplicity, we for the most part cashed out dependence as supervenience (but we also discussed grounding-theoretic construals of dependence). As we went to some pains to point & 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
out, by itself this ‘quasi-internalist’ thesis is completely uninteresting. A key point was that the quasi-internalist need not assign the same contents to corresponding thoughts of duplicates, such as you and your Twin Earth twin. Consider, by analogy, the thesis that there is a kind of truth-conditional content that supervenes on the total galactic profile, qualitative and non-qualitative, of a thought. That thesis puts no interesting constraints on how we theorize about content since it says nothing about when distinct thoughts have the same content. Moreover, if—as we have argued1— there are world-bound objects (i.e., objects concrete at only one world) coincident with every thought in every possible thinker, it will turn out that all content assignments (including ones with world as the only index) are quasi-narrow. Speaks is right that quasi-internalism can only become interesting once we ‘consider stronger (more specific) quasi-internalist claims about content assigments and evaluate
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